I’d assumed she’d be staring at the camera the whole time, and she was; but I’d also thought it’d be easy to tell when she died, and it wasn’t. For the first 120 shots, Lilly’s face is tense the way it had been that whole week because of the pain. After that, she gets a look like when she’s trying to explain something about camera technique, only stronger, and that look stays with her for the next 86. Then, starting at frame 207, her face starts to change. The pain and focus are still there, but by frame 229, it’s clear you’re seeing a record of that pain and focus stored within the face’s stillness, and that Lilly has left that face behind.

Acknowledgments

As I wrote this book, I was inspired by the work and lives of many people, including Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Amiri Baraka, Judy Chicago, Louis Faurer, Harold Feinstein, Robert Frank, Helen Gee, Hettie Jones, Leon Levinstein, Helen Levitt, Vivian Maier, Sally Mann, Lisette Model, Alice Neel, Ruth Orkin, Grace Paley, Diane di Prima, and Garry Winogrand. Steven Millhauser’s novella Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (1810–1846) introduced me to the enormous potential of the museum catalogue as a way to tell a story. I could build a small habitable cabin of all the books I read for research, but I’m especially thankful for The Choices We Made, edited by Angela Bonavoglia, which helped me wrap my post–Roe v. Wade mind around the pre–Roe v. Wade era; and for Hellhole, by Sara Harris, which detailed conditions inside the New York City House of Detention for Women in the 1960s. In my various research quests, several people generously allowed me to interview them or otherwise shared their work and knowledge with me: thank you to Jennifer Bernstein, Mary Engel, Harold Feinstein, Chloe Mills, Ruthann Robson, and Charles Spurlin.

Many thanks to the Sustainable Arts Foundation for their ongoing support of artists and writers with families, and for their grant, which provided me a much needed boost in material and immaterial ways.

Thanks to Jin Auh for becoming my ally and my agent, and for fighting for me and this book. Thanks to Kathy Belden for the care, intelligence, and acuity of vision that allowed this book to achieve its final form. Thanks to Wendy Schmalz for twenty years of agenthood and friendship.

Thank you to David Gassaway, Tim Kreider, Anthony Tognazzini, and Ellen and Mark Goldberg for reading. Double thanks to Jason Little, Ellen Twaddell, and Megan Kelso for reading . . . and then reading again.

Thank you to my daughters for expanding my idea of what love is and for teaching me what it means to be a mother. Thank you, Jason, for us.

Reading Group Guide

A Scribner Reading Group Guide

Feast Your Eyes

Myla Goldberg