Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles
One of the side benefits of having a kick-ass 22-year-old poet for a daughter is that she introduces me to badass writers like Eileen Myles. I just finished Chelsea Girls, Myles’ first novel which was republished recently alongside a collection of her poems. It felt a little like reading Patti Smith’s Just Us Kids—both books chronicle their early days as broke, starving artists in NYC in the 70s. And they are both fabulous reads, but for different reasons. Among her virtues—or vices, depending on who’s doing the telling—are Myles’ descriptions of her many sexual exploits. Steamy, tender, drunken, passionate and light-hearted, she describes each one with an irresistible honesty and fierce energy. And, if well-written hot-as-hell sex scenes aren’t enough, Myles also gifted me with a revelation about three-ways. I’ve never been in one—um, or been invited, let me just admit—but the idea always made me queasy. First of all, it’s taken till my 50s to shed a lot of the prudish, self-hating, sex-fearing crap I absorbed from my upbringing. But even with most of that gone (o.k. some of it gone), whenever I thought about it, I wondered whether it would immediately lead to jealousy—what if your partner was more into the other person than you, etc. But it never occurred to me to think about being the third!! There’s Myles, jumping into bed as the new play thing for an adventurous, open-hearted, sexy couple, and on top of that, hanging out with the kids making breakfast and watching cartoons (well, I could skip that part). And getting free dinners—which might have been her primary motivation; hard to tell. Anyway, if you haven’t already gotten the message, run, do not walk, to get a copy, and then get ready to steam up your windows….