Cool for You

With one, quick phrase about the Charles River being "theirs", Eileen Myles manages to capture and sum up in perfect poetry, the entire class chasm that is Boston. It's the fine brush strokes of words and phrases such as just that one, which make "Cool For You" so forceful, so honest and so unlike any other memoir on the market.I came to the book as a recent-transplant to the worlds of Boston and Cambridge, craving some kind of knowledge of this place that would match what I was seeing on the streets. And Myles' words had them. The truth. About Boston/Cambridge, about life, and about how hard it is to find good, solid truth in a family that speaks in circles around honesty. This isn't a standard pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of memoir. There are no great and true conclusions, and no epiphanies to judge your own meager life by. What it is. Simply. Is a validation. That life is neither sweet and true. Nor all harsh and cold. It's about moment to moment.And most of the time, no one's going to offer you an M & M from their pocket for kicking a bad habit or two.

Too many novels/memoirs get lost in pretty words and pat observations which lead to little or no insight into the "real" author. Eileen Myles doesn't play this game. Memories of sexual experiences, horrible jobs, too much booze, and a family life that doesn't resemble reruns of Ozzie and Harriet spill onto the page without artifice and without regard for chronology. The result is a dizzying, beautiful, tough and honest view into one woman's life. I couldn't stop turning the pages as I wandered deeper into Ms. Myles's memories and connected, at times, with her sense of displacement. There's also much humor in this book: Ms. Myles has an ability to paint scenes of her Catholic school experiences that can make you laugh out loud. More authors should write this honestly.

In this wonderful novel, poet Eileen Myles drives into her past's parking lot and sees not dull gravel but "thousands of eggs." Each of her paragraphs confirms an immense fertility. Abandoning the linear presentation of time, Ms. Myles connects remembered instants with heart logic, with synaptic precision. A Massachusetts childhood, a mad grandmother, the oddest assortment of odd jobs, the motley pavements of New York -- all shine in this startling, funny, rigorous book.

Reading "Cool For You" was like winding and reeling, freely being pulled through murky corridors, through spaces of clarity, past thresholds and back - like living a life, not only Eileen's, but one's own. It took me to places of confusion, shame, anger, sorrow, weakness, strength, humor and recognition."Cool For You" is a call from the straits of silence, Eileen's particulars echo from the depths and resonate without filling. This is a book for readers who are secretly writers waiting for this call and the permission to speak.

Proof that the best novelists are poets, Myles's Cool for You combines an artist's interior flood of sensations and a regular citizen's attempt to piece together the story of her institutionalized grandmother. Cool for You is too insightful to be lumped with memoirs. (In fact, it's categorized as a novel.) It's everything Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is touted as being, but Myles outmuscles, out-testosterones, and plain out-does sterile Joyce. There's a vitality here that you're familiar with if you're lucky enough to have heard and seen Myles read. This book's about institutions of all sorts--loony bins and Catholic school, summer camp and college--and an individual's busting free of them. This is a beautiful book, achingly truthful, funny, wise. I highly recommend Myles's world.