Adele Bertei interviewed by Peter Murphy: Part 1

The best-written nonfiction of the month: post-Beat, pre-punk, non-misogynistic, non-racist, non-homophobic 1970s Hip-Lit, with a Twist.

Twist: An American Girl, one of the best and most overlooked books of the year (at least by the literary establishment), is a memoir, and its author Adele Bertei is a musician, but this is not your standard rock autobiography.

In fact, it ends just as the music begins, when a young Bertei commences making noises in Cleveland’s 1970s pre-punk scene. The best way to describe it is probably as an outsider artist’s origin story: Bertei’s mother Kitty suffered from schizophrenia, the kid was shuttled between foster homes, convents and state care facilities. As a teen, she ran with petty thieves and drag queens and guttersnipe musicians before finding some small salvation as a singer.

Music memoirs as literature can be tricky. A lot of them lean too heavily on event-event-event in order to compensate for prose deficiency (one damn thing happening after another, as weary Hollywood executives often say of script-pitches). Rock novels generally aren’t much better – in recent years we’ve had lam…