Despite having written the book 20 years ago, Myles's literary style feels as contemporary as the essayistic autobiographical fiction of Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner and Tao Lin, who might be considered Myles's literary offspring.
New York Times
[Myles's] very presence in the world is a form of activism, but the work, when studied with care, is also political in the sense that it gives evidence of one of the richest and most conflicted human hearts you're likely to find
New York Review of Books
Unsettled in the best sense: restless, disturbing, changeable... Myles is exemplary for more and more young writers precisely because she has gone her own way.
Ben Lerner
Paris Review
One of the richest and most conflicted human hearts you're likely to find
Dan Chiasson
New York Review of Books
Reading Myles is nothing if not a physical experience, the one-two promise of a heartbeat that goes, I'm alive. I'm alive.
Electric Literature
[This book], on all accounts, redefined the queer novel.
Wonderland
Chelsea Girls offers poetry, sex, Catholicism, drugs, class and sexuality. This new reprint of Myles's hard-talking, lyrical autobiographical novel, about a female writer figuring things out in the 1960s, is the missing data for anyone who has read only the male American beat writers.
Deborah Levy
New Statesman