Cool for You: A Novel

by Eileen Myles, Chris Kraus (Introduction)

Overview

Grainy and stripped down, this gritty novel traces the downbeat progress of a tough, queer girl growing up in working-class Boston by "a cult figure to a generation of post-punk females forming their own literary avant-garde” (The New York Times).

Why can’t I live right now. Because I am not rich, I am not a saint. But I do know this: not all of us were sent here to work.

The first published novel of legendary poet and performer Eileen Myles follows a queer female growing up in working-class Boston, straining against the institutions that hold her: family, Catholic school, jobs at a camp, at a nursing home, at a school for developmentally disabled adult males.

She wants to be an astronaut. Instead, she becomes a poet and journeys through a series of low-end schools, pathetic jobs, and unmade beds. Schooled by mean and memorable Catholic nuns, this tomboy heroine stumbles and dreams her way through the painful corridors of family, early sexual encounters, and an eye-opening series of jobs caring for the sick and insane—the abandoned wards of the state. This is a book hell-bent on telling the truth about poor women, and how they do (and do not) get out of the hands of their families and the state. Without artifice or pseudonym, protagonist Eileen Myles boldly sets down a rich and graphic account of female experience in this world.

Free-ranging and deadpan, tragic and joyful, this is a book about women, gender, class, bodies, escape, and what it means to be “inside.” Never more relevant, and now with an introduction by Chris Kraus.

"Eileen Myles is a genius!"—Dorothy Allison

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619029170
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	04/11/2017
Edition description:	Third Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include For Now (an essay/talk about writing), I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, Chelsea Girls, and Cool for You. They showed their photographs in 2019 at Bridget Donahue, NYC. Eileen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa, TX.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction



“Plot doesn’t interest me that much, but time travel does,” Eileen Myles laconically told Nate Lippens in The Stranger after the first publication of her first novel, Cool for You, in 2000.


You could say the book is about Myles’s childhood, and that would be true, but it would also partially wrong. Using her particular childhood—the one she knows best—as a base camp, Myles proceeds to investigate childhood itself, and the role institutions played in the formation of self in the American mid twentieth century. In a project akin to Nathalie Sarraute’s 1985 book Childhood, in which Sarraute devised a new narrative form by writing from, not about, childhood’s “pre-dialogue” state, Myles transcribes the act of recall. Since Myles is, and has always been, the most public of poets, this act of recall happens here, happens now, in front of our eyes. As she told Lippens, “I got the idea I could make a novel by shuffling the stories into each other and finding some way they could be interconnected.” By recalling her childhood and early youth, Myles arrives at a breathtakingly new proposition for what ”the novel” can be.


Cool for You was written on the heels of the publication of Myles’s linked story collection Chelsea Girls, where she first translated the rangy, direct, highly public and intimate mode of address of her poems into prose. In Chelsea Girls, Myles established herself as one of America’s great raconteurs: Someone who’s able to recount an event, and the stories behind that event, and the moment-of-telling, and what it all means in what feels like a single and dizzying breath.


After its publication, Cool for You was rightly described as a kunstlerroman, a chronicle of artist’s becoming. There are many precedents for this, most famously those written by Rilke, Goethe, Samuel Butler, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce. But as a writer who is also a lesbian working-class poet, Myles finds that to describe her own life, she must investigate everything, from educational and institutional control to the sensation of language itself. Family relations play a large role in the artist’s formation, but so do the relations between people and things. In grade school, the young artist longed to be an astronomer because “they were lookers and I was a looker too.” Later, having established herself as a poet, she turns her attention to language and its mother, sound: “[W]ords are nothing,” she writes, “Believe me. Words are empty. It’s the squawking of the animal, the wheezing, the desperate wind of a life rattling through a body.” And: “I believe in sound. It’s the tiniest shaking, when the colors are gone, and the smells disperse, the shaking continues, its effect is infinite . . . Nothing in the world staying still, every dropped ruler in a classroom forty years ago is a tingling moment . . . ”


Although she is marked by her alcoholic father’s premature death, the narrator of Cool for You grew up in a relatively stable working class family in Arlington, Massachusetts. As a child she observed how the “families I knew were like little boxes.” Her mother worked as a secretary and she attended Catholic, not public, school. The adults have their own problems, and since the narrator is an independent and smart child, no one thinks to protect her from anything. One of the book’s most startling revelations is the extent that young girls were exposed to life’s darker realities at that time and place.


When she is fourteen years old, the narrator takes an after-school job at Shore’s, a neighborhood nursing home. Charged with delivering trays of mucousy food to the rooms, she hears the wails of the patients. “It was like it was only one dinner, again and again,” Myles writes; “a pattern of food entering and re-entering a stream of food fabric coming down the line of endless dinner times while we waited for the people to die.”


By then, she already knew exactly how these scenes of dereliction began. The family of her neighborhood friend Lorraine ran a boarding house in their home, a sort of pre-nursing home. Here, she met older women in their forties, fifties, and sixties living alone in small private rooms full of beads and old clothes and pictures of men. It didn’t take the child-Eileen Myles long to surmise that “women wind up in little rooms, women wind up alone.” Still, even this astronomer of human relations is shocked when she sees Mrs. Beatty, once the boarding house “star,” with her cigarette holder, fur coat, and spectacular entrances, has arrived at Shore’s too, her “big bare butt being lifted off a potty seat . . . I could smell her shit, but mostly it was her white nakedness and the fact that Mrs. Beatty was one of the most covered people I had ever seen in my life . . . and there she was without her hat . . . it was all gone, her colors and her fur and even her voice.”


There is madness, of course, in Myles’ family background—institutionalized madness wasn’t uncommon in that time and place. Part of the book’s narrative frame entails Myles’s search for the medical records of her grandmother, Nellie Reardon Myles, who entered a state institution when she was sixty years old, and died there some fourteen, or fifteen, or sixteen years later—the records tell how many teeth she has left; they know her disposition—“resentful”—at times, but they don’t know the date of her death. After attending another state institution, the University of Massachusetts Boston, a commuter school that doesn’t live up to the dreams of college life she’d formed as a child while watching TV, the narrator moves west and floats with madness herself. She drifts to Vancouver, and then San Francisco, and works many jobs. She observes on the news: “There were bodies turning up in graves every day . . . It was like people liked it. It would be so easy to kill me. Anyone could. That’s why I didn’t like it. It was just a small coincidence, my life. One of those sad girls.” But she doesn’t stay there. She doesn’t say how—the is matters more than the how—but then she comes back.


Seventeen years after its first publication, the book feels just as radical, startling, and daringly alive as when it first came out. Perhaps now it will be better read. When Dave Eggers titled his 2000 book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I think really he was talking about Cool for You.



Chris Kraus, 2017

Editorial Reviews

The reissue, after 17 years, creates a strange sort of time vortex, a double-lens of perspective, in which Myles is looking back on the self that wrote the book, who is in turn looking back on the self in the story.” —Helena Fitzgerald, Rolling Stone




“Her work is hard to describe, best encountered on its own terms; suffice to say it combines frankness and beauty in a truly original way.” —The Guardian

“Myles has long been a steady presence on the New York poetry scene...With the publication of this new and selected volume, which covers her 40-year career, she has become the toast of the town and the poetry world at-large.” —Publishers Weekly

“Myles is a big deal, a rock star, sort of like the Patti Smith of contemporary poetry. . . . Myles is relentlessly casual, and even joyful. She has a good time journeying through Hell, and like a hip Virgil, she’s happy to show us the way.” —NPR

From the Publisher

Myles' novel much resembles her poetry. Her narrative has the same jagged edges, the same turn-on-a-dime intellectual quirkiness, the same quality of pitiless observation…the ironic point-of-view, supplies the author with abundant comic effects, making her book, like Celine's, a tragedy that's God-awful funny.
—Lambda Book Report

Jim Cory

The Style is experimental without being annoying and without any condescension. Ms. Myles makes real the tough-girl narrator who muses on ambition and sexuality, grief and delight, with equal candor and grace.
—The Progressive

Kate Clinton