Twist

Twist: Tales of a Queer Girlhood is iconic rock-and-roll musician Adele Bertei’s harrowing and electric memoir of transforming trauma through art, pluck, and imagination, as told through the inimitable voice of her young alter ego, Maddie Twist.

From iconoclastic writer and musician Adele Bertei comes “a powerful look at survival and redemption despite extremely challenging obstacles” (Kirkus Reviews, Best Nonfiction of 2023). Set in a 1960s and ’70s American neighborhood rife with poverty and violence, fatherless Irish mothers and Italian mobsters, women crucified into madness by misogyny, and an unforgettable supporting cast of characters, Bertei speaks through her electrically alive avatar Maddie Twist to flip the victim script. Through her unshakable belief in imagination, poetry, music, and community, she transforms trauma into survival.

A compelling personal history of queer culture from a working-class view, Twist is good medicine: for readers who’ve experienced similar traumas, for teens caught in the foster care system, for the formerly incarcerated looking for hope, for writers grappling with how to tell their own stories. Most of all, it’s for everyone seeking transportive experiences in art and on the page.