Chelsea Girls Audiobook By Eileen Myles cover art

Chelsea Girls

A Novel

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Chelsea Girls

By: Eileen Myles
Narrated by: Eileen Myles
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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'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; 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.

©1994 Eileen Myles (P)2016 Tantor Biographical Fiction Genre Fiction LGBTQIA+ Creators Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Women Fiction Women's Fiction Biography Witty Substance abuse
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This is a amazing book. It reminds me of beatnik writers. So vividly written. What a incredible mind.

Amazing I’m 100% hooked

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She made herself seem like an awful person. I enjoyed her wit and had a great way of describing mannerisms but always in a cruel way, putting people down. The course of events was also disorienting and hard to follow—intentional, but I didn’t care for it

Difficult to review

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What did you love best about Chelsea Girls?

NYC poets in the 1970-90s took too many drugs, smoked too many cigarettes, and enjoyed too much sex. In this novel, Eileen Myles overshares all the details. By the end of the book, I wanted to meet her.

What about Eileen Myles’s performance did you like?

I adore her accent and matter-of-face delivery. Myles reads really shocking things with a flattened affect. (Some of her disclosures would have been better left unwritten, but there is no unwringing the bell.)

Any additional comments?

The chapters were not laid out chronologically. There were childhood chapters that followed adulthood chapters. That makes me want to listen to the entire book again in order to appreciate the early parts now that I have context. Did Myles intend this effect?

fascinatingly skanky

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this is the first none-fiction-novel i have ever completed. usually i find them tedious and basic. this was the complete opposite of that.

nice.

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Eileen Myles is the bravest storyteller I can remember. She does not flinch as she recounts her relationships and sexual experiences, both beautiful and harrowing. Her narration is impeccable, and her charm is irresistible.

Fearlessly Honest

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