"A daringly inventive parable of female creativity and motherhood" (O, The Oprah Magazine) from Myla Goldberg, the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Bee Season, 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.
"A searching consideration of the way that the identities and perceptions of a female artist shift over time" (The New Yorker), Feast Your Eyes shares 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. Myla Goldberg has gifted us with "a mother-daughter story, an art-monster story, and an exciting structural gambit" (Lit Hub)--and, in the end, "a universal and profound story of love and loss" (New York Newsday).