Reading Time: 1 Min.
Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles EILEEN MYLES is an award-winning poet and writer who has published more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. They have received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, four Lambda Literary Awards, and the Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, among myriad other honors. They live in New York and Marfa, Texas, with their pit bull named Honey. I emailed Myles on a whim in early February. I was hardly expecting a response, let alone for them to agree to an interview. And yet I woke up the very next morning to their response: “Oh, totally.” I was pleasantly surprised by their informality and honesty during the interview. Famous though they are, they addressed me like we were close, longtime friends. I’ll admit, I was a bit starstruck; even so, the conversation felt easy and natural. We spoke about, among other things, Chelsea Girls, a book that was published 30 years ago today, on May 1, 1994. Written between 1980 and 1993, Chelsea Girls is a collection of prose that reads like a memoir—although Myles has adamantly expressed that it’s not. Genre aside, the essays loosely span their childhood, teenage years, and, eventually, their life as a writer in New York; throughout, Myles’s unmistakable voice is drenched in wit, honesty, and the arrogance of youth. They describe life as a dyke, plain and simple. Yet their prose leaps off the page—to me, the stories read as if Myles is sitting and speaking right across the table. I was first introduced to Myles’s work— Chelsea Girls specifically— in high school. After that, I couldn’t get enough. I wanted more than anything to write like Myles, to bring audiences the kind of reading experience so profound that it registers on a physical level. The fictionalized, lesbian, and flat broke self the book constructs is messy but incredibly brave. As I’ve gotten older, Chelsea Girls has only resonated more. These days, it’s almost always in my bag. It’s there when I need it, which is often. ¤ LYDIA ENO: When you’re […]
Click here to view original page at It Was Me and Not Me All the Time: A Conversation with Eileen Myles
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Reading Time: 1 Min. Fantasy and science fiction readers are naturally open to the unexpected, and they like new takes
Reading Time: 1 Min. The first thing that strikes you about Mia Farrow in Jen Silverman’s “The Roommate,” now at
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