Cool for You’s tough-girl narrator wants to be an astronaut. Instead, she becomes a poet and journeys through a series of low-end schools, pathetic jobs, and unmade beds. 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. This is a book hell-bent on telling the truth about poor women, and how they do (and do not) get out of the hands of their families and the state. Without artifice or pseudonym, protagonist Eileen Myles boldly sets down a rich and graphic account of female experience in this world.
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"With the audacity of Henry Miller, without the protection of his bravado, Myles lets the voice of poverty-madness-shame speak through her and proves the past is never operable." -- Cris Kraus, The Nation
Cool for You is touching, funny, and original, featuring strange, beautiful images of the ordinary world. Myles once said of Henry Miller that he `razzes life from within,' and the same can be said of her. -- Mary Gaitskill
Myles transforms a slew of autobiographical material into a narrative that is as bleak as it is redemptive. Each page is imbued with the kind of tone that you want to hear when you pick up the phone late at night and it's a friend calling to catch up. Dark, hip, astonishingly bright. I cannot recommend it enough. -- Tom Padilla, Posman Books (Booksense Pick recommendation)
Myles's conversational, self-referential style recalls Lynne Tillman and Lydia Davis, who have also broken up narrative to uncover the pools of waiting, repetition and introversion in women's lives. Myles's working-class lesbian perspective links her to Dorothy Allison, Pat Califia and Leslie Feinberg. And her protagonist's journey through hospitals and other institutions calls to mind Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. [But]Cool for You is original in ways that are not shocking but subtle. Myles has an exquisite sense of the borderline, where people hide or are transformed according to luck and will...Most important, though, is her understanding of more abstract institutions, especially the family. She exposes the most painful moments of an average, sad youth, including a heartbreaking scene in which her mother finds her in bed with a boyfriend, and a vertiginous description of watching her alcoholic father die on the couch. Her portraits are unrelenting but kind, well served by undramatically rich writing that roams but always gets to the point. -- Ann Powers, New York Times Book Review
One of the savviest voices and most restless intellects in contemporary lit. -- Dennis Cooper, Artforum
Cool for You is touching, funny, and original, featuring strange, beautiful images of the ordinary world. Myles once said of Henry Miller that he `razzes life from within,' and the same can be said of her. -- Mary Gaitskill
Myles transforms a slew of autobiographical material into a narrative that is as bleak as it is redemptive. Each page is imbued with the kind of tone that you want to hear when you pick up the phone late at night and it's a friend calling to catch up. Dark, hip, astonishingly bright. I cannot recommend it enough. -- Tom Padilla, Posman Books (Booksense Pick recommendation)
Myles's conversational, self-referential style recalls Lynne Tillman and Lydia Davis, who have also broken up narrative to uncover the pools of waiting, repetition and introversion in women's lives. Myles's working-class lesbian perspective links her to Dorothy Allison, Pat Califia and Leslie Feinberg. And her protagonist's journey through hospitals and other institutions calls to mind Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. [But]Cool for You is original in ways that are not shocking but subtle. Myles has an exquisite sense of the borderline, where people hide or are transformed according to luck and will...Most important, though, is her understanding of more abstract institutions, especially the family. She exposes the most painful moments of an average, sad youth, including a heartbreaking scene in which her mother finds her in bed with a boyfriend, and a vertiginous description of watching her alcoholic father die on the couch. Her portraits are unrelenting but kind, well served by undramatically rich writing that roams but always gets to the point. -- Ann Powers, New York Times Book Review
One of the savviest voices and most restless intellects in contemporary lit. -- Dennis Cooper, Artforum
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
National Treasure: Custodian of Consciousness,
By
This review is from: Cool For You (Paperback)
Eileen Myles's Cool For You rocks so hard it hurts. Like most memoirs, it's moving, and often sad, but where other books devolve into wee wistful prettiness, Cool For You stays rigorous- like a breaststroke, performed again, and again, and again. Ms Myles inhabits several different descriptors- Irish Catholic, working class, lesbian, alcoholic...- which she refuses to codify into "identities", though illumines beautifully nonetheless. It's embarrassing to admit, but here I am at age 30 reading the book, and for the first time in my life really getting the horror of the snares set out for people just based on class alone. But, anyway, Ms. Myles brings all this to vivid reality before her reader- like her tale of working in a rancid home for mentally retarded adults, hungover, and bingeing on fistfuls of M&Ms- the candy used on the patients for behavior modification. Occasionally she'll switch gears entirely, putting aside the story-telling mantle and delving into off-the-cuff but nevertheless brillaint philosophizing, like the mini-rant about why the image of a female Christ could never power a whole vast culture like the male version has, because the figure of a suffering woman is a given, if not a redundancy. Myles is a philosopher from an alien logical system- one where no one ever, ever tries to make a totalizing statement. As a big fan of Ms. Myles' poetry, I believe that the book's flat-footed, precarious, lyrical, and epigrammatic voice stems from decades of verse-making, esp. of the hip and savvy New York School style that she is the sole remaining inheritor of. Her metaphors and descriptions are just this side (-the genius side) of disaster- in the hands of anyone else- anyone who had the slightest lapse of faith they'd collapse, leaving a big old mess. In her hands though, they punch you through conditioned ways of seeing into something rougher, and more beautiful. An eastern European writer (Vaclav Havel? Milan Kundera?) once said something to the effect that no one actually cares about the future- that for both nation-states and the individual control of the future is only appealing in so far as it means control of the past- rewriting the official history to come out always looking good. But neither Myles' voice nor story(s) are self-seeking. Coincident with this she never tries to crystallize the past, to present it as one whit more fixed or comprehensible than right here right now, you the person reading these words. (The running story of her instutionalized grandmother, to whom the book is dedicated, is a toccata of gaps, mysteries, and paraphrase.) A conscious, chosen, and endlessly repeated act of moment-by-moment non-resolution. That's rare discretion, and so very precious. If it were up to me, Eileen Myles would be a National Treasure. -Piki M
15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Portrait of an Artist-American,
By A Customer
This review is from: Cool For You (Paperback)
Proof that the best novelists are poets, Myles's Cool for You combines an artist's interior flood of sensations and a regular citizen's attempt to piece together the story of her institutionalized grandmother. Cool for You is too insightful to be lumped with memoirs. (In fact, it's categorized as a novel.) It's everything Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is touted as being, but Myles outmuscles, out-testosterones, and plain out-does sterile Joyce. There's a vitality here that you're familiar with if you're lucky enough to have heard and seen Myles read. This book's about institutions of all sorts--loony bins and Catholic school, summer camp and college--and an individual's busting free of them. This is a beautiful book, achingly truthful, funny, wise. I highly recommend Myles's world.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cool for Us,
By
This review is from: Cool For You (Paperback)
Too many novels/memoirs get lost in pretty words and pat observations which lead to little or no insight into the "real" author. Eileen Myles doesn't play this game. Memories of sexual experiences, horrible jobs, too much booze, and a family life that doesn't resemble reruns of Ozzie and Harriet spill onto the page without artifice and without regard for chronology. The result is a dizzying, beautiful, tough and honest view into one woman's life. I couldn't stop turning the pages as I wandered deeper into Ms. Myles's memories and connected, at times, with her sense of displacement. There's also much humor in this book: Ms. Myles has an ability to paint scenes of her Catholic school experiences that can make you laugh out loud. More authors should write this honestly.
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Aunt Anne, New York, San Francisco, Bobby Doyle, Peter Pan, Aunt Marie, Arlington Catholic, Aunt Gladys, Swan Place, Westborough State Hospital, Ascension Thursday, Lucy Bean, Peter Whitman, Harvard Square, Fidelity House, Spy Pond, Fernald School, Crane's Beach, Janice Oaks, Kevin Coughlin, Birch Lodge, Miss Temple, University of Massachusetts, Shriver Center, Pleasant Street Browse Sample Pages:
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Aunt Anne, New York, San Francisco, Bobby Doyle, Peter Pan, Aunt Marie, Arlington Catholic, Aunt Gladys, Swan Place, Westborough State Hospital, Ascension Thursday, Lucy Bean, Peter Whitman, Harvard Square, Fidelity House, Spy Pond, Fernald School, Crane's Beach, Janice Oaks, Kevin Coughlin, Birch Lodge, Miss Temple, University of Massachusetts, Shriver Center, Pleasant Street Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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