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Description of  Caca Dolce: Essays from a Lowbrow Life

“Martin’s honest writing exists above the confines of fear and social norms . . . Her writing is sweaty, uncomfortable, and enchanting . . . She taps into the consciousness of her past selves with precision and care, respecting the integrity and desires of those younger women. A sure hit for fans of Sara Benincasa’s Agorafabulous! and Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl.” ?Booklist (starred review) Funny, candid, and searchingly self-aware, this essay collection tells the story of Chelsea Martin’s coming of age as an artist. We are with Chelsea as an eleven-year-old atheist, trying to will an alien visitation to her neighborhood fighting with her stepfather and grappling with a Tourette’s diagnosis as she becomes a teenager falling under the sway of frenemies and crushes in high school going into debt to afford what might be a meaningless education at an expensive art college navigating the messy process of falling in love with a close friend and struggling for independence from her emotionally manipulative father and from the family and friends in the dead-end California town that has defined her upbringing. This is a book about relationships, class, art, sex, money, and family?and about growing up weird, and poor, in the late 1990s and early 2000s.