This hybrid work of biography, social history, and criticism weaves memoir seamlessly into the mix.

Opens with a collage of memories, ekphrasis, and philosophical aphorisms that mimic the slippery nature of Sycamore and Gladys’s adult relationship.

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.

This book blurs the lines of genre convention and polyvocality by assembling a multivoiced collage of texture, feeling, and evidence. Sycamore works with archival materials, resuscitated and reconstructed memory, and interviews to produce a collection that’s part art history, part art theory, and part memoir, collapsing the spaces between authorship and authority, and between knowledge production and inheritance.

[A] searching meditation.