I ran into Michelle Tea reading Chelsea Girls from her outside seat at a cafe on Valencia Street shortly after the book came out in 1994. This is like running into the Ramones buying Chuck Taylors at a Footlocker. I distinctly remember this as the way Eileen Myles got on my radar1, but I don’t recall the conversation. I could make one up that sounds as fake as a biopic:
“This book is wicked awesome!” Michelle exclaimed, waving around the Black Sparrow edition in one hand while simultaneously drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette with the other. See? All ready for a cringey pre-dotcom San Francisco nostalgia Netflix Series called Frisco Grunge.
But I must mention Michelle here for the reason I want to underscore the untold importance of Eileen Myles: they have influenced so many writers that came after. Chances are, if you read any straight-from-the-brain biographical fiction or nonfiction from the late ‘90s, bet on Myles having at least a little to do with it. So many of us from our scene are better for having read them.
There’s a lot of ways to rate the importance of an artist, but I’m only going to talk about one of them for this article: the influence they have on getting other artists producing. Some artists become iconic, some define a genre or a national era, and others might be hacky but sell a million copies of whatever. But my favorites are the ones that threw a lit cigarette on the oily rags in the corner of my creative space and really set me on fire.
Now here’s where I want to pause for just a moment and talk about the “writer’s writer” or “comic’s comic” phenomena2. I mean this as the highest compliment, but sometimes it can be taken another way—that only the artists in that medium will “get” them—think about a Rush concert in which the entire crowd are musicians, or a comic too obtuse for regular folk to laugh at. And sometimes it denotes someone who is good at what they do, but will never have any kind of commercial or financial success. So without using that term here, I want to explain what I mean.
Eileen Myles has had a very successful career, in both the lowbrow art world and academia. They’ve published a long shelf of books since 1978 and continue to put out new work. And writer envy of all envies, they had a Hanuman title back in the ‘80s—this was a line of physically tiny books, which is an article that someone else should write, because I don’t know anything about them other than they were the coolest-looking small press books. But I’m going to focus on Chelsea Girls, as I recently reread it.
This is the same story I’ve had before, of running into Stories Bookstore in Echo Park at the last minute to see a reading. I just wanted to get an Eileen book and maybe get it signed and get out of there. Good lord, it was packed to the gills. There was the new book but also the new printing of Chelsea Girls I didn’t have. At the moment, I couldn’t remember if my Black Sparrow copy was in my storage space or on my shelf and I had an overwhelming urge to read it again, and with a trip I knew I had coming up, I didn’t want to take my “nice” copy anyway, so a repurchase it was.
On the way down the West Coast on the Coast Starlight train, I cracked open Chelsea Girls. Immediately, I thought of several life stories I have that I’ve never bothered writing. Soon, I put the book away, opened the laptop, and started mashing the keys. This kind of inspiration/work energy is so valuable to creative people.
By the mid-90s, Bukowski was dead and the Beat poets who were still alive seemed like they lived in a different plane of existence. But Eileen was in a generation of authors that were on a different level than the rest of us, but still accessible—someone we could talk to, possibly get a letter of recommendation from. We could get to where they were, somehow. With all due respect, there were a lot of the older generation of writers whose new work was dull and lifeless, whereas Myles was still coming out with their best work.
Eileen’s stories are first-person narratives with a rambling gait that involve the drama of everyday life. In these stories, they’re a young person still trying to find their way in life, making mistakes but full-on going for grand victory. The stakes and the consequences are low for a lot of literature, but the tone is perfect and the plots are real. Whereas with a book like On The Road3, a young writer might think “I need to go on an adventure so I can have something to write about,” with Chelsea Girls, anyone reading it should think “I have enough in my life to write about now, I just need to get off my ass and do it.”
Now, once you get off your ass and write your memoir is when you’ll see the true genius of Eileen’s work: they make it look easy, like someone who spends hours on their hair to get that “woke up like this” look. After all, they’re just writing what happens, right? Well, it’s a horrible shock to find out that it takes a well-honed talent to get to that point of writing. To maintain a narrative that reads like the author is shouting it into your ear from the backseat of a motorcycle is no easy feat. It’s like watching Steph Curry casually shoot three-pointers in practice4. How hard could it be? As it turns out, few experiences that were interesting to you will be interesting to anyone else on their own merit; chances are, your first attempt at this will be as compelling as hearing a coworker tell you about a weird dream they had while cornering you in the break room.
But by writing it, you will get started. It takes a lot of pages to find your voice and a lot of life experience to see your own life for what it is. You will have to crank out a lot of bad pages before they get better. And you will need to read more books. Eventually, I hope, at the worst, you will be a better writer, and, at best, you may be a very good one.
I had heard of Eileen for sure, but this is when I started reading them seriously. I had to keep up with everything the other writers from my peer group were doing, from books they were reading to drugs they were using. Also, I just figured out how to use footnotes in Substack so get ready, I’m going to use a lot of them.
This Cracked article made me think of a long list of writers who should be on such a list and since I had the Eileen photo and been meaning to write one of these about them, so here ya go.
This is another book whose real value lies in getting young people to write. I don’t actually like On the Road, but I do appreciate it inspiring teens to get moving creatively.
There was a guy named Mark Price, who was the most boring great player in NBA history. He has no highlight reel. I wanted to say “it’s like watching Mark Price shoot free throws,” but only basketball nerds would appreciate it.