Chelsea Girls: A Novel (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
Though I read this book for the first time when I was sixteen, Myles' voice has stuck with me like a seductive parasite in my head. Their recount of New York in the 70s, unblushing lesbian/queer existence and survival as an artist had (and continues to have) me wholeheartedly captivated.
— From AnastasiaDescription
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 life into a work of art. Told in her audacious voice, made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, Chelsea Girls cobbles together memories of Myles’ 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; 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 female writer shrugged off the chains of a rigid cultural identity meant to define her.
About the Author
Eileen Myles has published twenty books of poetry, art journalism, and fiction and libretti. She's a Guggenheim Fellow, has received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America and a Lambda Award for lesbian fiction, and was named to the Whiting/Slate Second Novel List. She also received an arts writers grant from Creative Capital/ the Warhol Foundation and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. She lives in Marfa, Texas, and New York.