Literary / Historical Fiction
Date Published: 09-25-2202
Publisher: Woodpecker Lane Press
In this vividly-rendered novel, Melanie Dugan reimagines the life of Alice Neel, a groundbreaking American painter who revolutionized the art of the portrait in the twentieth century. Born in 1900 into a straitlaced middle-class family, Neel charted her own unconventional path. Her lifetime spanned World War I, the 1918 flu pandemic, women winning the right to vote, the Great Depression, World War II, the McCarthy Era, the Civil Rights Era, and second-wave feminism. She worked for decades in obscurity, wrestling with depression, poverty, and misogyny, loving the wrong men, fighting to live life on her own terms, and above all to paint.
Interview with Melanie Dugan
Have you read anything that made you think differently about fiction?
I have read fiction that explodes my understanding of what fiction is capable of. I have read fiction that absolutely blows my mind and has expanded my understanding of what it means to be human and, possibly, non-human. There are writers who do amazing innovative stuff formally with fiction (Proust, David Mitchell, Virginia Woof — I could go on), and writers who do amazing stuff in what they write about (Ursula Le Guin, Kathryn Davis, Bernardine Evaristo – I could go on). And when I read writers like those, I understand fiction is an endlessly flexible medium that writers can keep bending and pushing and re-inventing. I guess that means I’m always reading stuff that makes me think differently about fiction.
How do you select the names of your characters?
That is a great question! I need names that reflect the character of the person I’m writing about. I recently had to re-name a character because there was another character in the novel with a similar name, so one character had to get a new name to avoid confusion. The character was a woman, and the name I was changing had a softness in how it sounded to me. So, I spent a couple of days walking around trying out new names, the requirement for the new name being that it needed to have a similar softness. Any woman’s name I ran into, I tried out: names of sisters, friends, names on the spines of books, names in magazine articles, names I heard on the radio. Some were out of the running fast because they were heavy with “k” or “t” sounds that don’t feel soft to me. Plus, the name had to suit the reality of the fictional world I’m writing about, so no Glindas since that name comes freighted with strong associations I don’t want to tap into in this story. Then, if I find a name I like, I look up its meaning. It’s remarkable what you learn; sometimes the meaning of the name knocks it right out of the running – if I’m writing about someone gentle, sunny, and optimistic they can’t have a name that means sad, or fierce, or malevolent. As you can see, the process can take a while. Often, if I think I’ve found a name, I’ll say it to myself when I’m just waking up in the morning – when I’m half-awake – to see how it feels, and if it doesn’t feel right, I start the whole process all over again. Of course, some characters arrive with their names right from the start. And in this novel, many of the characters were based to some extent on real people, so I had to use their names.
Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?
Yes — references to other books, poems, movies, or songs.
What was your hardest scene to write?
In Hard White, the death of her baby daughter, Santillana.
Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?
Each one of my novels is quite different. I haven’t written any series. However, there are some issues that reoccur in a few of the books.
What were your goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you feel you achieved them?
I wanted to explore what it meant for Alice Neel to be who she was and live the way she lived in a time and place when women weren’t supposed to be that way or live that way. I wanted to show the prejudices she was up against, the social expectations she bucked, and what the consequences were for her, and for the people around her – what it meant for her to be a female artist in the 20th century. I hope I was successful.
What inspired you to write Hard White?
I knew about Alice Neel’s work from the time I was 10 – I saw it somewhere and its raw power struck me. Later, I studied art during the late 1970s, when there was a big conversation going on about women in the arts – Meret Oppenheim had made her furry cup and saucer, Niki de Saint Phalle was making these wild, colorful sculptures, Judy Chicago was hosting her dinner party, the Geurrilla Girls were demanding more equitable representation of women in galleries, art textbooks, and art museums. Neel had a profile in the art world by then and she was part of that discussion. Then, in December 2019 – just before covid-19 hit – my partner gave me a catalogue of an exhibition of hers for my Christmas gift. Again, I was struck by the power of her work, especially the paintings of pregnant women. No one else had painted heavily pregnant women the way she did — lots of madonnas had been painted, which are lovely and graceful, but the madonnas are not really about women being pregnant, they’re about a woman being a vessel for an important baby. The pregnancy of the woman is ancillary to the story of a male baby being born. In the madonna paintings, this extraordinary process women go through is once again sidelined. And yet, pregnancy is amazing, it’s one of the most dangerous experiences a woman can have (still, in the 21st century), and here was Neel, making these powerful, moving paintings. Then the pandemic hit and I had time to read and research her, and the book was born.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you have planned for the future?
Right now, I’m working on a novel about loss. It is not as sad as it sounds.
Can you tell us a little bit about the characters in the book?
A man wakes up one morning and his wife has left him. The story takes off from there.
What did you enjoy most about writing this book?
Alice Neel is a great character — she was smart, she had a wicked sense of humor, she said very funny and often outrageous things. She decided to be an artist when that wasn’t really a career choice for women if they weren’t independently wealthy or didn’t have the support of a husband or patron. She was impulsive, and often made self-sabotaging decisions. So, she’s a great character to spend time with. And then she lived through almost all of the 20th century – WWI, the 1918 flu pandemic, women in the US getting the vote in 1920, the Depression, WWII, McCarthyism, the Civil Rights Era, Second Wave feminism. And she was involved in many of these movements and events – she moved to Spanish Harlem when there were mostly only people of color living there, she picketed museums to pressure them to include more work by women in their collections, she knew some of the Black Panthers and was involved in protests in support of Civil Rights, she had an ambivalent relationship with feminism, but always insisted on the fact she was a painter, not a “lady painter.” So, a tremendous character who lived through tumultuous, turbulent, exciting times – two ingredients that add up to a rewarding experience researching and writing about them.
About the Author
Melanie Dugan is the author of Bee Summers (“a carefully wrought portrayal of the way we carry trauma with us through life.” Brenda Schmidt, Quill & Quire), Dead Beautiful (“the writing is gorgeous,” A Soul Unsung), Revising Romance (“heartwarming, amusing and…downright sexy,” Midwest Book Review), and Sometime Daughter (“Stunning debut,” Kingston Whig-Standard). Her short stories have been shortlisted for several awards, including the CBC Literary award. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
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Novel Idea bookstore, Kingston, Ontario
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