Chelsea Girls: A Novel

by Eileen Myles Narrated by Eileen Myles

Overview

In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms life into a work of art. Told in her audacious voice, made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, Chelsea Girls cobbles together memories of Myles's 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, her volatile adolescence, her unabashed "lesbianity," and her riotous pursuit of survival as a poet in 1970s New York.


Suffused with alcohol, drugs, and sex; evocative in its depictions of the hardscrabble realities of a young artist's life; and poignant with stories of love, humor, and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool, and intimate account of a writer's education, and a modern chronicle of how a young female writer shrugged off the chains of a rigid cultural identity meant to define her.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

New York writer Myles's ( Not Me ) autobiographical adventures recount her volatile '60s adolescence littered with vibrant memories of an alcoholic father and her awakening as a writer in the '70s. Myles revisits her risk-filled past because she wants desperately to be understood: ``It's lonely to be alive and never know the whole story. . .I would like to tell everything once, just my part, because this is my life, not yours.'' She views becoming a poet as a ``cultural accident'' and depicts her calling as she knows and loves it--a life filled with drink, drugs, sex, love, loneliness and poverty. Although her tales are highly personal, they are nonetheless rather indifferently told: Myles feels nothing because she doesn't know what to feel and consequently wanders through her life as though she were curious tourist. She erects walls between herself and her emotions that also leave the reader feeling cut off. But Myles is nothing if not honest, and her accounts of her life are so harsh that they stick with the reader as closely as they stick with her. (July)

Library Journal

This series of 28 autobiographical tales reflects the various stages of the author's life. The early stories depict the pain and poignancy of a young girl's adolescence in the 1960s. Growing up in a Catholic family in Boston, the narrator witnesses the death of her alcoholic father. The later stories take place in New York during the 1970s as the narrator struggles to write poetry and assert her sexuality. Some readers will find this collection off-putting. The writing is often stream-of-consciousness, sometimes with grating grammatical mistakes. Because the tales skip back and forth in time, not much continuity is established. In addition, graphic lesbian sex and a focus on alcohol and drugs pervade most of the stories. For large fiction collections or gay literature collections only.-Stephanie Furtsch, Purchase Free Lib., N.Y.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170745760
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	05/24/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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