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No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene
Named one of the most anticipated nonfiction books of 2026 by the New York Times
"I loved this book.… A revelatory perspective on a formidable artistic movement whose history has been left to a handful of (male) gatekeepers."—Tanya Pearson, author of Pretend We’re Dead
"A riveting and beautiful account."—Thurston Moore
An intimate insider's account of New York's most radical cultural revolution and the women who obliterated every barrier in their path
In 1975 a young queer singer from Cleveland meets Nan Goldin and joins her in New York's bombed-out downtown, where something unprecedented is brewing. At Max's Kansas City and CBGBs, in derelict lofts and underground clubs, a generation of visionary women artists is rewriting the rules of creativity, sexuality, and power.
Adele Bertei didn't just witness the No Wave explosion—she ignited it. As acetone organist for the Contortions and Brian Eno's assistant, she was at the epicenter when punk collided with post-punk, when Lydia Lunch screamed her first songs, when Kathy Acker was penning her transgressive novels, when Kathryn Bigelow was making her first films.
No New York reveals the untold story of the boundary-pushing women who made No Wave Nan Goldin capturing flash-lit portraits of gender fluidity, Barbara Kruger deconstructing media, Kiki Smith exploring the body's mysteries, Lizzie Borden challenging cinema itself. While mainstream culture wallowed in sexism and homophobia, these artists created something fluid, fierce, and transgressive.
Raw and gripping, No New York takes readers deep into the artistic and sexual experimentation of an era when everyone read Jean Genet, quoted Antonin Artaud, and believed true expression mattered more than money or fame.
Includes 55 rarely seen images of iconic musicians and artists that capture the look and feel of the era. Images are from Bertei's personal collection as well as well-known artists and photographers like Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, Vivienne Dick, Michael Granros, Marcia Resnick, and Julia Gorton.
"I loved this book.… A revelatory perspective on a formidable artistic movement whose history has been left to a handful of (male) gatekeepers."—Tanya Pearson, author of Pretend We’re Dead
"A riveting and beautiful account."—Thurston Moore
An intimate insider's account of New York's most radical cultural revolution and the women who obliterated every barrier in their path
In 1975 a young queer singer from Cleveland meets Nan Goldin and joins her in New York's bombed-out downtown, where something unprecedented is brewing. At Max's Kansas City and CBGBs, in derelict lofts and underground clubs, a generation of visionary women artists is rewriting the rules of creativity, sexuality, and power.
Adele Bertei didn't just witness the No Wave explosion—she ignited it. As acetone organist for the Contortions and Brian Eno's assistant, she was at the epicenter when punk collided with post-punk, when Lydia Lunch screamed her first songs, when Kathy Acker was penning her transgressive novels, when Kathryn Bigelow was making her first films.
No New York reveals the untold story of the boundary-pushing women who made No Wave Nan Goldin capturing flash-lit portraits of gender fluidity, Barbara Kruger deconstructing media, Kiki Smith exploring the body's mysteries, Lizzie Borden challenging cinema itself. While mainstream culture wallowed in sexism and homophobia, these artists created something fluid, fierce, and transgressive.
Raw and gripping, No New York takes readers deep into the artistic and sexual experimentation of an era when everyone read Jean Genet, quoted Antonin Artaud, and believed true expression mattered more than money or fame.
Includes 55 rarely seen images of iconic musicians and artists that capture the look and feel of the era. Images are from Bertei's personal collection as well as well-known artists and photographers like Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, Vivienne Dick, Michael Granros, Marcia Resnick, and Julia Gorton.
336 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 31, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 25, 2026
An insightful adventure in the world of “No New York,” where danger is always around the corner. A really enjoyable read.
April 30, 2026
Adele Bertei boards a Greyhound from Cleveland in July 1977 carrying a burlap-wrapped Fender Duo-Sonic, two thrift-store suits, a hundred dollars, and a shorn head. The ideal punk curriculum vitae for the world's most aggressive job application.
Her first stop in New York City is St. Patrick's Cathedral, where she lights candles for her two great teachers: Peter Laughner, the doomed Cleveland rock polymath who handed her the guitar, and Nan Goldin, the photographer who seduced her, shot her, and expanded her entire vocabulary of desire. Below St. Michael's foot, Lucifer winks.
The city outside is a borough of amphetamine junkies and broken umbrellas rushing into drains. Bertei, twenty-two years old, a self-taught butch who spent her adolescence in a Cleveland reformatory called Blossom Hill and her early adulthood drinking in gay bars with drag queens, is about to devour it. She is carrying, she tells us, centuries of bottled-up female rage and the genetic memory of Irish women with absent fathers and Italian men who lost fingers to the mob's cookie jar.
Downtown, Bertei enters the orbit of the Contortions, the all-aggression, all-function James Brown tribute band from hell fronted by James Chance, a man whose principal compositional tool is slapping audience members. The scene around them is a magnificent disaster of talent: Anya Phillips, the dominatrix-manager whose sex work funds the avant-garde; Lydia Lunch, teenage fury in a schoolgirl dress; Kathy Acker, ransacking the canon for sexed-up sacrilege; Nan Goldin photographing everyone into mythology; and Diego Cortez, the social fulcrum who connects everyone to everything including, eventually, Brian Eno.
Eno produces the No New York compilation after witnessing a Contortions set so violent that Village Voice critic Robert Christgau is forced to physically sit on James Chance to stop the carnage. Bowie, watching from nearby, later appears on the cover of Lodger dressed in a rumpled suit with limbs askew, which may be an homage or a hostage photograph.
After the Contortions Bertei forms the Bloods, an all-lesbian band that plays the First International Women's Rock Festival in Berlin, spray-paints THE BLOODS RULE on the Berlin Wall, nearly dies from Dutch heroin of lethal purity, and eventually plays an opening set for Van Morrison in a different key from each other.
Amsterdam provides a lesbian commune, a poker table with switchblades on it, and a houseboat on the Prinsengracht directly across the canal from Anne Frank's hiding place, where Bertei reads Hannah Arendt and Benjamin and begins to ask whether she has been reckless.
The Bloods dissolve, their twenty-year-old roadie Bobby Battery dies of an overdose, and Bertei wraps a tourniquet around her heart. What comes after, in the corporate music world, is a different and considerably more expensive kind of violence.
Adele Bertei grew up without a floor beneath her. A mother lost to schizophrenia, a stepfather who lost his decency to cruelty, and an adolescence in a Cleveland reformatory where she learned to be a butch daddy before she learned to play guitar. She survived all of it, moved to New York, made serious noise, and then wrote the book to prove it happened.
The women of No Wave were the scene, and every prior chronicle had treated them as decoration on someone else's monument. Bertei makes the case with her body, her diary, and her considerable fury that women like Anya Phillips, Lydia Lunch, Kathy Acker, Nan Goldin, and Pat Place were generating the voltage while the men were getting the album credits.
Every creative industry still operates a quiet system of attribution drift, where women's contributions age into the margins while men's become mythology. Bertei's corrective arrives late and she is aware of it. This gives the book the charge, the irritation of the betrayed who watched history get written wrong and waited long enough to be absolutely certain of the facts.
The memoir is exhilarating and self-serving in equal measure, but that is what a good memoir ought to be.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Her first stop in New York City is St. Patrick's Cathedral, where she lights candles for her two great teachers: Peter Laughner, the doomed Cleveland rock polymath who handed her the guitar, and Nan Goldin, the photographer who seduced her, shot her, and expanded her entire vocabulary of desire. Below St. Michael's foot, Lucifer winks.
The city outside is a borough of amphetamine junkies and broken umbrellas rushing into drains. Bertei, twenty-two years old, a self-taught butch who spent her adolescence in a Cleveland reformatory called Blossom Hill and her early adulthood drinking in gay bars with drag queens, is about to devour it. She is carrying, she tells us, centuries of bottled-up female rage and the genetic memory of Irish women with absent fathers and Italian men who lost fingers to the mob's cookie jar.
Downtown, Bertei enters the orbit of the Contortions, the all-aggression, all-function James Brown tribute band from hell fronted by James Chance, a man whose principal compositional tool is slapping audience members. The scene around them is a magnificent disaster of talent: Anya Phillips, the dominatrix-manager whose sex work funds the avant-garde; Lydia Lunch, teenage fury in a schoolgirl dress; Kathy Acker, ransacking the canon for sexed-up sacrilege; Nan Goldin photographing everyone into mythology; and Diego Cortez, the social fulcrum who connects everyone to everything including, eventually, Brian Eno.
Eno produces the No New York compilation after witnessing a Contortions set so violent that Village Voice critic Robert Christgau is forced to physically sit on James Chance to stop the carnage. Bowie, watching from nearby, later appears on the cover of Lodger dressed in a rumpled suit with limbs askew, which may be an homage or a hostage photograph.
After the Contortions Bertei forms the Bloods, an all-lesbian band that plays the First International Women's Rock Festival in Berlin, spray-paints THE BLOODS RULE on the Berlin Wall, nearly dies from Dutch heroin of lethal purity, and eventually plays an opening set for Van Morrison in a different key from each other.
Amsterdam provides a lesbian commune, a poker table with switchblades on it, and a houseboat on the Prinsengracht directly across the canal from Anne Frank's hiding place, where Bertei reads Hannah Arendt and Benjamin and begins to ask whether she has been reckless.
The Bloods dissolve, their twenty-year-old roadie Bobby Battery dies of an overdose, and Bertei wraps a tourniquet around her heart. What comes after, in the corporate music world, is a different and considerably more expensive kind of violence.
Adele Bertei grew up without a floor beneath her. A mother lost to schizophrenia, a stepfather who lost his decency to cruelty, and an adolescence in a Cleveland reformatory where she learned to be a butch daddy before she learned to play guitar. She survived all of it, moved to New York, made serious noise, and then wrote the book to prove it happened.
The women of No Wave were the scene, and every prior chronicle had treated them as decoration on someone else's monument. Bertei makes the case with her body, her diary, and her considerable fury that women like Anya Phillips, Lydia Lunch, Kathy Acker, Nan Goldin, and Pat Place were generating the voltage while the men were getting the album credits.
Every creative industry still operates a quiet system of attribution drift, where women's contributions age into the margins while men's become mythology. Bertei's corrective arrives late and she is aware of it. This gives the book the charge, the irritation of the betrayed who watched history get written wrong and waited long enough to be absolutely certain of the facts.
The memoir is exhilarating and self-serving in equal measure, but that is what a good memoir ought to be.
❤️ 🇮🇱
April 24, 2026
The book overall felt disjointed and without purpose. Though her stories and anecdotes were insightful and fun.
April 18, 2026
I wish there was more about the No Wave movement and less about her personal life.
April 15, 2026
3.5 stars. The end was too disjointed for a full 4.
April 21, 2026
The late 70s and early 80s were the time that this sort of music played a significant role in my life. It’s was more British than American, but still I found this of great interest.
May 18, 2026
This memoir, a collection of anecdotes about the late seventies and early eighties in New York, is flush with nostalgia for the wide eyed enthusiasm that comes with being young artists. Adele’s crowd is much more appealing to me these days than the debauched cool of the punk crowd as it tended to be more cerebral, less macho, more inclusive, and more interested in art and dancing. This isn’t the end all be all story of no wave, or even early 80’s NYC, but it IS a fascinating perspective, and I particularly loved it’s focus on the importance of women in this particular scene. If you’re familiar with this crowd and the players, this is an easy and enjoyable read.
April 1, 2026
I was more into punk, new wave and "college rock" than No Wave, but I had tangential knowledge of it and the music. This helped flesh that out and I'm grateful to learn more about it from this author, who sounds like an amazing thoughtful and talented person. I found this copy in a record store in Manchester last December. Didn't even realize it was an advance copy, but I'm happy to have gotten a sneak peak. Definitely worth picking up when it comes out in a month or two.
May 12, 2026
It's a bit random-access-memoir, like Abel Ferrara's SCENE, but with female punk rock energy and passion, well-written and acutely observed by Adele Bertei. Includes Contortions, Basquiat, Susan Seidelman, John Lurie, Lizzie Borden, John Cale, Slava Tsukerman and much, much more. Requires perhaps a rough knowledge of and interest in the art circles in NYC in late 70s and early 80s, but pure catnip for those. Enjoyed it greatly.
May 15, 2026
I think Adele Bertei is very cool and has had very cool life experiences and I also think she could have written a better memoir. I felt like the end quarter of the book was the most moving and cut off very abruptly. I found myself feeling throughout the memoir that she was describing a series of events more than bringing us with her through her experiences and letting us feel those feelings with her. I want to hear more about her internal experiences during this time and what happened after.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews