For Daisy Rockwell, 'our friend, Art', as her father called it, was everywhere. 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, she assembles a glittering mosaic of memories and images. Here are tales of loves, deaths and afterlives and, above all, of the constant need to create; to see the world differently.Deeply personal, and aglow with light and colour, this is a book about remaking life through art, and about what it means to tell our stories.



Daisy Rockwell is a visual artist, writer, and Hindi-Urdu to English translator living in Vermont. She has been honored as a translator with several awards, including the International Booker Prize. She is also the author of two novels, Taste and Alice Sees Ghosts; a collection of poems on translation, Mixed Metaphors; and The Little Book of Terror, a collection of essays and paintings on the global war on terror. Her essays and translations have appeared in many publications, including Granta, Vogue, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares.



Transfixing and often heartbreaking ... An exceptional meditation upon the fiction of family stories, the originality of the artist, garbled language and pearl-like translations, Daisy Rockwell introduces us to the all-embracing, and sometimes brutal, life of being friends with Art.



'[Rockwell has] the lightness, ease and spectral quality of Blake, and the surreality of Leonora Carrington. Yet her vision is unique.' 'Just as Babette's Feast makes the viewer hungry, so Our Friend, Art makes the reader reach for their soft pastels to relive the joys of creation.'