Chelsea Girls - by Eileen Myles (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

A groundbreaking and candid novel-in-real-time, considered a cult classic, from one of America's most celebrated poets

In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms her life into a work of art. Told in her audacious and singular 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; with raw, flickering stories of awkward love, humor, and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool, and intimate account of a writer's education, and a modern tale of how one young female writer managed to shrug off the chains of the rigid cultural identity meant to define her.

Review Quotes

"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