“A beautiful meditation on the interplay of art, time, and memory, that is itself a luminous portrait of a woman without vision who is just beginning to see.” Ann Packer, author of The Children’s Crusade and Swim Back to Me
Ten years after Edgar Degas’s 1872 visit to New Orleans, a lost sketchbook surfaces. His Creole cousin Tell- who lost her sight as a young woman–listens as her former child-servant describes the drawings and reads the artist’s enigmatic words. It is both cryptic and revelatory, leading Tell to new understandings of her broken marriage, her difficult, brilliant cousin Edgar, her daughter Josephine, and herself.
Harriet Scott Chessman s the author of the acclaimed novels The Beauty of Ordinary Things, Someone Not Really Her Mother, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, and Ohio Angels. She is also the author of the libretto for My Lai, a contemporary operatic piece commissioned by Kronos Quartet in 2015. She has taught literature and creative writing at Yale University, Bread Loaf School of English, and Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program.