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Mickey
"[Chelsea Martin's] deceptively relaxed prose perfectly captures the Facebook-guzzling void that constitutes modern heartbreak. Fav."—Lena Dunham
After breaking up with her boyfriend Mickey, a young woman struggles to situate her life and her art, and reach her estranged mother. Told in a series of vignettes, Mickey is one young woman’s journey to figuring out life (or not) amidst drunken mistakes, reality TV marathons, bathroom sex, and the daydreamed titles of imaginary art installations.
Chelsea Martin is the author of four books, including her small press bestseller, Even Though I Don’t Miss You.
After breaking up with her boyfriend Mickey, a young woman struggles to situate her life and her art, and reach her estranged mother. Told in a series of vignettes, Mickey is one young woman’s journey to figuring out life (or not) amidst drunken mistakes, reality TV marathons, bathroom sex, and the daydreamed titles of imaginary art installations.
Chelsea Martin is the author of four books, including her small press bestseller, Even Though I Don’t Miss You.
200 pages, Paperback
First published July 12, 2016
3 people are currently reading
567 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews
April 8, 2016
Holy shit! This here is a special book, people. Chelsea Martin's best book yet in fact. Mickey is a novella-length meditation on the struggles with making art, keeping love, keeping a home, and trying to connect with your disinterested mom. It's smart, heartbreaking, and deeply--unsettlingly--funny. It's like the Chelsea Martin you loved before X 1000. This shit is amplified! My favorite book of the year so far.
August 12, 2016
Neurotic narcissist who doesn't know who she is. That's who is the first person narrative is in this book.
And it's tiring.
I had thought it a different kind of girl deals with breakup story. I'm surprised I made it to 60% on my Kindle given my dislike of self obsessed characters who are at times aware of the negative impact they have on others yet selfishly feel justified in inflicting it.
Thank you to the publisher for this free copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.
And it's tiring.
I had thought it a different kind of girl deals with breakup story. I'm surprised I made it to 60% on my Kindle given my dislike of self obsessed characters who are at times aware of the negative impact they have on others yet selfishly feel justified in inflicting it.
Thank you to the publisher for this free copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.
December 17, 2016
Total shite. Do not see how anyone can praise this impenetrable and trite vignette-style book and take their assertions seriously. Hapless and emotionally unsound narrator makes quarter-hearted (not even HALF, jeez) decisions concerning her sexual and emotional relationships because she apparently wants to suffer for her art, I guess.
January 6, 2017
Lena Dunham loved this book. Next time I won't ignore such a red flag.
August 24, 2016
My review for the Chicago Tribune:
If novelist Jean Rhys had lived into the age of social media, then she might have written a book like "Mickey," the funny, depressive, and semi-stream-of-consciousness new novella by Chelsea Martin.
For a book that is largely about the loneliness of a life lived through the distancing mediation of technology, Mickey is an arrestingly immediate and personal work. The experience is less like that of reading a traditional narrative, and more like flipping through the open tabs of the internet browser that is the nameless first-person narrator's brain.
The story, such as it is, hovers around the 20-something protagonist's breakup with her boyfriend, the titular Mickey, beginning in medias res with the declaration, "Things were already falling apart with Mickey anyway. I sensed it." In tandem with this on-again, off-again affair, Martin's narrator also struggles with the loss of her dead-end job and subsequent lack of funds, the disappearance of her mother (who moves away without telling her, then refuses to reply to her texts), and her various but largely self-doubting ideas of what it means to be an artist.
Martin presents all of the book's events and concepts in the same wry, low-key, self-deprecating way, as when she writes: "Anything can be humiliating, but sometimes I think that making art is a uniquely humiliating experience. For your work to be successful, it has to possess or imply original thought (which is impossible), intelligence (which is dependent on the intelligence of other people and, therefore, uncontrollable), or visual appeal (which is pointless and stupid and demeaning)."
This giving of equal weight to seemingly unequal things creates an undercurrent of resigned desperation, as well as the opportunity for Martin to be deadpan and matter-of-fact about material that, handled differently, could be self-indulgent.
An excerpt of "Mickey" was published in the winter poetry issue of Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner's Lenny Letter newsletter late last year under the heading "a poet grapples with her struggle to find authenticity through art." This credit is worth noting not only because it indicates that the creator of HBO's "Girls" (with which Martin's work shares characteristics) is a fan, but also because it speaks to the genre-bending nature of the novella itself.
Composed of vast fields of white space populated by little blips of text, sometimes just a brief single paragraph at the top of a page, sometimes several — which may or may not be related — in succession down the page, "Mickey" progresses by means of fragments and pauses, gaps and leaps from one subject to the next. This concise yet ever-unspooling structure evokes the reading of texts or tweets or status updates, building a similar tension to that found in scrolling and swiping; you get the sense that you're not getting the full story, whatever that means, but rather are receiving a curated collection of related but often stand-alone parts and episodes.
For example, the narrator shares a vignette of how, "Every year before Christmas my mom would take me to see snow. She's from the East Coast, and she thought it was an important part of the holiday season." Then on the following page, she offers the anecdote: "When Mendeleev created the Periodic Table of Elements, spaces were left blank for elements awaiting discovery. Elements that just seemed like they should exist," which concludes, "it's like there are empty spaces in my life that I am purposefully leaving open, thinking that if the space is kept available, something can or will eventually find its home there."
Building her momentum by jumps and juxtaposition, Martin explores the simultaneously exciting and unbearable idea that selfhood and emotions are inescapable, and that most humans will spend their lives vacillating between attempts to avoid contact and misunderstandings with their fellow humans and frantically seeking out connection and validation.
"The negative space I imagine surrounding my body is a sort of comfort to me on lonely days," thinks Martin's narrator. "But its existence depends on my body being there to appear around my self-conscious brain perpetually trying to find a distraction from itself." If you enjoy futility, sarcasm, aggravation and art, then you will most likely enjoy this book as an excellent distraction from your own self-conscious and self-sabotaging brain.
If novelist Jean Rhys had lived into the age of social media, then she might have written a book like "Mickey," the funny, depressive, and semi-stream-of-consciousness new novella by Chelsea Martin.
For a book that is largely about the loneliness of a life lived through the distancing mediation of technology, Mickey is an arrestingly immediate and personal work. The experience is less like that of reading a traditional narrative, and more like flipping through the open tabs of the internet browser that is the nameless first-person narrator's brain.
The story, such as it is, hovers around the 20-something protagonist's breakup with her boyfriend, the titular Mickey, beginning in medias res with the declaration, "Things were already falling apart with Mickey anyway. I sensed it." In tandem with this on-again, off-again affair, Martin's narrator also struggles with the loss of her dead-end job and subsequent lack of funds, the disappearance of her mother (who moves away without telling her, then refuses to reply to her texts), and her various but largely self-doubting ideas of what it means to be an artist.
Martin presents all of the book's events and concepts in the same wry, low-key, self-deprecating way, as when she writes: "Anything can be humiliating, but sometimes I think that making art is a uniquely humiliating experience. For your work to be successful, it has to possess or imply original thought (which is impossible), intelligence (which is dependent on the intelligence of other people and, therefore, uncontrollable), or visual appeal (which is pointless and stupid and demeaning)."
This giving of equal weight to seemingly unequal things creates an undercurrent of resigned desperation, as well as the opportunity for Martin to be deadpan and matter-of-fact about material that, handled differently, could be self-indulgent.
An excerpt of "Mickey" was published in the winter poetry issue of Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner's Lenny Letter newsletter late last year under the heading "a poet grapples with her struggle to find authenticity through art." This credit is worth noting not only because it indicates that the creator of HBO's "Girls" (with which Martin's work shares characteristics) is a fan, but also because it speaks to the genre-bending nature of the novella itself.
Composed of vast fields of white space populated by little blips of text, sometimes just a brief single paragraph at the top of a page, sometimes several — which may or may not be related — in succession down the page, "Mickey" progresses by means of fragments and pauses, gaps and leaps from one subject to the next. This concise yet ever-unspooling structure evokes the reading of texts or tweets or status updates, building a similar tension to that found in scrolling and swiping; you get the sense that you're not getting the full story, whatever that means, but rather are receiving a curated collection of related but often stand-alone parts and episodes.
For example, the narrator shares a vignette of how, "Every year before Christmas my mom would take me to see snow. She's from the East Coast, and she thought it was an important part of the holiday season." Then on the following page, she offers the anecdote: "When Mendeleev created the Periodic Table of Elements, spaces were left blank for elements awaiting discovery. Elements that just seemed like they should exist," which concludes, "it's like there are empty spaces in my life that I am purposefully leaving open, thinking that if the space is kept available, something can or will eventually find its home there."
Building her momentum by jumps and juxtaposition, Martin explores the simultaneously exciting and unbearable idea that selfhood and emotions are inescapable, and that most humans will spend their lives vacillating between attempts to avoid contact and misunderstandings with their fellow humans and frantically seeking out connection and validation.
"The negative space I imagine surrounding my body is a sort of comfort to me on lonely days," thinks Martin's narrator. "But its existence depends on my body being there to appear around my self-conscious brain perpetually trying to find a distraction from itself." If you enjoy futility, sarcasm, aggravation and art, then you will most likely enjoy this book as an excellent distraction from your own self-conscious and self-sabotaging brain.
Read
May 3, 2016"You can tell when I'm going through something emotionally taxing because I will act very natural and unaffected."
July 20, 2016
My interview with Chelsea, about MICKEY, on Electric Lit:
https://electricliterature.com/it-is-...
https://electricliterature.com/it-is-...
April 24, 2017
This book was written in that sort of droll, flat affect that seems to be so ~trendy these days (it sort of reminded me of Problems or So Sad Today), which sometimes seems hard to have a lot of feelings towards/about? Like, a bunch of things happen in a row, and they're recounted in a bunch of deceptively simple vignettes. Still, I think I loved it. I laughed out loud multiple times, and annoyed my poor roommates & girlfriend by insisting on reading aloud a bunch of the best lines. I kept saying, "can I just read one more sentence from this book?" and doing it anyway despite their semi annoyed expressions. And if that isn't the best indication that a book is great, what is?
September 4, 2017
If you're looking for a portrayal of a stereotype millenial artist, this book nails it. It's filled with navel gazing sarcastic self-loathing but even more other-loathing and I did not look away. The self-absorption is staggering. It's at times very clever and funny, but in a Twitter sort of way.
April 21, 2017
The best thing I can say about this novella is that it was the quickest reading exercise of my adult life (so far). Which probably means I didn't give the words their due notice. Because while the text is sparse, the meanings behind the words are often very loaded. This is a narrator who thinks a lot. She's introspective, artsy, self-absorbed. It's a curse, not a blessing. It's her very undoing. If she put her self-sabotage to the side long enough, she might just turn her artistic inclinations into actual pieces of work that could one day be exhibited.
It is a quick read, but it isn't an easy read. The narrator wears her intelligence as a shield, which often prevents the reader from connecting with her on a deeper level. If there is vulnerability there, it's neutered by the millennial equivalent of purple prose. I liked parts of the novella, and there were some bits of dialogue and internal monologue - particularly in the passages about her interaction (or lack thereof) with her mum - that were interesting. But ultimately, I was too bogged down by the words themselves. If anything, it was a case of one upmanship, with each sentence outdoing the wit and quirk and deprecation of the one that came before it.
It is a quick read, but it isn't an easy read. The narrator wears her intelligence as a shield, which often prevents the reader from connecting with her on a deeper level. If there is vulnerability there, it's neutered by the millennial equivalent of purple prose. I liked parts of the novella, and there were some bits of dialogue and internal monologue - particularly in the passages about her interaction (or lack thereof) with her mum - that were interesting. But ultimately, I was too bogged down by the words themselves. If anything, it was a case of one upmanship, with each sentence outdoing the wit and quirk and deprecation of the one that came before it.
December 29, 2016
I really like this book, which is about a lot more than a girl going through a breakup.
I started dog-earing pages at 73 because I couldn't stand it any longer and now pages 73-end are all dog-eared: "Anything can be humiliating, but sometimes I think that making art is a uniquely humiliating experience."
I have thought this so many times.
I'm sorry it's over.
I started dog-earing pages at 73 because I couldn't stand it any longer and now pages 73-end are all dog-eared: "Anything can be humiliating, but sometimes I think that making art is a uniquely humiliating experience."
I have thought this so many times.
I'm sorry it's over.
April 11, 2016
All Splendor and Mickey. It changed my life.
September 1, 2016
Chelsea Martin is one of 4 or 5 writers alive today that I consider a wizard.
February 16, 2018
As I read this book, I found myself trying to decide whether I liked it or not. Whether I did or did not, it seemed like more of a reflection on me than of the novel. Is the main character as terrible and self-centered as she seems? Is she hiding something profound and sad? Is it any less profound if she is aware of it?
And does that excuse her general sh*ttyness?
I can't remember ever reading a book where every other page felt like something my best friend would say to me at an adult sleepover while sitting next to me on a sofa eating cheetos. Read it to feel understood, read it to laugh, read it to feel disgusted with the main character's life and the ways it might resemble yours. And then...read it to feel like maybe there is something meaningful in all this garbage. I don't know. Maybe.
And does that excuse her general sh*ttyness?
I can't remember ever reading a book where every other page felt like something my best friend would say to me at an adult sleepover while sitting next to me on a sofa eating cheetos. Read it to feel understood, read it to laugh, read it to feel disgusted with the main character's life and the ways it might resemble yours. And then...read it to feel like maybe there is something meaningful in all this garbage. I don't know. Maybe.
August 21, 2017
Refreshing & relatable(especially for ppl in their mid 20's-early 30's). Def something I'd recommend to all of my traditionally non-reading homies due to its simple and accessible insights that show us that we aren't the only ones doing what we thought we were the only ones doing--"I thought I was just weird". Some girl named Lena Dunham is a fan of hers too if that matters at all.
“Anything can be humiliating, but sometimes I think that making art is a uniquely humiliating experience."
“Anything can be humiliating, but sometimes I think that making art is a uniquely humiliating experience."
July 17, 2019
A novel of vignettes telling the story of a breakup with the eponymous Mickey and the protagonist's estrangement from her mother. This is interspersed with reflections and the struggles of being a young adult and an artist who fails to keep a day job, while grappling with feelings of isolation and lack of self-worth.
For some readers this might be seen as an indulgent read but I found it funny and moving.
For some readers this might be seen as an indulgent read but I found it funny and moving.
January 3, 2019
Laughed out loud at many points, rolled my eyes or furrowed my brow the rest—most likely because I recognized my 20-something self and I had forgotten how mundane having low self esteem was. I enjoy Chelsea’s voice but I don’t miss my 20s!
April 8, 2020
The writing evokes feelings I've had before more than the actual events that evoked those feelings, and it's also pretty funny. Highly recommend as a quick read, especially if you are a person who has trouble connecting to people, or whose attachment style is definitely not secure.
November 28, 2023
“Consciously, I didn’t want to hurt Mickey, but believing that I didn’t want to hurt Mickey suddenly felt like some larger effort to hurt Mickey more deeply and profoundly than I had ever hurt him before.”
November 21, 2024
I'm a sucker for this kind of book. Read it in two sittings. A fractured novel. Hilarious at times. Chelsea (or the character in the book or whatever) sucks as a person most of the time, and she both tells us nothing bothers her while also telling us that she's sensitive to everything.
Round up 5
Round up 5
March 1, 2019
Read this book.
March 13, 2019
Drily hilarious doesn’t begin to capture how brilliantly this book conveys the awkwardness and absurdity of being alive.
May 10, 2019
Smart, funny, completely original. Loved this book.
August 20, 2019
If you are a self-obsessed, self-destructive person, like myself, you will really like this book.
December 24, 2019
Super funny and compelling. A little disjointed at times, but it's juggling big ideas and striking poignant connections, which is really admirable for such a tiny book.
December 26, 2019
Cleverness wrapped in more cleverness then sprinkled with emotional poignancy that dissolves upon contact
March 5, 2020
modern, sad, funny, lonely
October 26, 2021
sooo good. like im in the narrators mind
January 14, 2024
“I want to understand Courtney’s motivation in life, but I feel like I have to turn off the parts of my brain I like the most in order to turn on the parts of my brain that help me understand her.”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 43 reviews