Chelsea Girls

Chelsea Girls is a novel according to the cover. Why not since novels are the other of other litterary genres, pretty much anything long enough including some form of narration.It's composed of beautifully written stories, often bordering on poetic prose, previously published or not, and assembled in a non chronologic manner. I read it as a memoir as it seems to be autobiographical. I thought this was a beautifull book. It first struck me as real fun but as I read through it the events narrated and the tone made me somewhat sad. Not that Myles gets less witty in their observations, judgments and writing. It’s just that they talk of teenagehood and the violence within their youth : sexual abuse, suicides, people dealing with trauma through addiction etc. And just the general downer being a teenage / young adult / queer in a straight world can be. This being said there is also queer joy in the book. It’s an artist’s memoir. A specific type of artist I guess. In one of the first stories Myles says how highly they think of their trade. And one of the book’s themes is that of being a poet and leading a poet’s life as Myles understands (understood ?) it. This gives their writting an accuteness of observation of self and others which is great. This also made it sound queer to me : a form of lucidity that stems from the marge. Yet as I read along certain aspects slightly irritated me. I find there is a specific quality of selfecenterdness here. I believe it comes from the type of art Myles does : once you put a foot in it, virtually everything you live is art. And as a reader this is fun but sometimes somewhat bothering in the way they include other people in the stories and in the way they stand in their time. Compared to somewhat contemporary authors such as Dorothy Allison, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde etc. there is very little attention given to the political context. The Vietnam war and Aids are quicly evoked, nothing or very little on racism etc. But the general impression I got was that of a life generally oblivious to political context. This is unfair and I don't expect everyone to be an activist. And of course living a lesbian life is political in itself and a feat to do so unabashedly in the midst of massive heteronormativity. This one of the pleasures of the books : such lives are lived, such intensity is grappled and could have just been totally ignored by the “sick and boring” heterosexual norm (as Jane Ward puts it). In themselves these stories set other norms that one can use to model and examine one's life outside of heteronormativity, and there is a real strength to this book because of this. It shows one way of doing otherwise, according to oneself as much as one can manage. In that sense I found this read very refreshing and inspiring.

CW : alcoholl and other drugs, sex, fatphobia (two passages), sexual abuse.