(Note: though Eileen Myles used the pronoun “she” at the time this book was written, they now use the singular “they,” so that’s what I’m using here.)
Near the end of Inferno (which is split into three sections, each one loosely corresponding to a section of Dante’s Divine Comedy), Eileen Myles writes that “poetry is most of all a mastery of places, not the world but the weather of the states that form in your life and what you read and how things were taken and what came back” (260). That’s also a pretty good description of this book, which is an autobiographical novel about the narrator’s coming of age as a writer and a queer person. It’s also about New York in the late 1960s and 1970s (and onward), and it’s smart and wryly funny and really satisfying, maybe especially the first section, which mostly alternates between the narrator’s experience in a literature class at U Mass Boston and a story about going out on a double date of sorts with a near-stranger and two visiting Italian businessmen, fairly early in the narrator’s NYC life. The second section is partly structured as a grant application, partly as a series of vignettes about being a writer (among other things); the last section is another series of vignettes, about being a writer and sex and life.
I love Myles’s descriptions of New York: “Millions of little covens. It’s not a big city at all,” they write (51). Or, later in the book: “It’s the way New York is: all the realities blinking next to each other” (203). Myles captures a feeling of possibility related to being young in the city and to being a writer and to being queer, and that feeling is probably all the more pronounced because of the way that New York’s openness contrasts with the narrator’s Boston-adjacent childhood and adolescence. Myles writes this, about Catholic school: “the nuns enclosed the world with sanity and god. The rules flowed up and down the calendar and around the clock and in the day the sky, the world was rules—known by god the nuns said” (8). And then Myles writes about the city, about “being completely open to the world” in a “temporary way,” “notebook open to all the light coming in” (33). I also love this, about poetry readings at the West End bar by Columbia: “The light poured in from Broadway behind the poet so you could see it was winter and the trees were skinny and the cars on Broadway were moving fast and a reading was going on. The world was a movie” (53).
(I also totally love the sweet and tender and observant way Myles writes about their dog Rosie in this book—I’d already wanted to read Afterglow, Myles’s “dog memoir”, and now I’m even more excited about it.)
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