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Black and White
Black and White
Black and White
Audiobook8 hours

Black and White

Written by Dani Shapiro

Narrated by Marguerite Gavin

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

From the author of Family History and the bestselling memoir Slow Motion comes a spellbinding novel about art, fame, ambition, and family that explores a provocative question: Is it possible for a mother to be true to herself and true to her children at the same time?

Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter from the ages of three to fourteen. The Clara Series, which graced the walls of museums around the world as well as the pages of New York City tabloids that labeled the work pornographic, cast a long and inescapable shadow over its subject. At eighteen, when Clara might have entered university and begun to shape an identity beyond her sensationalized, unsought role in the New York art world, she fled to the quiet obscurity of small-town Maine, where she married and had a child, a daughter whom she has tried to shield from the central facts of her early life and her damaging role as her mother's muse.

Fourteen years later, Ruth Dunne is dying, and Clara is summoned to her bedside. Despite her anguish and ambivalence about confronting a family life she has repressed and denied for more than a decade, Clara returns. She finds Ruth surrounded, even in her illness, by worshipful interns, protective assistants, and her conniving art dealer.

Once again, she is Clara Dunne, the object of curiosity, the girl in the photos. Except this time she has her own daughter to think about-a girl who at nine looks strikingly like the girl in Ruth's photos-and she yearns to protect her, to insulate her from the exposure that will inevitably result when her two worlds, New York and Maine, collide.

As Clara charts a path connecting her childhood with her adult life, Shapiro's novel weaves together past and present in images as stark and intense as the photographs that tore the Dunnes apart. A brilliant examination of motherhood-a novel that pits artistic inspiration against maternal obligation and asks whether the two can ever be fully reconciled-Black White explores the limits and duties of family loyalties, and even of love. Gripping, haunting, psychologically complex, this is Shapiro at her captivating best.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 15, 2007
ISBN9781400174409
Black and White
Author

Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro is the author of the novels Black & White and Family History and the bestselling memoir Slow Motion. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Elle, Vogue, O, and other publications.

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Rating: 3.659999984 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5

    Excellent book, very much in the style of Jodi Picoult.

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Dani Shapiro is the queen of chronicling dysfunctional families. In Black & White she takes her struggles inwards with a book that focuses on a persons ability to reconcile who they were and who they are and how our familial relationships define us. Shapiro is an extremely talented writer and Black & White is a very well written book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An interesting novel that asks the reader to define their idea of art.Ruth Dunne, photographer, begins shooting nude photographs of her youngest daughter, Clara, at the age of three. The work continues for eleven years. Is it art or is it child pornography? And where does Ruth's responsibility as a mother to two daughters come into play? Is she abusing Clara while neglecting the elder daughter, Robin? What of the father in this family? Clara breaks free at eighteen and starts her own life in which she marries, moves to an isolated area in Maine and has her own daughter. Fourteen years later, Clara is forced to revisit her childhood and forced to determine what to tell her daughter. A very well written study of this family, its intricate past and its precarious present.Bonus - a one line mention of Sting!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    When Clara Dunne was a young child, she became the focus of her mother Ruth’s photography. From the age of three till the age of fourteen, Clara served as her mother’s unwilling muse, and Ruth Dunne quickly became famous for her controversial, provocative nude photographs of her daughter. Driven by her success and her artistic vision, Ruth ignored Clara’s increasing unhappiness and her own husband’s disgust at the images. Finally, when Clara was eighteen, she ran away from New York City and the constant recognition of being “the girl in those photographs” and started a new life in rural Vermont.At the story’s open, Clara has not seen her mother in fourteen years and is happily married with a young daughter of her own…a daughter who bears a striking resemblance to herself at the same age, and who knows nothing about Clara’s childhood or the photographs. Clara still fights with the demons of her past, however, and when her sister calls to tell her that their mother is dying, her initial reaction is to reject the idea of visiting the woman who tormented her childhood. And yet, she goes to New York anyway, a decision which instantly throws her life into turmoil. Her relationship with her sister is strained; her mother is every bit as overbearing as ever, despite her illness; and Clara’s daughter Samantha is hurt and confused that her mother has left her with no explanations offered; while Clara’s husband Jonathan resents bearing the weight of their daughter’s pain alone.Seeing her mother and sister again, Clara is forced to relive the life from which she’d fled, and when Jonathan and Samantha join her in New York, she is forced to grope towards healing and forgiveness. As the title suggests, this is not a novel with many shades of grey.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    In Black & White, Dani Shapiro tells the story of Clara Dunne who has been estranged from her famed artist mother, Ruth, for fourteen years. That is, until her mother's illness forces her to return from the safe life that she has created for herself to confront her mother and the past that she has struggled to erase. Shapiro's characters are expertly rendered, from the damaged Clara whose childhood love for and trust of her mother is abused by Ruth's constant use of her as a model and a muse to further her photography career, to Ruth herself whose love for her daughter and love of her art are so inextricably linked that they sometimes seem to become interchangeable. Shapiro effortlessly evokes Clara's heart-wrenching emotions as she attempts to reconcile her past with her present and find a place in her heart for a mother whose selfish love for her was never completely black or white.