Tell Me One Thing
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- £7.49
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
Outside a rural Pennsylvania motel, nine-year-old Lulu smokes a cigarette while sitting on the lap of a trucker. Recent art grad Quinn is passing through town and captures it. The photograph, later titled "Lulu & the Trucker," launches Quinn's career, escalating her from a starving artist to a renowned photographer. In a parallel life, Lulu fights to survive a volatile home, growing up too quickly in an environment wrought with drug abuse and her mother's prostitution. Decades later, when Quinn has a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art and "Lulu & the Trucker" has sold at auction for a record-breaking amount, Lulu is surprised to find the troubling image of her young self in the newspaper. She attends an artist talk for the exhibition with one question in mind for Quinn: Why didn't you help me all those years ago? Tell Me One Thing is a portrait of two Americas, examining power, privilege, and the sacrifices one is willing to make to succeed. Traveling through the 1980s to present day, it delves into New York City's free-for-all grittiness while exposing a neglected slice of the struggling rust belt.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two women's paths cross and their lives are forever altered in Schlottman's dynamic, character-driven debut. In 1980, amateur SoHo-based photographer Quinn Bradford travels to Philadelphia with her boyfriend on a drug pickup run. While there, she spies Lulu, a young girl posed atop a trucker's knee dangling a cigarette, and captures the moment with her Instamatic. The image becomes her "golden ticket" and catapults Quinn's career and notoriety to unforeseen heights. Four decades later, with Quinn's popularity swelling demand for her work, the now-iconic Lulu and the Trucker image commands a high price at auction. In a parallel narrative following the moment of the snapshot, Lulu deals with a hardscrabble childhood living in a trailer park with her mother, a sex worker who's addicted to drugs and resentful of Lulu's burden. A crisis point arrives in the present day, when Lulu attends a retrospective of Quinn's work, hoping to question Quinn as to why she never kept in touch. Schlottman acutely nails the misty, gold-hued atmosphere of the 1980s, and deeply explores themes of class and privilege. Though a surprising conclusion fumbles some of the narrative momentum, the ending is poignant nonetheless. This thought-provoking work will put readers on the lookout for what the author does next.
