The Chelsea Whistle: A Memoir (Live Girls) [Paperback]

Michelle Tea (Author)

Book Description

Series: Live Girls | Publication Date: August 2, 2002

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Childhood is morbid," declares Tea, author of the Lambda Award-winning Valencia, in this gritty girlhood memoir. As a kid, she perfected the art of playing dead. In her teens, she was deep into Goth-black lipstick and lace, her hearse-driving boyfriend and other grim reaperesque fashions. In lush detail, she describes growing up on the other side of the tracks in the Boston suburb of Chelsea. Her alcoholic father abandoned the family, and her mother was overworked. Tea longed to possess cool clothes, experimented with drinking and drugs, had sex with boys and then with girls. Recounting these bits leads to an obsession with proving that her stepfather had bored holes in the house's bathroom and bedroom doors so he could spy on Tea and her sister when they were growing up. However, his confession isn't exactly gratifying; Tea wishes he had actually "grabbed" her, wishing for the "indisputable trespass of a hand," which would have made her the unarguable victim of sexual abuse. Tea finally walks out of her mother's house for good, proclaiming herself not a woman but "some new girl, an orphan." The writing is well-honed (e.g., Tea describes her father extracting lobster meat as "pulling fingers from a glove"), and the image of the "Chelsea whistle" is poignant ("the boys it meant to call were the boys I would need to be saved from"). However, the book's starts and stops, coupled with a disappointing ending make her account ultimately unsatisfying.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Tea's memoir of growing up poor and white on the East Coast in the 1970s and '80s begins with her playing at being dead with her cousin and sister. Death and a sort of stagnant life in death were pretty much what this aging, "graffitied" working-class suburb of Boston had to offer its inhabitants. Tea's formative years aren't unusual, given her class background or the time. Her parents are divorced, and soon after their separation, her father, whose upbringing has left him completely unprepared to relate to his wife and daughters, deserts the family. Tea's biography is her attempt to explore the truth of her childhood, including incest. What makes it remarkable is her flair for description and her ability to recall vividly the indignities of her childhood. Tea has written a powerful and useful narrative for other incest survivors. June Pulliam
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 296 pages
• Publisher: Seal Press; 1st Seal Press Ed edition (August 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580050735
• ISBN-13: 978-1580050739
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,941,973 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I lived for almost a year in a depressed Massachusetts town, December 3, 2007

By 

dolores (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Chelsea Whistle: A Memoir (Live Girls) (Paperback)

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.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Publisher's Weekly misses the magic, September 7, 2002

By 

maizy "maizy814" (nashville, tn USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Chelsea Whistle: A Memoir (Live Girls) (Paperback)

What can I say about Michelle Tea and her writing that hasn't already been said in a positive light? She is the most honest, unafraid writer I have ever had the pleasure to read, and The Chelsea Whistle is a daring, heartbreaking, wonderful continuation of her life story. Her writing is beautiful, everflowing and wonderfully descriptive. She pulls no punches, neither to protect herself nor to protect or punish the people around her. The thing I love best about her writing is the picture she presents of a whole person; she trusts her audience to see truth in whatever way they find it. She is able to pull words from the dark places in her that are universal but never said--she makes the whole human experience come to life in the way that we all know it in our hearts, and she does not purport to be special in her own experience. I don't know what Publisher's Weekly read, but I did not find her writing choppy, and if the ending is disappointing, it is only that her character is not done growing, as perhaps the PW reviewer hopes for. Michelle's is a life in progress, and I cannot wait to read the next chapter.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Growing up can be painful..., December 26, 2002

By 

Jen McSurley (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Chelsea Whistle: A Memoir (Live Girls) (Paperback)

Tea's memoir is an amazing glimpse of a teenager's life in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Being a fellow New Englander I can hang onto every word she says and feel that is sad but true. Tea bases the book around her insanely complicated family life, while adding snippets of inner city adventures. Serious and funny she pulls you through a whirlwind of emotions and issues without asking you to sympathize with her.
She lives through a divorce, her step-father's harassment and deals with being a lesbian in a place where there is no such thing. It is a quick read and well worth it.