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Summary
Summary
ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019
2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Finalist
2019 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
2020 Chautauqua Prize Finalist
The first novel in nearly a decade from Myla Goldberg, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Bee Season --a compelling and wholly original story about a female photographer grappling with ambition and motherhood, a balancing act familiar to women of every generation.
Feast Your Eyes , framed as the catalogue notes from a photography show at the Museum of Modern Art, tells the life story of Lillian Preston: "America's Worst Mother, America's Bravest Mother, America's Worst Photographer, or America's Greatest Photographer, depending on who was talking." After discovering photography as a teenager through her high school's photo club, Lillian rejects her parents' expectations of college and marriage and moves to New York City in 1955. When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter's sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives and especially Lillian's career as she continues a life-long quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition.
Narrated by Samantha, Feast Your Eyes reads as a collection of Samantha's memories, interviews with Lillian's friends and lovers, and excerpts from Lillian's journals and letters--a collage of stories and impressions, together amounting to an astounding portrait of a mother and an artist dedicated, above all, to a vision of beauty, truth, and authenticity.
Author Notes
Myla Goldberg is the bestselling author of Feast Your Eyes , The False Friend , Wickett's Remedy , and Bee Season , which was a New York Times Notable Book, a winner of the Borders New Voices Prize, a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, and was adapted to film and widely translated.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Goldberg (Bee Season) evocatively profiles a brilliant woman whose identities-as woman, artist, and mother-are inseparable from one another. Aspiring photographer Lillian Preston moves from Cleveland to New York for college and spends her first few months there pining over her crush who left home to fight in the Korean War. Soon, however, Lillian turns her camera toward documenting Brooklyn's streets and denizens-and, almost in desperation as a single mother in thrall to the demands of a young child, the minutiae of her life with her daughter, Samantha. When her first big break-a solo exhibition at a woman-owned gallery-garners more notoriety than fame (her nude photographs of her daughter, which form much of the exhibit, are labeled as obscene), Lillian comes to realize that her own ambition may come at the expense of Samantha's innocence and their relationship as mother and daughter. Set in a pre-Roe v. Wade America, Goldberg's novel highlights the ways in which things have and have not changed for women artists. The book's combination of voices (composed largely of the adult Samantha's photographic descriptions and contextual narratives, excerpts from Lillian's journals, and letters between Lillian and friends) serves to construct, appropriately, a curated version of Lillian. This is a memorable portrait of one artist's life. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Goldberg (The False Friend, 2010, etc.) writes the fictional biography of a female photographer whose career is sidetracked by controversy surrounding intimate pictures of her young daughter.The character Lillian Preston may initially remind readers of Sally Mann, whose photographs of her children created debate in the early 1990s. But Lillian's story, which takes place primarily in the 1950s through 1970s, is singularly her own. After falling in love with photography at her Cleveland high school, Lillian dismays her doting but conventional parents by moving to New York City, lovingly portrayed in all its gritty glamour, to pursue her dream. For Lillian, photography is all-consuming, her camera an extension of her arm. But once Samantha is born, the result of a brief affair, Lillian's artistic ambition becomes entangled with fierce mother-love. Quiet, easily ignored, Lillian's forte is shooting unposed street scenes. Her obvious genius brings her critical notice (if no money) in the NYC art world until an avant-garde gallery owner is charged with "pandering obscenity" by exhibiting photographs of 6-year-old Samantha in her underwear, one taken while Lillian was recovering from an abortion and unable to go outside. Neither Lillian's career nor Samantha's childhood recoversa case of every mom's fear of screwing up writ large. The novel is structured as the catalog Samantha puts together for a retrospective of Lillian's work at the Modern Museum of Art years after her death. Photograph by photograph, Samantha sets the scene through her memories of her deeply complicated relationship with her mother, recorded interviews with people who knew Lillian, letters from Lillian to others, and Lillian's private journal. The collage of impressions and reactions creates a holistic portrait that also allows Samantha and more secondary characters, like Lillian's high school boyfriend, to reveal their own complexities. Lillian herselfselfishly single-minded in her artistic drive but genuinely protective of her child and often desperately lonelyis both larger than life and thoroughly human.A riveting portrait of an artist who happens to be a woman. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
From Bee Season (2000) onward, Goldberg has portrayed girls and young women with fluent sensitivity. In her brilliantly structured fourth novel, she revisits the theme again, in the story of photographer Lillian Preston, who, chronically shy yet determined, flees Cleveland for New York in 1953 at 17 and becomes an accidental single mother at 19. She loves Samantha, but photography rules their threadbare lives. A masterful street photographer, Lillian also passionately photographs her young daughter, who loves posing for her. When she exhibits in a small Brooklyn gallery a series of innocently made photographs of partially clad Samantha, both Lillian and the gallery owner are arrested. The outrage over photographer Sally Mann's portraits of her children comes to mind, and, indeed, Mann is one of a number of real-life artists, along with Diane Arbus and Vivian Maier, who inspired Goldberg. This mesmerizing mosaic of a novel takes the form of an unconventional museum-exhibition catalogue containing letters, Lillian's journal, and Samantha's piercing commentary on photographs we feel as though we've seen and her interviews with her mother's few friends, each fascinating. As she brings into provocative focus Lillian's commitment and sacrifices and the gravity of Samantha's trauma, Goldberg illuminates the odds against women artists and the terrors pregnant women faced in the pre-Roe v. Wade era. This is a novel of infinite depth, of caring authenticity both intimate and societal, of mothers and daughters, art and pain, and transcendent love.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MYLA GOLDBERG'S AMBITIOUS new novel, her first since "The False Friend" (2010), follows a fictional midcentury photographer whose pioneering oeuvre draws from the real-life work of Sally Mann, Diane Arbus and Berenice Abbott, and whose milieu - the Lower East Side of the 1950s; Brooklyn in the 1960s - offers a lively fictional counterpart to the Beat movement. As a high school junior, Lillian Preston discovers photography. "Making pictures makes me fully and truly myself," she gushes as she spends Saturdays taking undercover "photography walks" around Cleveland in her father's clothes. Though she maintains the appearance of a proper girl of her era, even after she moves to New York and carves a niche for herself in the downtown bohemian-intellectual scene, Lillian has been waiting since childhood for a "different life to reveal itself": "Since I was little, I knew I was meant to live differently than others, I just wasn't sure how or why." Live differently, she does. At 19, she finds herself pregnant. After a harrowing trip to a back-room abortionist, she decides to keep the baby and raise her alone. That baby, Samantha, will become her greatest subject, as well as the one who secures her fame: An exhibit of photos depicting Samantha half-dressed is deemed obscene. Lillian and her gallerist are thrown in jail, the photos are splashed all over the tabloids and the case becomes a free speech cause celebre, ultimately going to the Supreme Court. The story unfolds, cleverly, through an imaginary (and, it has to be said, highly improbable) museum catalog - the accompaniment to a posthumous Preston retrospective at MoMA- written by Samantha, and filled with Lillian's letters and journal entries, as well as interviews with the major players in her life. Together, these "documents," linked by Samantha's wry commentary on the photos and Lillian's life, form a kind of feminist Künstlerroman, in which the artist comes of age in tandem with becoming a mother, and her divided loyalties to her child and her art threaten to tear her apart, emotionally. (The Dexedrine she takes, to stay awake all night in the darkroom and tend to Samantha during the day, helps a bit.) Goldberg's passionate depiction of Lillian rings heartbreakingly true at a moment when discussions of emotional labor dominate certain sectors of the media and writers like Kim Brooks and Claire Vaye Watkins write viral essays contemplating whether it is truly possible to be both an artist and a mother. (To wit: I read "Feast Your Eyes" twice, often nodding my head in recognition, as an ear-infection-riddled 3-year-old slept on my lap.) AT TIMES, Goldberg crosses the slender line between clever and cute - too many characters refer to their fathers as "Pops" and speak in a style of contorted irony. The constraints of the catalog form, hinging on descriptions of photographs we cannot see and Samantha's labored contemplations of how Lillian might have composed them, grow tedious as the novel wears on. One wishes Goldberg had chosen to frame her story as, say, a faux oral history, in the vein of Taylor Jenkins Reid's "Daisy Jones &the Six," or a pastiche like Christine Sneed's sublime "Little Known Facts." Though the novel's plot hinges on the obscenity trial, its most powerful moments arrive in the form of Lillian's wrenchingly intimate reflections in her journal, from devastating accounts of watching her daughter sleep to poignant descriptions of her artistic process. "If shooting is like hitching a ride on the back of the living city, in the darkroom I am riding the current of an invisible slipstream... I'm reduced to a mote of pure awareness." JOANNA RAKOFF'S most recent book is "My Salinger Year."
Library Journal Review
Goldberg's first novel since 2005's The False Friend explores the complex and -emotionally fraught relationship of photographer Lillian Preston and her daughter Samantha, beginning with Lillian's leaving her provincial home in Cleveland for New York City in the 1950s. The story follows Lillian's path as a struggling artist and single mother, and the changing culture and social mores through the 1970s. Lillian achieves her greatest notoriety through a series of seminude photos of herself and Samantha, which become the center of a well-publicized obscenity case. The repercussions of this have an irreversible impact on the relationship between the mother and daughter. Goldberg tells her story through the unusual format of an exhibition catalog of Lillian's work, with notes primarily by Samantha but also other friends and associates of Lillian, as well as Lillian's own letters and journal entries. The photos that accompany the narrative are not shown (given that they are fictional) but are easy to visualize based on Goldberg's description. Verdict Without being overt, this story is feminist at its core, as Lillian struggles twice as hard to subsist as an artist and is criticized for prioritizing her work over personal relationships. A strong book club pick.-Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
