Chelsea Girls

by Eileen Myles

Overview

Available once again for a new generation of readers, the groundbreaking and candid coming-of-age novel in-real-time from one of America's most celebrated poets that is considered a cult classic.

In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms their life into a work of art. Told in an audacious voice, made vivid and immediate in lyrical language, Chelsea Girls cobbles together memories of Myles’ 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, their volatile adolescence, their unabashed “lesbianity,” and their 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 writer shrugged off the chains of a rigid cultural identity meant to define them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062394668
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	09/29/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	372,361
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Eileen Myles (they/them, b. 1949) is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose practice of vernacular first-person writing has made them one of the most recognized writers of their generation. Pathetic Literature, which they edited, came out in fall 2022. a “Working Life,” their newest collection of poems, is out now. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.

Editorial Reviews

Chelsea Girls, which tracks [Myles] from a Roman Catholic upbringing near Boston in the 1950s and '60s through the discovery of drugs, girls, poetry, poverty and George Plimpton's book parties in Manhattan, seems funnier and more honest and raw now than it did in 1994. It transmits its meanings along what she calls, at one point, "a glowing cord of drunkenness and sex." The book has a yearning quality and a sweetness that prevent it from being a mere time capsule or Henry Miller-like debauch.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

Myles’s work functions as a bridge between many of the discussions of the present — about sexual violence, class, ‘hook-up culture’ — and a past from which those narratives were often secret or hidden…. It seems to resist assimilation, in part by maintaining its sense of defiance.” — T: The New York Times Style Magazine

“Myles is often referred to as an ‘institution’…. But the word bounces off them: there is nothing official about them, nothing staid or still. They are exemplary for more and more young writers precisely because they have gone their own way.” — Ben Lerner, The Paris Review

"Reading Myles is nothing if not a physical experience, the one-two promise of a heartbeat that goes, I’m alive. I’m alive." — Electric Literature

"Chelsea Girls offers poetry, sex, Catholicism, drugs, class and sexuality. This new reprint of Myles’s hard-talking, lyrical autobiographical novel, about a female writer figuring things out in the 1960s, is the missing data for anyone who has read only the male American beat writers." — Deborah Levy, The New Statesman 

From the Publisher

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)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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.

Library Journal