Adele Bertei discusses TWIST: An American Girl, her wrenching & poignant new memoir
The creator of the band the Bloods—the first out, queer, all-women-rock band—Adele Bertei has made a career as a singer, songwriter, writer, and director. Her resume, which spans decades and disciplines, is a who's who of the ’80s underground—performing and recording for artists such as Culture Club, Whitney Houston, Sandra Bernhard, and Matthew Sweet, to name a few.
But her formative years bore little resemblance to her celebrity-studded adult life. In Twist: An American Girl, Bertei recounts her troubled childhood in 1960s and 1970s Cleveland, telling the story through the eyes of “Maddie Twist,” a stand in for Bertei herself. As she says about her alter-ego in the author’s note, “I needed protection while taking the journey back through the war zones of my youth.”
Interview by Tyler Nesler
Twist is told by a stand-in character, Maddie Twist, who you call your narrative “Trojan horse.” Was it your immediate decision to create a stand-in persona for telling the story of your formative years, or did you initially struggle to write this autobiography without this protection?
Twist has been in progress since 1977. I began writing the book in New York, but the work was lost, and many decades passed before I returned to it. As you may imagine, the writing journey was difficult. Writing as Maddie Twist gave me a bit of emotional protection, the distance needed to write from a raw, active perspective. And writing in the active voice from that time period (1960s/early 70s) also made the story somewhat impervious to our modern cultural politic of ’sensitivity’ reads. I wanted the voice to be free from adult analysis, straight from the heart of the kid going through it. Creating an avatar gave me armor to do this at a time when writers, teachers, and artists are being policed and cancelled for the merest suggestion of upsetting gender or racial or any myriad of sensitivities.
In the first paragraph of your Author's Note, these lines immediately struck me, “I have no appetite for revenge. Or maybe this book is a story of compassionate revenge.”
“Compassionate revenge” is fascinating because we don't often think of compassion and revenge as having any correlation. While writing the book, how did you work to develop a steady mindfulness to help avoid recounting these often harrowing personal stories without ever tipping into a tone of vindictiveness towards your abusers?
It’s been good to see so much discussion about stoicism online these days. Being stoic is an easy signifier for Maddie Twist, in terms of her resilience and courage. When I say compassionate revenge, I mean it in the sense that truth can be another form of wounding; a good wounding, a necessary hurt. People generally do not want to hear you say they’ve hurt you terribly. Most of us don’t want to believe we’re capable of cruelty. It’s hard to take responsibility for our actions, easier to feign unconsciousness, or to gaslight others as a form of self-protection. Not that I’d ever want to shame anyone; to me, shame is the most toxic of all emotions.
Thank you for describing the writing as employing mindfulness, which was necessary while pondering the origins of cruelty and of goodness, and how I faced those questions in such dire extremes as a child. In retrospect, I saw dark events as opportunities to want to know, what is it that turns people cruel? Then, to understand the idea and resonance of responsibility. That we cannot control circumstances—but we can control how we feel about those circumstances, and control the choices we make as adults, which is the essence of stoicism.
Twist: An American Girl - ZE Books
Throughout the upheavals in Maddie's early life, she discovers and holds onto elements that give her true hope and a sense that life can have a deeper meaning, such as music and books. Regarding music, I love Maddie's line, “If there really is a God, God has to be music.” What particular elements of music do you believe were so crucially salvational to you/Maddie?
My grandmother was a single mother playing stride piano in speakeasies during the Great Depression, to make enough to care for her daughter (my mother). Her bone-deep rhythms were inherited by my mother, then me. I absorbed the vibrations of her rhythmic playing at a young age. And radio music in the late 1950s, 1960s and 70s was the very best period of American and British music; the birth of rock and roll and its explosive blossoming. For those of us who grew up on it, we know. And then to discover what it felt like to sing gospel music with a group of girls my age, and women at Blossom Hill was the ultimate experience of music as God. I've never felt grace as strongly as I have in harmony with other voices singing gospel. In the beginning was the word, and the word was vibration, was sound. And the sound is God.
Of everyone in the book, Maddie's Uncle Jack is one of the only figures who genuinely recognizes and encourages her intellect and perceptiveness. I love his gentle directive, “Stick to your books, your books are your foxholes.” How do you think this line also parallels Maddie's experiences, since he's framing this regarding warfare and survival?
Poetry and novels presented extraordinary worlds for me to lose myself in, providing escape from the reality I was living. Maddie Twist calls her book of Percy Shelley poems “a shield against the nitwits” while surviving the ignorance and bullying of her peers.
Jack was my mentor…he and I would have fascinating conversations, about space and time and reality shifting. He was a type of spirit guide...he knew he’d be dodging bullets in Vietnam, that his life would be in the balance and that mine would be too—at the mercy of strangers with no control of the circumstances, as it is in combat.
There’s a moment in the book where a Vietnam vet I end up working with tells me we both deserve Purple Hearts, the medal awarded to soldiers wounded in battle. There are millions of women who deserve Purple Hearts. Men too. Survivors of wars that may never be acknowledged. In some ways, I wrote the book as a tribute to those unknown soldiers, for instance, the girls incarcerated beside me, who may not ever be able to tell their own stories. And it’s not like we see a lot of working class stories (queer or otherwise) of war and survival on the NYT best seller list! We need more working class stories. When you shut a people’s stories out of popular culture, they are bound to eventually feel extremely pissed off.
While there is a lot of grimness to Maddie's story, there are also some genuinely funny and bordering on surreal moments, my favorite being her wild random car ride with “Miss Aquanest.”
While I read that sequence, it was as if I'd entered a scene from a John Waters film - Aquanest looked and sounded like a John Waters character, and Maddie also recognized the sheer absurdism of this character - do you think that an innate sense of dry humor and wry observation was crucial to helping you/Maddie survive?
Yes, most definitely! I hope my description of Miss Aquanest didn’t come off as cruel, since she was very kind and delightful in her kooky way! There were so many funny and absurd characters along the journey. Laughter is always crucial in dark times. Especially these days when we’ve collectively been forced down a surreal rabbit hole. With no ladder out! Can we build one please?
When Maddie arrives at the Blossom Hill institution, she navigates a very complex social structure of sexual awakening and identity that is rooted in a coded realm of “stud” and “femme” roles that the girls take on, with all of it expressed in these lyrical sequences of flirtatious roller skating that the administration was aware of.
Why do you think the administration allowed these expressions, and what may have happened to you/Maddie without this stage-like space to express and explore? Would it have been a much harder path toward self-realization and acceptance?
Fortunately for we girls, the recreation staff duo was obviously gay! They did not want to rob us of our teen dating rituals, and I’ll always be grateful for their tacit permission and compassion. Not that we wouldn’t have made out with each other if it had been strenuously verboten! We’d have found a way, as all teens discovering romance and sexuality do.
The ‘game’ as we called it inside, and how we played it, informed my persona as a butch lesbian when I was released. In the early 1970s, gay women played on either side of the butch and femme gendered divide. Having been in a reform school anointed me with extra-special ‘game’ sauce, and I certainly worked that flavor! But we are talking about very singular, isolated scenes.
Outside of the gay bars and our own homes, there was no acceptance, only derision and ostracism. It was a different world for gay people in the 1960s and 70s, up into the 1990s. People forget that Ellen DeGeneres didn’t come out until 1997. No celebrities dared. Coming out or being exposed before the late 1990s could prove worse than disastrous. It could prove fatal, as it did for a dear friend of mine—my fairy godmother in the book, Mona.
Another critical turning point was the drag queens who lived above Maddie’s first derelict apartment. The book’s last portion is a revelation for both the reader and Maddie and gives her a sense of hope and light through these figures who fight to live fully as themselves against all odds.
Have you speculated how it may have been for you/Maddie without meeting and being embraced by these fortuitous upstairs neighbors? What was behind your choice to end the book at that point, especially when Maddie and Mona look out over the Cuyahoga River while reflecting on what it means to “witness” and tell their stories, no matter the cost?
I was blessed, incredibly fortunate to have met drag friends at that turning point in my life as a young queer woman. One of the reasons I’ve written the book… I feel it's crucial that we know and understand our history, or as we are seeing with the current right-wing control over women’s bodies and rights, of homo-and-transphobia, we are doomed to repeat it.
Mine is just one story among hundreds of thousands who were ostracized, persecuted, beaten, raped, suffered incredible indignities. Many of us lost our lives fighting for our very right to live and breathe, so that future generations can be their authentic, beautiful selves today, free from the same injustices.
My hope is that young people in the queer community will have more compassion, not bully their elders when we unintentionally mistake their gender or speak in the language that we love, a language we used to celebrate each other. For those of us who survived, we fought not only for our own freedom and dignity, but for theirs.
Twist: An American Girl is available now
