The Chelsea Whistle: A Memoir (Live Girls)

The Chelsea Whistle: A Memoir (Live Girls)
by Michelle Tea

The Chelsea Whistle: A Memoir (Live Girls)
List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $2.99
You Save: $11.96 (80%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions


(Click here)
Buy this book at online book store in your country
Canada | UK | Germany | France

Book Summary Information

Author: Michelle Tea
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-08-02
ISBN: 1580050735
Number of pages: 296
Publisher: Seal Press

Book Reviews of The Chelsea Whistle: A Memoir (Live Girls)

Book Review: I lived for almost a year in a depressed Massachusetts town
Summary: 5 Stars

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, 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 as any narration 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.

Summary of The Chelsea Whistle: A Memoir (Live Girls)

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.

Authors Books

Book Subjects
Most talked about in Authors Books
Bloomsbury Recalled ImageBloomsbury Recalled
by Quentin Bell
Columbia University Press; Published: 1997-01-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $19.38
Price in other shops: $29.00
William Tyndale: A Biography ImageWilliam Tyndale: A Biography
by David Daniell
Yale University Press; Published: 1994-11-30; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $62.92
Neither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America ImageNeither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America
by Kathleen Ann Myers
Oxford University Press, USA; Published: 2003-08-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $14.00
Price in other shops: $45.00
Storm of Steel (Penguin Classics) ImageStorm of Steel (Penguin Classics)
by Ernst Jünger
Penguin Classics; Published: 2004-05-04; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.50
Price in other shops: $16.00
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life ImageSurprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
by C.S. Lewis
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Published: 1995-11-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $10.22
Price in other shops: $18.00
Roughing It (The Penguin American Library) ImageRoughing It (The Penguin American Library)
by Mark Twain
Penguin Classics; Published: 1981-12-17; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.65
Price in other shops: $16.00
Life Is So Good: One Man's Extraordinary Journey through the 20th Century and How he Learned to Read at Age 98 ImageLife Is So Good: One Man's Extraordinary Journey through the 20th Century and How he Learned to Read at Age 98
by George Dawson, Richard Glaubman
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 2001-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.55
Price in other shops: $15.00
Shakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives) ImageShakespeare: The World as Stage (Eminent Lives)
by Bill Bryson
Harper Perennial; Published: 2008-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.00
Price in other shops: $13.99
The Professor and the Madman CD ImageThe Professor and the Madman CD
by Simon Winchester
HarperAudio; Published: 2005-10-04; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $8.47
Price in other shops: $14.95
Alexander Hamilton: A Life ImageAlexander Hamilton: A Life
by Willard Sterne Randall
Harper; Published: 2003-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $5.86
Price in other shops: $32.50
Similar Books and other products
The Left Hand of Darkness ImageThe Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin
Ace Books; Published: 1987-03-15; Mass Market Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.54
Price in other shops: $9.99
Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin Classics) ImageEichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin Classics)
by Hannah Arendt
Addison Wesley; Published: 2010-07-24; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.08
Price in other shops: $12.33
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself (Bedford Series in History and Culture) ImageNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Written by Himself (Bedford Series in History and Culture)
by Frederick Douglass
Bedford/St. Martin's; Published: 2002-12-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.68
Spoon River Anthology (Dover Thrift Editions) ImageSpoon River Anthology (Dover Thrift Editions)
by Edgar Lee Masters
Dover Publications; Published: 1992-10-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $0.76
Price in other shops: $3.00
Love Medicine: Newly Revised Edition (P.S.) ImageLove Medicine: Newly Revised Edition (P.S.)
by Louise Erdrich
Harper Perennial; Published: 2009-05-05; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.00
Price in other shops: $14.99
In the American Grain (Second Edition) (New Directions Paperbook) ImageIn the American Grain (Second Edition) (New Directions Paperbook)
by William Carlos Williams
New Directions; Published: 2009-10-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.08
Price in other shops: $13.95
Woman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories ImageWoman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories
by Sandra Cisneros
Vintage; Published: 1992-03-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $4.99
Price in other shops: $13.00
Rose of No Man's Land ImageRose of No Man's Land
by Michelle Tea
Mariner Books; Published: 2007-02-05; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.86
Price in other shops: $14.00
Rent Girl ImageRent Girl
by Michelle Tea
Last Gasp; Published: 2004-08; Paperback; Book
Best price: $12.54
Price in other shops: $24.95
Valencia ImageValencia
by Michelle Tea
Seal Press; Published: 2008-04-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.67
Price in other shops: $16.00
Book store. Illustrated catalog of books on different categories