Title: The Chelsea Whistle
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.
Subjects: Social life and customs, American Authors, Homes and haunts, Lesbians, Childhood and youth, Biography, American Women authors, Authors, american, Authors, biography, Massachusetts, social life and customs
Places: Chelsea, Chelsea (Mass.), Massachusetts, United States
People: Michelle Tea
Time periods: 20th century