Michelle Tea - The Chelsea Whistle The Chelsea WhistlePrice: » » Buy this Product @ Amazon.com « «
Editorial ReviewsProduct Description In this gritty, confessional memoir, Michelle Tea takes the reader back to the city of her childhood: Chelsea, Massachusetts—a place where time and hope are spent on things not getting any worse. Tea’s girlhood is shaped by the rough fabric of the neighborhood and by its characters—the soft vulnerability of her sister Madeline and her quietly brutal Polish father; the doddering, sometimes violent nuns of Our Lady of Assumption; Marisol Lewis from the projects by the creek; and Johnna Latrotta, the tough-as-nails Italian dance-school teacher who offered a slim chance for escape to every young Chelsea girl in tulle and tap shoes. Told in Tea’s trademark loose-tongued, lyrical style, this memoir both celebrates and annihilates one girl’s tightrope walk out of a working-class slum and the lessons she carries with her. With wry humor and a hard-fought wisdom, Tea limns the extravagant peril of a dramatic adolescence with the private, catastrophic secret harbored within the walls of her family’s home—a secret that threatens to destroy her family forever. Similar Products
Customer ReviewsLewis DeSimone Said: Surviving Chelsea ( Oct. 24th 2008 ) In her disturbing, funny, and often lyrical memoir, Tea effectively captures the ugliness and grit of our shared hometown (two writers from Chelsea, Massachusetts--it's a miracle!). I'm not sure if an outsider would have the same reaction, but I could see every detail clearly as her prose triggered buried memories of places and a way of life I've gladly left behind. The dominant emotion of the memoir is anger, and very understandably, given the backward culture of Chelsea. But then Tea completely startles with passages of poetic description--always maintaining her tone, skating that fine line to avoid falling into sentimentality. The tension between her tough persona and the beautifully expressed insights sustains the story, adding layers of intriguing complexity. maura Said: I lived for almost a year in a depressed Massachusetts town ( Dec. 3rd 2007 ) I never really thought about Amazon editing these reviews but in my last review I wrote the word b**!&#t and it was not posted. So this time I will write more nicely.... Michelle Tea's memoir is no b**!&#t in its honesty and brutality about the growing up of girls. I worked in a reformatory school for girls in a new England town, an experience that scarred me (and I think the girls too) as the 12-17 year olds I worked with were labeled naughty and dirty although with only one clear exception had been more damaged than damaging. Every day the girls were given five minutes to shower and another thirty minutes to dry and curl and spray their hair....to socially conform or face punishment. Which is to say Tea's memoir strikes me as true to a specific time and place and yet surprisingly, humanely funny. As in the chapter where she talks about her elementary school fear of being pulled aside by a high schooler and hooked on drugs with the use of a mickey mouse stamp with LSD on the back. The kind of rumors and paranoia and fear that waft through small towns in America waft through this memoir and each chapter contains beautiful and true minutia about the props and tenderness and toughness of girlhood. Like maybe all good memoirs, Tea's childhood story outlines a betrayal....despite all her best intentions to stay free of the harms, microbes and miscreants lurking on the outskirts of her world, to not cause her overworked underpaid mother more trouble, a betrayal from within. I won't say more here except that the way she writes about this experience is fresh and poetic and clear. Those who criticise the ending seem to want something that non-fiction can't provide, which is clear closure. The concept of closure is nice, but rare in long-lived family dramas. And for those who think her experiences are too dramatic or made up, I disagree. The shame and fear and dirt of families written about here seems as true to me as any narration of I've encountered. I wish sometimes that there could be a bridge...that in high school rich kids or middle class children who don't have to face this fundamental struggle of their right to exist could read more of the stories of children who have to start running from a very early age just to make it "out" of a tight web of poverty and family violence. I found this story to be hopeful, not because Tea's girlhood is tied up with a pink ribbon at the end, but because she's survived to write this account, we know the "ending" isn't the real ending of her story, just a step. And that her struggle as dirty and ugly (and at times hilarious) as it was has also been successful. I recommend this book to people of both genders, grown up or growing up who are able to contemplate the real life fears and tribulations of a real (not sanitized, doll-ified) american girlhood. Also recommended for fans of Judy Blume. HLR Said: Not My Cup ( Nov. 1st 2005 ) My stars are generous. I liked this memoir the first time I read it, but upon reading it a second time I could only wonder what I was thinking the first time around. As fellow reader Bruce suggests, Tea's story DOES have merit and, I would add, social importance, but the ways in which she conveys her story--or fails to convey it sometimes--leaves much to be desired. I feel like the real story is still in the walls of Tea's mind, in the walls of the house where she grew up, in the walls of words that she has contructed and called The Chelsea Whistle. But hey, it's her memoir, not mine. In short, Tea's memoir could be about 100 pages shorter! It had really good potential, but it does not leave a lasting impression. I would have liked to see Tea draw out more of the social issues and implications (relating to class, religion, sexuality, etc.) surrounding her coming of age. Instead, at some of the most crucial moments, we get walls--pointless references to what she ate on random days or how she tried to cure a yeast infection. (And trust me, unlike other writers, there was no symbolic value in any of these references.) Nonetheless I credit Tea for being so open and candid with her story. I just expected and hoped for something different, something resonant and socially useful (especially since she calls herself a feminist). Something more. just some Said: a third attempt shows true writing skills.... ( Oct. 18th 2005 ) tea's first two memoirs are full of action and sesationalistic experiences with lovers, drugs and prostitution. where you really find out about the skills of a writer is their ability to make the quieter, less thrilling moments of life interesting. tea's ability to do this is best discribed as average. though i appreciate her story of growing up working class in a poor neighborhood outside of boston, it was somewhat of a struggle to get through this book. i would venture to suggest that tea is certainly an important voice in young, queer culture, she's just not always so well spoken. Bruce J. Wasser Said: overwrought, over-the-top, Tea's harsh memoir falters badly ( May. 28th 2003 ) After trudging through Michelle Tea's gritty, depressing and desperately uneven recollections of her degraded and desolate childhood and adolescence, exhausted readers will have reason to congratulate both the author and themselves for survival skills. Written in staccato bursts of stream of consciousnessness vignettes which yearn for an editor's red pencil, "The Chelsea Whistle" valiantly attempts to not only narrate but explain how poverty and hopelessness blight lives. Unfortunately, Tea spends far too much time describing events and cataloging abuses and far too little time analyzing their influence. Sure, her horrific Chelsea, Massachusetts, the place where the American Dream goes to die, suffocates and submerges creative individualism and creative impulse. Of course, the only families that city spawns are pathetically dysfunctional. With Tea's ham-handed approach, readers will shrug their shoulders and say, "So what?" The memoir is not completely without merit. The author's candid appraisal ofher life, aswirl in class, ethnic, racial and religious prejudices provides ample opportunity for Tea's sardonic resentment to manifest itself. The memoir bogs down, though, in the prosaic protests the author mounts; after all, how many song titles, dress styles and alcoholic drinks does it take to lead us to the inevitable conclusion that the author dissipated her physical and emotional self. Never once does the author permit us to glance into her developing homosexuality; instead, Tea prefers titillation and presumed shock instead of peceptive self-evalution. This omission is doubly galling as numerous young lesbians may well turn to this memoir for solace and solidarity. What they will receive is stereotype and caricature. There are serious stylistic flaws as well in "The Chelsea Whistle." Its author apparently does not believe in dialogue or quotation marks; instead, she prefers to wow the reader with capitalized letters for the spoken word. This isn't artistic creativity, but a writer playing at trendy iconoclasm. Even more pathetic is her presenation of a serious family trauma as the "deep dark secret only to be revealed late in the memoir." Once exposed, her epiphany is not apocalyptic but mundane, not horrifying but banal. Tragically, Michelle Tea's suffering appears anti-climactic. But then, why should her "catastrophy" be anything else but another flavor in her multi-scooped cone of despair. |
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