dropped at p. 150. i never drop books but i hated the writing style so much, i just couldnt take it anymore. ( )

Here's all the lines I highlighted, except for when I highlighted entire pages.



I only like getting drunk and being in love. If I wasn't either of those things, I simply needed my rent, cigarettes and coffee, simple enough. I really liked the life of the poet.

I just started doing this thing between remembering and imagining.

So what if they can't think anymore. I can't talk when I stop smoking. My sentences come out screwed up and gasping and I'm always breathing heavy and spitting. What a beast.

Like movies leave ghosts or spirits.

A woman uses you because you let her in so naturally never expected it's just chess.

I remember people white-faced, people dancing who were never seen dancing before or afterwards in their lives.

Everything I did was something to fix me.

I never thought about that before mostly thinking I knew everything about a person by the way they dressed.

A speed freak with spidery repetitious gestures [...] He was kind of a conductor.

It was the most ironic end of an empire song any culture ever played for itself.

You never knew if she was making this stuff up.

The kind of person who always had diet pills in her faded jean pockets.

I'm softly fingering it's petals on the subway home, it is so artificial, so dark, so beautiful.

He put this faggy little turn on "Eileen", like it was a made up name, something I'm pretending to be.

She thought the trip would be good for her, a distraction. People always think that until they get a few drinks in them.

Like? I can't even tell you what that meant.

You don't even know other people are alive, you're so selfish.

My little vial of coke and the red phone.

I thought my death would be this way. I loved it.

Isn't there a moment when you hear something cruel and you can't believe they're talking about you.

Don't you feel like dying, she said.

It was beginning to feel too late.

I missed the good old days when we couldn't get over ourselves.

Pills alone can make you mean.

We showed each other everything we wrote. It was so twisted.

Whenever he decided he hated me that haircut made him sad.

My father wasn't dead. That's an important thing about that time. The energy was higher, in my world, in my life.

She managed to be sexy while she took part in childish games.

I could act like a jerk unto delirium.

Oh Eileen, aren't you ever going to grow up.

DIane had long dark hair and she also held court.

How weird. He was hurting me and it felt pretty good.

You didn't want to be thought about that much.

But I wasn't so sure he was being good — the house felt hot, it was manic and scarey.

She groaned at their beauty.

Running out around, drunk, late at night like it was the middle of the day since I'm so sad and there's nothing to get up for.

Always being the coward or not an initiator but always ready to go on an adventurous ride.

Just because I couldn't say let's do it, but you could, my job was to make it cool.

You caught me at an odd time, full of rituals.

Dreaming is like getting drunk alone, the less you live the more you dream, the more fantastic and outrageous the dreams get.

Dreams are death in training.

Europe was old. So old that nothing mattered at all. Nothing could happen.

Everything described as Bohemia is just someplace you fall.

I felt I had blown my opportunity to be whipped and fucked by famous people.

I walked home with this woman who was ruining my life, had been doing so for a while.

She gives me that look: "You've told me before."

Of a drowning man.

Did you ever feel like spring is this sap, this slow-moving stuff.

If we never drink together again I think I'll be safe.

As if you could make anything stop.

Time staggered.

I might look like a healthy kid,

I couldn't believe my incredible luck to easily seduce this interesting woman until I got to know her better. Mane was crazy.

No one's going to make a little wife out of me.

Why is that people are always so withholding toward those who adore them meanwhile adoring someone else.

That really hurt, it hurt now, the moment of pulling one over on someone you love. Being loved for your deception.

She wore a white alligator shirt, without the alligator (YOU MEAN A POLO EILEEN)

Being volatile so I had to be reliable, being young so I had to be old.

How can you punish someone who's pushing you into doing something bad.

Flirting often looks like sarcasm.
( )

The story of Eileen Myles is very intriguing and if read in paperback would probably be much better. I listened to the book as an audio book. The narrator was Eileen herself. Of the audio books I have listened to, I don't think she is the best narrator. Her story would have been more captivating with a different person reading and I wonder if part of that was she was too close to her own book. The story itself was interesting and there were parts that the stories kept me wanting more details. Overall, if you want an interesting story, this would do the trick. ( )

This took a while to finish, but not because I didn't like it. I just couldn't stop my mind from jumping around, every other line made me recall something I hadn't thought about in a while and gave me a new voice to think with. I hope to come back to this book someday.

Sex, drugs, and poetry. Lots of all three, though surprisingly more heavily weighted to the first two. This book is sort of a memoir, sort of a novel, and the audiobook is read by Myles herself. I would have lived to hear more about her years in New York City, but she had some crazy stories from back home.