Full name: The Chelsea Whistle: A Memoir

Author: Michelle Tea Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Memoirs, Gay & Lesbian, Non Fiction Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9781580050739 9781580052399 1580050735 1580052398

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 books: Please Excuse My Daughter by Julie Klam Look Back with Love by Dodie Smith The Florist's Daughter by Patricia Hampl Dreaming by Carolyn See Instead of a Letter by Diana Athill A Backward Glance by Edith Wharton Sleeping with Cats by Marge Piercy Name All the Animals by Alison Smith Yesterday Morning by Diana Athill Driving with Dead People by Monica Holloway Circling My Mother by Mary Gordon Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick Moose by Stephanie Klein Dancing Fish and Ammonites by Penelope Lively Her Last Death by Susanna Sonnenberg Rent Girl by Michelle Tea In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado Tomorrow Will Be Different by Sarah McBride Logical Family by Armistead Maupin Teaching the Cat to Sit by Michelle Theall