Anne LeClaire
Dawn Tripp, winner of the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction, is the author of the novels “Moon Tide,” “The Season of Open Water, the Boston Globe bestseller “The Game of Secrets” and the newly released “Georgia,” a biographical novel about American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, her love affair with photographer Alfred Stieglitz and her quest to become an independent artist.
Even before it hits the shelves this month, (pub date is February 9th) Tripp’s latest has generated terrific buzz among reviewers and booksellers. “’Georgia’ is as stunningly beautiful as the artwork that inspired it,” said Vicky Titcomb of Titcomb’s Books after reading an Advance Reader’s Copy. “It is an incredible read from beginning to end, a book that begs to be discussed.”
The genesis of the book occurred during Tripp’s 2009 visit to the Whitney Museum to see an exhibit of O’Keeffe’s abstractions from 1915.
“I was blown away,” Tripp said during a recent conversation. “They were insanely original, stunning shapes and forms, and they were completely at odds with the sense of O’Keeffe I’d always held.”
Tripp was fascinated by the disconnect between what she knew about the artist and what she didn’t. Later, as she continued her research she felt another disconnect, one between the image she’d always had of the older artist and the complex and sensual partially clothed woman in the photos taken by Stieglitz. She wondered how so much of the well-know artist could be unknown to her.
Tripp admits she was nervous to take on such an iconic figure about which so much had been written. She researched assiduously, drawing insights from the many volumes written about the artist. She was determined to be true to the facts of her life but early on decided to tell the story from O’Keeffe’s point of view, feeling that would give depth and illusion to her life and her art.
Tripp lives with her family in Westport, Massachusetts. In April she will be appearing at Titcomb Bookshop to talk about Georgia.”
For more information go to www.dawntripp.com
Dawn Tripp (Photo by Jack Tripp)
DAWN’S PICKS:
— “The Lover” by Marguerite Duras – Lyric and deceptively spare, The Lover is a haunting story of a young French girl and her affair with her Chinese lover in pre-war Indochina. It is also a love letter and a letter of farewell to a country and an age on the brink of irrevocable change. There are four or five novels that I will return to year after year – this is one of them.
— “The English Patient” by Michael Ondaatje — I adore almost everything Ondaatje writes, but this book in particular, for its scope and poetic stunning force. A shifting, fractured narrative, the story is beautiful and relentless exploration of the nature of love and desire in all its forms. In “The English Patient” Ondaatje allows the narrative to unfold in an unusual way – it is not linear, but it has such a strangely keen driving force, you are swept away.
— “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Milan Kundera – Kundera’s classic novel is set against the violence and upheaval of 1960s Czechoslovakia. This story of two couples is erotic, philosophic, and psychologically incisive – in gorgeous muscular prose, Kundera maps the intervening spaces between self and other, freedom and choice, and the weight and the lightness of love. It is brilliant.
— “A Moveable Feast” by Ernest Hemingway – Hemingway’s classic memoir is a deeply moving love letter to youth, and to 1920s Paris. Evoking the thrilling, creative atmosphere of the City of Lights in the years between the wars, A Moveable Feast is a piece of literary history – the story of Hemingway as a young expatriate writer, his first wife, Hadley, and their friendships with Ezra Pound, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and others. I adore this book – the way I adore Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights” and William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury.” These are all books I read for the first time as a teenager, and every time I go back into them, I feel like I am home.
— “O”Keeffe and Stieglitz” by Benita Eisler – I opened Benita Eisler’s biography of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz and was immediately drawn into the streets of New York at dusk on January 1, 1916, the winter evening Anita Pollitzer first brought O’Keeffe’s drawings to Stieglitz. Eisler’s biography is at once spellbinding and meticulously detailed – a taut, provocative page-turner that brings O’Keeffe, Stieglitz, and their world alive. In all of her biographies, (and yes, I’ve gone on to read them all!), Eisler is a consummate storyteller. In O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, she captures the unique spirit of the tumultuous relationship between these two passionate artists. I read this book in two days, then picked it up again a month later just to inhale it all over again.
— By Anne LeClaire
I read the Eisler biography and was fascinated by both O’Keefe and Stieglitz; both their art and their relationship. Looking forward to reading “Georgia.”