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.”

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