Mon 3/27 @ 7:30PM
By the time Adele Bertei, the show business renaissance artist, started to write her first book, she had already collaborated with a litany of marquee musical acts.
She’d worked on an album with Brian Eno, produced a film for Playboy, launched the first all-out lesbian punk band, released a handful of records on both sides of the Atlantic, appeared in her own MTV videos and been embedded in New York’s rough-and-tumble No Wave scene of the late 1970s.
But those weren’t the stories she had to tell. Peter and the Wolves (Smog Veil) is the biography of Peter Laughner, Cleveland’s enigmatic and influential rock ‘n’ roll bad boy. Bertei became Laughner’s protégé, sidekick and roommate, and she had a ringside seat at his triumphs and tragedies. The book is a subjective biography, intertwining Laughner’s story with Bertei’s own, and Bertei depicts Cleveland in all its rust-belt gothic decadence. Its release in 2020 coincided with the lavish box-set tribute to Laughner, some fifty years overdue.
Her second book was another tribute to an underrated musical powder keg. Why Labelle Matters (University of Texas Press) recounts the trajectory of the powerhouse all-girl soul group the Bluebelles as they transform into the explosive Afrofuturist trio Labelle. It’s well-researched, the prose is elegant and there’s intrigue on every page. This book too is both tribute and memoir; the author is part journalist, part unabashed fangirl. In both books she drops occasional, oblique references to her own background: a troubled childhood, bouncing around in foster homes and reformatories, sexual violence. But the focus remains on her subjects, leaving the reader to wonder: who, really, is Adele Bertei?
Her new book, TWIST, An American Girl (Ze Books), goes a long way toward revealing the complexities of this multi-talented writer and performer. But we will have to accompany her from her earliest childhood years through a harrowing upbringing and terrifying adolescence. “Troubled” doesn’t begin to describe the scope of challenges, bad luck and narrow escapes endured by this perceptive, self-aware child. She is also exceptionally literate; books are her refuge and primary life cross-reference in her attempts to make sense of the pandemonium of dysfunction around her. All of English literature, including the Greek classics, factors into her unaffected stabs at understanding her schizophrenic mother, deadbeat father, soldier uncle, neighbors, teachers – anyone who might help her navigate the nest of barbed wire that is her home life. As a child, she parses every encounter for its veracity, intent and consequence. People and situations are constantly compared to stories she’s read or conversations she’s overheard, in a crippled quest for understanding. Hunger of all kinds is omnipresent; she describes her heart as a “fist of bees.”
Abandoned by her family, routinely betrayed in a horrific parade of foster placements and institutions, her trust gives way to guile and the art of the slippery dodge. She assumes a variety of adaptive guises, roles and nicknames. Chameleonic role-playing becomes an essential skill in her survival kit and one that will certainly be exercised in her later professional life. In one intimate exchange with a lover who is one or two years and a couple of changes ahead of her, Maddie (her alterego in the book) admits to herself, “Truth is, I don’t know who the hell I am. I’m whoever I need to be to stay safe.” But somehow she retains an essential empathy for the plight of other damaged travellers, even her perpetrators. This native emotional compass is a saving grace for her, and for her reader.
In the book’s introduction, Bertei explains that she had to invent a stand-in character to represent herself, in order to provide some “protection while taking the journey back through the war zones of my youth.” That character is called Maddie. This slight distance serves the reader too, for the trip is often unfathomably dire. Bertei’s precise, sensuous prose is another gift to the reader. It helps to raise frightful situations to a safer level for reflection. Maddie’s observations and quandaries ring true as seen through the eyes of the present child or teenager, not the adult interlocutor decades hence. In this, Bertei matches Lynda Barry (The Good Times Are Killing Me) and Janice Mitchell (My Ticket to Ride) in their uncanny ability to successfully re-inhabit their younger selves and revisit the confusions and dangers of childhood.
Music is her other salvation, her constant companion. It’s her soundtrack and her primary bridge toward connection with her family and, especially, other girls. Radio played relevant and fulfilling music in those days. Record players were the ticket to social success; singing and producing an occasional concert becomes an outlet. But adolescence is hazardous enough in the best of circumstances. Factor in poverty, plus a girl all too aware of her burgeoning queerness, and you have a recipe for toxic abuse from her peers. Then add in parental neglect, a shifting parade of dubious authorities and the vagaries of institutionalized culture and you have a recipe for disaster. In Maddie’s case, disaster is ultimately not the only option.
It’s not a spoiler to say that there are cracks where the light gets in, and that a place of promise, not threat, is possible. There will undoubtedly be promises and threats aplenty in store for this dynamic, gifted, expressive young woman. But against all odds, at this point Maddie Twist, Adele Bertei, stands a chance.
WKSU’s Amanda Rabinowitz interviews Adele Bertei about her new book TWIST, An American Girl, on Monday, March 27 at 7:30pm at Heights Arts in Cleveland Heights, presented with Mac’s Backs Book on Coventry. Free admission, cash bar.
https://www.heightsarts.org/events/2143/
Review by Jordan Davis