Opens with a collage of memories, ekphrasis, and philosophical aphorisms that mimic the slippery nature of Sycamore and Gladys’s adult relationship ... Sycamore’s use of present tense is both immersive and propulsive.
Possibly the most brilliant choice the author made was arranging this book as a kind of collage — a nod to the medium in which Goldstein worked. Sycamore explains how her grandmother’s pieces interact with one another and their environments, both historically and physically ... Sycamore elegantly weaves together a variety of subjects.
This book blurs the lines of genre convention and polyvocality by assembling a multivoiced collage of texture, feeling, and evidence. Sycamore works with archival materials, resuscitated and reconstructed memory, and interviews to produce a collection that’s part art history, part art theory, and part memoir, collapsing the spaces between authorship and authority, and between knowledge production and inheritance ... Modular, wide-ranging, and lyric ... Resonates on multiple levels. It is both one person’s attempt at getting closer to a person and the art form they worked in, and it is asking us, the reader, to do this as well.
