First published 2022
Anne Truitt opens a spiral-bound notebook in winter 2001, two years before her death at 83. The acclaimed sculptor commits to recording her thoughts without guidelines, letting the artist speak freely. She looks back across 80 years, weighing the sacred against the mundane in daily entries that strip away pretense. Truitt wrestles with questions that define any creative life: how to balance art with family, motherhood with ambition, the practical demands of living with the spiritual pull of making. She writes as she sculpted, returning to memories to uncover fresh truths about her choices. The entries reveal an artist reconciling the competing claims of her roles as mother, grandmother, friend, and creator. Her unflinching honesty illuminates the rewards and responsibilities she accepted throughout her career. This final volume completes the journal series she began in 1974, capturing a mind still engaged with the fundamental tensions between art and life even as that life nears its end.
Genres: biography, art, memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Period: 2001, 20th-century
216 pages · Hardcover · Yale University Press