Remember This: A Novel [9781250419965]

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.

Miranda Rando, a forty-year-old writer living in Brooklyn, is making major breakthroughs in her biography of a powerful female artist, yet she can’t escape the commanding influence 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 need to grapple more deeply with his own religious life leads him to join a church mission to Haiti. There, he meets a young man eager to come to America. But Henry’s motivation to help becomes complicated by a disturbing attraction to the boy, which also threatens his relationships with his daughter, Miranda, and his wife, Lily, a longtime stage actress.

Miranda’s drive to understand the mysterious painter she’s profiling occasions an imaginative return to her childhood in the ferment of 1970s New York. Over the course of her research she gains a new awareness of how much artists will always withhold from their children, and from the world.

Anthony Giardina, the author of Norumbega Park, returns with a bravura novel that moves through the contemporary art world, the internecine squabbles of theater on and off Broadway, and the politics of post-earthquake Haiti to ask questions about artistic legacies and about the roots of family ties. What secrets are necessary for us to keep? How much can we ask of one another? And what truths remain hidden even from ourselves?