Remember This: A Novel [9780374611347]

Overview

The author of Norumbega Park returns with a bravura novel about the secrets artists keep—from the rest of the world, and from themselves.

Even though Miranda Rando, a forty-year-old writer living in Brooklyn, is making breakthroughs in her biography of a powerful woman artist, she can’t escape the all-commanding presence of her father, Henry. And now that he has written a slightly embarrassing and shockingly successful self-help book, the seventy-year-old playwright is everywhere.

Henry’s sudden rise to prominence—along with his need to grapple more deeply with his own religious life— leads him to join a mission to Haiti. There, he meets a young man eager to come to America. But his motivation to help becomes complicated by his disturbing attraction to the boy. It also comes to threaten his relationships with his daughter and his wife, Lily, a successful actress.

Miranda and Henry play out their separate dramas until the lives of the father and daughter become hopelessly intertwined. Miranda’s drive to understand the mysterious artist she’s profiling becomes a journey into the past, into the lost New York of the 1970s, a time whose social and political fervency will always be wrapped up with her own childhood. That journey, existing alongside Henry’s need to test the boundaries of their relationship, leads her to a new awareness of how much artists will always withhold from their children, and from the world.

Anthony Giardina’s Remember This moves through the cutthroat contemporary art world, the New York theater scene, and post-earthquake Haiti to ask questions about artistic legacies, and about the root of family relationships. What secrets are necessary for us to keep? How much can we ask of each other? And what truths will remain forever hidden?