Summary of The Art of Her Life (Vine Leaves Press 2024)
At nine years old, on her first visit to a museum, Emily fell in love with Breakfast, a painting by Henri Matisse. Now a single mother, she lives in the world of art and can barely find time for her two daughters, much less for Mark, the man she loves. Her days are a jumble—she’s lost the thread of her life—but a contest at the museum where she’s the registrar gives her hope—the chance to see Breakfast again. Matisse’s words and paintings permeate her days and nights, and glancing at a note card of the painting she loves, she sees something she’s never seen before. The Art of Her Life shows the power of art to transform an ordinary life.
Donna Meredith
DM: Writing any book is a big undertaking that takes many months if not years. How long did you work on this book?
CNM: Well, you got right to the heart of it with your first question. Twenty-five years. When I decided I wanted to be a writer, this novel is what I wrote. I learned how to write writing it and worked on it for ten years before I could let it go and start something new. Every five years or so, after I’d finish writing another novel, I’d read it over and see if it was worth keeping. Then I’d revise, using all my new-found writing abilities, as well as update for technology (changing car phones to cell phones, for example). After the book was accepted for publication in 2022, my editor made some great suggestions, and I worked on it some more. So, from first words to publication—twenty-five years.
DM: What motivated or inspired you to write about this story?
CNM: Back in the late nineties, I had lots of coffee table books (as one did), and mine were mostly art books, and mostly from French museums. My first passion was French. When I decided I wanted to try writing, what I wanted to write was a novel. That’s what I loved to read. And somehow, I had the idea of showing a character’s growth in her different interpretations of a painting. I didn’t have a particular painting or artist in mind and spent lovely days of lovely weeks looking through art books to find a painting that could be interpreted in more than one way.
DM: Did any particular character really speak to you?
CNM: The main character Emily who never has enough time to herself. Ha. When I first started writing, I had four children at home, ranging in age from four to seventeen.
DM: What research was required for the writing of this story?
CNM: The most wonderful kind. That of art and art museums and the art of Henri Matisse. And it was such a gift to discover that Matisse also wrote about art AND that the art historian Jack Flam had collected his essays and interviews into a book. Matisse on Art is a book I love and that I read more than once cover to cover.
DM: Tell us a little about your writing process.
Cynthia Newberry Martin
CNM: I can’t wait to get out of bed and get to my desk if I’m in Columbus or to the sofa if I’m in Provincetown or in my seat if I’m traveling. I can write anytime or any place, but I love writing in the morning. I don’t feel like I have to write every day. It’s just that I want to. Writing makes the days matter. I used to be able to sit for hours and hours, but these days I average about four hours a day. Around noon, my body gets antsy, and mind starts to wander. I came to writing after twenty years of French and almost ten years of the law. Plus, I’m naturally list-and-goal-oriented. Whatever creative parts of me that had existed had gone into hiding. So, to encourage those parts to come out and play, I avoid outlines and try to let one thing lead to the next. I write on the computer rather than longhand for the same reason. In the early days, when I was using pen and paper, I was critiquing the beginning of the sentence before I could get to the end.
DM: Tell us a little about your background and what got you started as a writer.
CNM: I’ve always been a reader, but when I was pregnant with child number three, I took some time off from practicing law. During what turned out to be six years and another child, I discovered the books of Ellen Gilchrist, Ann Patchett, Barbara Kingsolver, Josephine Humphries, Dani Shapiro, Abigail Thomas, Pam Houston and many others. These women writers kept me connected to the world. And when I finally had enough free time to go back to work, I no longer wanted to practice law. My new heroes were these writers, and I wanted to do what they did.
DM: What writers or works have influenced your writing?
CNM: I studied with Pam Houston for eight years and learned not to waste the reader’s time with unnecessary words and not to do the reader’s work for them, something that took a long time for me to figure out because I had come to writing with a reader brain. What I mean by that is that I would read the words a writer put on the page and also my brain would do the work the writer hoped I would do, and when I first started writing I was putting all of that on the page, leaving nothing for the reader to do.
DM: What are you working on next?
CNM: I’m three years into a new novel called The Glove Factory. Shelley’s sister, Luna, dies unexpectedly, and Shelley, a librarian, leaves town for a new life, which is what Shelley does. But three years later, Shelley, now a private investigator, is feeling an urgency she’s never felt before—she will be fifty in six months—and she heads back to the Cape Cod town where she and Luna used to live, even though back is a place Shelley doesn’t go. This journey triggers a series of events that push her to face the southern past she’s rejected, as well as the different selves she used to be, and lead her on a quest for the place of the past in the present.
DM: Thank you for taking the time to give our readers a glimpse into your writing life. SLR wishes you continued success with your writing.
Author BIO:
Cynthia Newberry Martin’s first novel, Tidal Flats, won the Gold Medal in Literary Fiction at the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards and the 14th Annual National Indie Excellence Award for Fiction. She also wrote Love Like This. Her website features the How We Spend Our Days series, over a decade of essays by writers on their lives. She grew up in Atlanta and now lives in Columbus, Georgia, with her husband, and in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in a little house by the water.
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