Chelsea Girls: A Novel

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.

"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

"Eileen Myles is a genius!" —Dorothy Allison, award winning author of Bastard out of Carolina