Feast Your Eyes: A Novel

by Myla Goldberg Narrated by Myla Goldberg, Samantha Desz, Lisa Flanagan, Joy Osmanski, Jacques Roy, Candace Thaxton

Overview

ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF 2019

2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Finalist

2019 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

2020 Chautauqua Prize Finalist

“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).

Editorial Reviews

JUNE 2019 - AudioFile

I don’t want to make photographs, I want to make windows,” says the subject of this fictional biography of a street photographer, single mother, and provocateur who set out to make a name for herself in the late 1950s-early 1960s New York arts scene. Using a natural and direct delivery, and with the help of a few veteran narrators, author Myla Goldberg deftly takes up much of narration herself, telling the story through the artist’s daughter’s recollections, letters, friends’ accounts, and the descriptions of 118 photographs in a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The descriptions offer a wonderful testament to the power of the spoken word—the listener can imagine every detail in every photograph. A well-written, adventuresome production. B.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

02/25/2019

Goldberg (Bee Season) evocatively profiles a brilliant woman whose identities—as woman, artist, and mother—are inseparable from one another. Aspiring photographer Lillian Preston moves from Cleveland to New York for college and spends her first few months there pining over her crush who left home to fight in the Korean War. Soon, however, Lillian turns her camera toward documenting Brooklyn’s streets and denizens—and, almost in desperation as a single mother in thrall to the demands of a young child, the minutiae of her life with her daughter, Samantha. When her first big break—a solo exhibition at a woman-owned gallery—garners more notoriety than fame (her nude photographs of her daughter, which form much of the exhibit, are labeled as obscene), Lillian comes to realize that her own ambition may come at the expense of Samantha’s innocence and their relationship as mother and daughter. Set in a pre–Roe v. Wade America, Goldberg’s novel highlights the ways in which things have and have not changed for women artists. The book’s combination of voices (composed largely of the adult Samantha’s photographic descriptions and contextual narratives, excerpts from Lillian’s journals, and letters between Lillian and friends) serves to construct, appropriately, a curated version of Lillian. This is a memorable portrait of one artist’s life. (Apr.)

From the Publisher

A daringly inventive parable of female creativity and motherhood."
—O, the Oprah Magazine

“Inventive ... Goldberg offers a searching consideration of the way that the identities and perceptions of a female artist shift over time."
—The New Yorker

“Wrenchingly intimate...Goldberg’s passionate depiction of Lillian rings heartbreakingly true at a moment when discussions of emotional labor dominate certain sectors of the media and writers like Kim Brooks and Claire Vaye Watkins write viral essays contemplating whether it is truly possible to be both an artist and a mother.”
—Joanna Rakoff, The New York Times

“Lively and vivid... Goldberg expertly differentiates the voices of [her characters] ... fascinating.”
—Chris Hewitt, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“With cleverness and imagination, vivid historical detail and great heart, this catalog tells the story of Lillian's life...Lillian Preston also represents an exciting turn of events in the career of her creator, Myla Goldberg, [who] has reemerged with a stunning success, what feels like the book she was always meant to write...Through its intense focus on a series of photographs, a group of quirky characters and a particular time in our cultural history, Feast Your Eyes becomes a universal and profound story of love and loss.”
—Marion Winik, Newsday

“If you’re stuck in a reading rut, Feast Your Eyes will snap you right out of it.”
—Elizabeth Entenman, HelloGiggles

“Like a photograph that captures the inner light of its subject, Feast Your Eyes catches such moments on the page, illuminating the power of both beauty and heartbreak. Goldberg unsparingly reveals a driven artist whose propulsive talent is also her Achilles’ heel.”
—BookPage

"The action in Feast Your Eyes unfurls entirely in program notes for a retrospective of Lillian's work in the Modern Museum of Art — expect a mix of letters, analysis of Lillian's photographs, and commentary from Samantha, who's curating the exhibit. Through this collage comes a gripping portrait of Lillian: a fierce mother, a fierce artist, and a woman crucified for both."
—Refinery 29

“A mother-daughter story, an art-monster story, and an exciting structural gambit.”
—Lit Hub

“From Bee Season (2000) onward, Goldberg has portrayed girls and young women with fluent sensitivity. In her brilliantly structured fourth novel, she revisits the theme again, in the story of photographer Lillian Preston, who, chronically shy yet determined, flees Cleveland for New York in 1953 at 17 and becomes an accidental single mother at 19... This is a novel of infinite depth, of caring authenticity both intimate and societal, of mothers and daughters, art and pain, and transcendent love.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist, STARRED

“A riveting portrait of an artist who happens to be a woman.”
—Kirkus Reviews, STARRED

“This story is feminist at its core ... A strong book club pick."
—Library Journal

“Goldberg evocatively profiles a brilliant woman whose identities—as woman, artist, and mother—are inseparable from one another... a memorable portrait of one artist’s life.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Reading Myla Goldberg’s Feast Your Eyes reminded me of other unlikely adventure stories, like Hillary’s summit of the Himalayas, or Shackleton’s return from Antarctica. Only here the human constraints are still more challenging: making art as a single mother in a twentieth century dominated, and distorted, by men. This is an unflinching, deeply moving portrait of the artist, and a bravura performance in and of itself. I loved this book.”
—Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

JUNE 2019 - AudioFile

I don’t want to make photographs, I want to make windows,” says the subject of this fictional biography of a street photographer, single mother, and provocateur who set out to make a name for herself in the late 1950s-early 1960s New York arts scene. Using a natural and direct delivery, and with the help of a few veteran narrators, author Myla Goldberg deftly takes up much of narration herself, telling the story through the artist’s daughter’s recollections, letters, friends’ accounts, and the descriptions of 118 photographs in a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The descriptions offer a wonderful testament to the power of the spoken word—the listener can imagine every detail in every photograph. A well-written, adventuresome production. B.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171178963
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/16/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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