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.
This book is a series of stories about the author's interesting East-Village life. The stories are NOT told in chronalogicalorder, but somehow seem to flow together seamlessly.From her small, working-class town childhood in Massachusetts, to her wild teen years, to multiple rapes, [bad] summer jobs, struggling NYC artists, drug addiction, and un-healthy lesbian relationships.... Myles covers all subjects.This book reads quickly,...
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Eileen Myles has an incredible gift for nailing down a moment, or for that matter, a sweep of years. Each image is carefully chosen and tacked into place, and what rises is the edifice of a life. The metaphor is probably too static. Myles's prose is exhilarating even at its bleakest, it's full of breathless speed. There's plenty that is bleak here--a sad alcoholic father who dies before his daugher's eyes; an awful, floundering...
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