Contradiction Days
An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood
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- ¥2,400
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- ¥2,400
発行者による作品情報
For readers of Rachel Cusk and Maggie Nelson, the rapturous memoir of a soon-to-be-mother whose obsession with the reclusive painter Agnes Martin threatens to upend her life
Five months pregnant and struggling with a creative block, JoAnna Novak becomes obsessed with the enigmatic abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. She is drawn to the contradictions in Martin’s life as well as her art—the soft and exacting brushstrokes she employs for grid-like compositions that are both rigid and dreamy. But what most calls to JoAnna is Martin’s dedication to her work in the face of paranoid schizophrenia.
Uneasy with the changes her pregnant body is undergoing, JoAnna relapses into damaging old habits and thought patterns. When she confides in her doctor that she’s struggling with depression and suicidal ideation, he tells her she must stop being so selfish, given she has a baby on the way, and start taking antidepressants. Appalled by his patronizing tone and disregard of her mental health history, JoAnna instead turns to Martin for guidance, adopting the artist's doctrine of joyful solitude and isolation.
JoAnna heads to Taos, where Martin lived for decades, and gives herself three weeks to model her hermetic existence: phone off, email off, no talking to her husband, no touching the dog. Out of a deep, solitary engagement with a remarkable artist’s body of work emerges an entirely new way for JoAnna to relate to the contradictions of her own body and face up to the joys and challenges of impending motherhood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this bittersweet memoir, poet and novelist Novak (Meaningful Work) silences inner turmoil during her pregnancy by adopting the hermetic lifestyle of abstract painter Agnes Martin (1912–2004). When familiar negative thought patterns surfaced during Novak's first pregnancy, leading to depression and disordered eating, her doctor told her she was "being selfish" and insisted she go on antidepressants. Appalled, Novak instead sought relief by living for three weeks in the self-imposed isolation that Martin, a personal hero, worked in. The author set off to Taos, N.Mex., with a list of rules—including no phone and no email—and became obsessed with harnessing Martin's joyful isolation for her own enlightenment: "Positive freedom, I hoped, would cure me of the negative feelings that held such power over my life." Though her studies of Martin sometimes crossed the line into worrisome compulsion, Novak gradually reached a breakthrough, even discovering maternal instincts while analyzing some of Martin's art. Many women will relate to Novak's discomfort with her pregnant body and fears about the ways motherhood will change her as a person. Though Novak's frank descriptions of her mental health crises make for difficult reading, this is a courageous and moving memoir of motherhood.
