Description

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Twist: Tales of a Queer Girlhood is iconic rock-and-roll musician Adele Bertei's harrowing and electric memoir of transforming trauma through art, pluck, and imagination, as told through the inimitable voice of her young alter ego, Maddie Twist.

From iconoclastic writer and musician Adele Bertei comes "a powerful look at survival and redemption despite extremely challenging obstacles" (Kirkus Reviews, Best Nonfiction of 2023). Set in a 1960s and '70s American neighborhood rife with poverty and violence, fatherless Irish mothers and Italian mobsters, women crucified into madness by misogyny, and an unforgettable supporting cast of characters, Bertei speaks through her electrically alive avatar Maddie Twist to flip the victim script. Through her unshakable belief in imagination, poetry, music, and community, she transforms trauma into survival.

A compelling personal history of queer culture from a working-class view, Twist is good medicine: for readers who've experienced similar traumas, for teens caught in the foster care system, for the formerly incarcerated looking for hope, for writers grappling with how to tell their own stories. Most of all, it's for everyone seeking transportive experiences in art and on the page.

About the Author

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ADELE BERTEI began playing music in Cleveland with Pere Ubu's legendary Peter Laughner, and as an original member of the Contortions, produced by Brian Eno on No New York. She was the pioneering creator of The Bloods--the first out, queer, all-women-rock band. Her singing and songwriting career includes recording, performing live, and writing for such diverse acts as Thomas Dolby, Tears for Fears, Culture Club, Whitney Houston, Scritti Politti, Sheena Easton, Jellybean Benitez, Lydia Lunch, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, the Pointer Sisters, and John Lurie. Bertei played a lead role in Lizzie Borden's seminal feminist sci-fi film Born in Flames. She is the author of two previous books: Peter and the Wolves (a memoir) and Why Labelle Matters, a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Awards. Twist: Tales of a Queer Girlhood is her origin story.