How It Feels to Be Alive - by Megan O'Grady (Hardcover)

About the Book

"From a celebrated critic, a beaming testament to how art makes us who we are and offers new ways of seeing our world and our lives"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A vital testament to how art makes us who we are--and offers new ways of seeing our world and our lives.

Barbara Kruger once defined art as "the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive." Testing that claim, How It Feels to Be Alive braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art's intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world.

When Megan O'Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed her life. At the end of an early marriage, art stoked new ways of thinking about connection and transformation. As a new parent, it guided her to confront vulnerability and shame. Whether seeking a home or contending with crises personal, political, and ecological, art was a critical lifeline, a source of beauty, solace, and provocation.

Looking closely at five artworks and the context in which each was made--often drawing on personal conversations with the artists--O'Grady examines the work's rippling impact, implicating sometimes unexpected lineages and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imaginations and attention? When bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does it offer? A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to rethink all that we take for granted, How It Feels to Be Alive inspires and exhorts, providing a template to think through the knottiest problems in our culture, our selves, and the connections between the two.

Review Quotes

"How It Feels to Be Alive is an essential book imbued with unwavering, attentive, and clear-eyed optimism. Exploring how to navigate an increasingly contentious world with the strength, wisdom, beauty, and history available to us through art, Megan O'Grady brings joy and meaning to everyday living. Reading O'Grady is like taking a long walk with a kindred spirit, through whose perceptive eyes we have gained a deeper understanding of our own minds."
--Yiyun Li, author of Things in Nature Merely Grow

"In an era when the arts feel increasingly imperiled, Megan O'Grady's How It Feels to Be Alive shines as a rapt testament to art's ongoing vitality. Her meditations on artists ranging from Agnes Martin and Carrie Mae Weems to Pope.L are a ravishing sensorium of embodied experience, while she also provides illuminating historical, biographical, and metaphysical insight. Rather than asking what art means, she asks what it does--how a painting unsettles us and reshapes the way we inhabit the world--with stunning candor and poetic grace."
--Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

"How--now that you mention it--does it feel to be alive? A bit like reading Megan O'Grady's book, stained with blood and beauty, as she fearlessly claws at the artificial veil between art and life and shows that, as anyone who has any experience of either knows, life and art are indivisible. She invents a new model of writing about art--and that, as it happens, is also a new way of writing about life."
--Benjamin Moser, author of The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters

"Megan O'Grady is one of the most astute and openhearted culture writers working today. How It Feels to Be Alive is a remarkable and restless work of clear thinking about mixed feelings."
--Catherine Lacey, author of The Möbius Book

"This book is a highly original take on the art and life conundrum. Megan O'Grady discusses these lucky artists and their work in the context of her own life and experiences, elements so tightly interwoven that they often merge, producing a new kind of memoir and a new kind of art writing--some of the best I've read."
--Lucy R. Lippard, author of Moving Targets: Feminist Essays on Women's Art 1970-1993

"Megan O'Grady's adventures in the art world take her from Agnes Martin's mystical geometries to the real-life interventions of Pope.L and beyond, reminding us that the best art will ask questions for which there may be no answer, create feelings one can barely name, and generate theories when there's nothing to believe. For O'Grady, art is a search for meaning, and it's personal. She shares her inner journey as the artists in How It Feels to Be Alive set out to sculpt the intangible, to interrogate the humdrum, or to reinvent the world, and, always, to look where no one else has. Look again."
--Cynthia Carr, author of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar

"How It Feels to Be Alive is an exquisite floodlight on the many vital gifts afforded to us by art--including our best argument that we need each other. Here is the ecstasy, here is the power that art invites into our ways of living. It is a celebration of what it means and what it takes to truly see ourselves and our world."
--Canisia Lubrin, author of Code Noir

"Insightful, broad-ranging, beautifully rendered, this memorable book offers profound reflections on identity, relationships, feminism and the environment. How It Feels to Be Alive reminds us why art matters."
--Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History

About the Author

Megan O'Grady is a critic and an essayist. She was a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where she created the Culture Therapist column. Her reviews and essays about art and life also appear in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. She was a contributing editor at Vogue and a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Currently, she is an assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she lives with her family.