The Chelsea whistle
By: Michelle Tea.
Edition: 1st Seal Press ed.
Publisher: Seal Press; Distributed by Publishers Group West
Published: 2002
Place of publication: New York; [s.l.]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 331
Subjects: Tea, Michelle -- Childhood and youth.; Tea, Michelle -- Homes and haunts -- Massachusetts -- Chelsea.; Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography.; Lesbians -- United States -- Biography.; Chelsea (Mass.) -- Social life and customs.
Genres: Biography.
Description: "In this memoir, Michelle Tea takes the reader back to the city of her childhood: Chelsea, Massachusetts - Boston's ugly, scrappy little sister and a place where time and hope can only keep things from 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 the Assumption; Marisol from the projects by the creek; and 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, catastrophe secret harbored within the walls of her family's home - a secret that threatens to destroy her family forever."--BOOK JACKET.