Remember This - by Anthony Giardina

Book Synopsis

The author of Norumbega Park returns with a bravura novel about the secrets artists keep--from the rest of the world, and from themselves.

Miranda Rando, a forty-year-old writer living in Brooklyn, is making major breakthroughs in her biography of a powerful female artist, yet she can't escape the commanding influence of her father, Henry. And now that he has written a slightly embarrassing and shockingly successful self-help book, the seventy-year-old playwright is everywhere.

Henry's need to grapple more deeply with his own religious life leads him to join a church mission to Haiti. There, he meets a young man eager to come to America. But Henry's motivation to help becomes complicated by a disturbing attraction to the boy, which also threatens his relationships with his daughter, Miranda, and his wife, Lily, a longtime stage actress.

Miranda's drive to understand the mysterious painter she's profiling occasions an imaginative return to her childhood in the ferment of 1970s New York. Over the course of her research she gains a new awareness of how much artists will always withhold from their children, and from the world.

Anthony Giardina, the author of Norumbega Park, returns with a bravura novel that moves through the contemporary art world, the internecine squabbles of theater on and off Broadway, and the politics of post-earthquake Haiti to ask questions about artistic legacies and about the roots of family ties. What secrets are necessary for us to keep? How much can we ask of one another? And what truths remain hidden even from ourselves?

Review Quotes

"Maybe the best new novel I've read this year . . . In all of his work, Giardina gives us the actual size of desire: exhausting, exhilarating, unknown and unknowable." --Anthony Domestico, Commonweal

"A fantastic book. Anthony Giardina's Remember This is about fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, love and desire, art and theater. It is moving, compassionate and wise." --Michael Imperioli

"Through [his] characters, Giardina explores noblesse oblige, suppressed emotions, and the ways that money tends to muck with true art . . . Fitting for a story rooted in upscale New York City with an eye on the past, Giardina writes with a genteel, Cheever-esque grace and charm . . . A cleareyed study of how a scruffier Manhattan and clearer ethics gave way to a more compromised and machined world." --Kirkus Reviews

"Giardina writes knowingly about the worlds of theater and literature, and his deliciously flawed characters are great company. The result is a perceptive look at artists and their limitations." --Publishers Weekly

"Remember This is so passionate about the making of art, so intelligent, so rich with memorable characters, and so cunningly suspenseful. As the plot moves between New York and Haiti, daughter and father, I fell increasingly under the spell of the wonderful prose and the profound question: what is success in life, or art? Anthony Giardina has written an amazing novel." --Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Belhaven

"Anthony Giardina knows everything about the complexities and deceptions of family life, the delusions of desire as well, but he has never depicted them so wisely or so expansively as in Remember This. A father, a daughter, and both of them writers. Yet Henry is willful and complacent, his work behind him, while Miranda is growing into strength and just discovering, at forty, how to become the woman she wants to be. This is a magnificent book." --Michael Gorra, author of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War

About the Author