Synopses & Reviews
Grainy, stained and stripped, this nonfiction novel traces the downbeat progress of a girl growing up in working-class Boston. Schooled by mean and memorable Catholic nuns, this tomboy heroine stumbles and dreams her way through the painful corridors of family, early sexual encounters and an eye-opening series of jobs caring for the sick and insane, the abandoned wards of the state.
Without artifice or pseudonym, protagonist Eileen Myles boldly sets down a rich and graphic account of female experience in this world.
Review
"Myles is one of the savviest voices and most restless intellects in contemporary lit." Dennis Cooper
Review
"The way roughness and humor are wrapped in a dangerous exciting tale a tale that pulls at my heart and enthralls my psyche is a stunning feat that makes Cool for You worthy of much study and massive enjoyment." J T Leroy
Review
"Cool for You is touching, funny, and original, featuring strange, beautiful images of the ordinary world. Like Henry Miller, Eileen Myles razzes life from within." Mary Gaitskill
Review
"Cool is hot, a poet's thrilling invention of the novel as though from Mars or some more distant body. She cruises her own life from this platform of language-vernacular, glinting, gestural-making art of everything she brings aboard." Jonathan Lethem
Review
"Eileen Myles is a genius." Dorothy Allison
Review
"If Eileen Myles was a lesbian John Wayne sweeping me up on her horse and taking me into the sunset of her life she couldn't have done it any better. In her most recent book, a novel entitled Cool For You (Soft Skull Press), Eileen gives us a transporting and incandescent account of her life." Janet Mason, Technodyke.com
Synopsis
Eileen Myles, the popular author of Chelsea Girls and Not Me, the poet who ran an openly female campaign for president in 1992, now gives us a talking masterpiece of a novel that scratches out and rewrites the picture of what fifty years of female life looks like today.
Cool For You is a darkly comic novel that traces the downbeat progress of an Irish American girl through a series of stuttering efforts to leave home. Cool For You's tough girl narrator wants to be an astronaut. Instead, she becomes a poet and takes us on a ferocious tour of, low-end schools, pathetic jobs, and unmade beds. This is a book hell-bent on telling the truth about poor women, how they do and do not get out of the hands of the family and the State.
Synopsis
Grainy and stripped, this gritty novel traces the downbeat progress of a girl growing up in working-class Boston. Eileen Myles is a genius!” Dorothy Allison