Taking the form of a self-directed research project, Sycamore recounts the legacy of her fraught relationship with her late grandmother, an abstract artist from Baltimore who encouraged Mattilda as a young artist, then disparaged Mattilda's work as "vulgar" and a "waste of talent" once it became unapologetically queer. As she sorts through her grandmother Gladys's paintings and handmade paperworks, Sycamore examines the creative impulse itself. In fragments evoking the movements of memory, she searches for Gladys's place within the trajectories of midcentury modernism and Abstract Expressionism, Jewish assimilation and white flight, intergenerational trauma and class striving.
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.
