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Before the author was born, her mother was a
commercial artist. Pamela Marin had always known that
her mom was once the art director of her dad's ad
agency, but didn't have so much a sketch by her mother's
hand.
That changed when Marin, at age
twenty-nine, set out to learn about the mother who'd
been gone for more than half her life.
In Kingsport, Tennessee, where her mom was born and reared,
friends and relatives gave the author four small
canvases Mildred Lady had painted as a schoolgirl.
In Nashville, where her mom went to art school—a fact
she'd never told her daughter—the school's retired
director handed over a manila folder that had been filed
away for half a century.
And in Chicago, where the author was born and where her mother died, Marin
found, abandoned in a storage locker, two self-portraits
Mildred Lady had made as a single, working artist in
what might have been the most hope-filled and satisfying
period of her life.
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