Our Friend, Art: A Family Mosaic

Confronting her artistic inheritance, an International Booker Prize–winning translator offers an intimate and richly illustrated meditation on language, her artist parents, and grandfather Norman Rockwell

This stunningly unique memoir includes over 100 full-color photographs, paintings, and drawings, many never published before!

For Daisy Rockwell, “our friend, Art,” as her father called it, was everywhere she looked. This is a portrait of an extraordinary family of artists—her parents, and her grandfather, Norman Rockwell—and what it was like to grow up both in, and out, of their shadows.

Drawing on their stories and those of her own life as an artist-writer, on photographs and paintings, from the polished and famous to the private and scribbled, Rockwell assembles a glittering mosaic of memories and images. Here are tales of loves, deaths and afterlives; among them the toy collections and outdoor thread sculptures made by her father Jarvis Rockwell; also her mother’s works throughout her life, including most poignantly those she made in the last year she had.

Here too are digressions, evasions, and returns, most centrally Rockwell’s own career in translation, where she has made her name independently and even on another continent. But above all, Rockwell dramatizes the whole family’s constant need to create; to see the world through the frame of art.

Deeply personal, and aglow with light and color, Our Friend, Art is a book about remaking life through art, and about what it means to tell our stories.