A Year in Books/Day 212: The White Blackbird

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  • Title: The White Blackbird A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter
  • Author: Honor Moore
  • Year Published: 1996 (Penguin Books)
  • Year Purchased: 2004/2005
  • Source: A bookstore in Buffalo, New York
  • About: I love stumbling across books about people whose names and faces don’t register. It is fair to say that I am obsessed with the obscure and the odd and the oddly obscure, especially when the subjects in question are creative and rebellious women. Anyone determined to live a life of artistry has to break some barriers. Deterrents come in many forms, but we all have expectations that we must push past in order to have the freedom to create. Margarett Sargent, a successful avant-garde artist during the 1920s, had to fight deeply ingrained limitations of gender and class. Honor Moore tells her grandmother’s story with an intimate immediacy that only a close, like-minded family member can conjure. As the emotional heiress to her grandmother’s complex personality and character, she is, at times, terrifyingly close to the blistering inferno of the older woman’s raw experiences. The honesty in this memoir is not accusatory or salacious, but full of an edgy, contemplative grace. The White Blackbird is as near to the artist as we can currently get, as her work is terribly hard to find. She doesn’t even have an entry on Wikipedia. How many others like her are out there? Talented women (and men) whose legacy hangs by a tender thread, waiting to be saved by the fortuitous interest of a (usually) random stranger of a later generation…Thanks to her eloquent granddaughter, Margarett Sargent is one of the lucky ones.
  • Motivation: The cover photograph and the blurb on the back.
  • Times Read: 1 (although I am reading it for a second time)
  • Random Excerpt/Page 35: “She kept no diary in 1908. The only record of her fourth year at Miss Winsor’s are her grades, which plummet at midterm. No warning preceded Miss Winsor’s final “blow up,” which came to Hereford Street by letter and survived in Dan’s memory: “I’m afraid we can’t take back your daughter Margarett. She’s a born leader, but unfortunately she always leads people in the wrong direction.””
  • Happiness Scale: 9+

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