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The creative shove she needed was the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016. Sometimes she would write for a few months then stick the manuscript back in a drawer for years. I had to delve into the systemic reasons behind racism and misogyny and homophobia.”īertei has been writing the book on and off since 1977 when she dived into New York’s counter-cultural scene, acting in underground films and reading prose and poetry to open for writers such as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Kathy Acker. Otherwise the rage and the sadness would have killed me off. I had to try and understand what was going on to have compassion. She explains: “As a child faced with the severe traumas that I went through, in order to survive I needed to know how cruelty finds its way into human hearts or I wouldn’t have made it. Twist: An American Girl, bracingly candid and stylishly written, is her attempt to understand.

That glamorous life offers little hint of Bertei’s harrowing childhood in Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1960s and 1970s with a violent father and a mother whose struggle with undiagnosed schizophrenia led Bertei to spend her teens in foster care. One recent article dubbed her “the most iconic rock’n’roll musician you’ve never heard of”. She was part of the New York “no wave” movement of the late 1970s and went on to write songs or perform as a backing singer for 1980s acts such as Tears for Fears, Sandra Bernhard, Culture Club, the Pointer Sisters and Matthew Sweet. Culture can’t continue to be as elitist because when you shut people out of a culture, where they have no mirrors, the dam is going to burst at some point.”īertei was the creator of the Bloods, the first all-woman openly queer rock band. You look at the New York Times, you’re not going to see any working-class stories there.

“We need to also hear more working-class stories. “We need to break the conspiracy of silence and more women need to be angry and speak out. “What a metaphor concerning the invisibility of women’s stories through the centuries,” the 68-year-old says by phone from Paris. She had the Moby Dick dream when she was a child but still remembers it clearly. This is a passage from Twist: An American Girl, a coming-of-age memoir by Adele Bertei, a writer, director, performer and musician.

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