A beautiful love story and meditation on grief, memory, art, and the deepest secrets we hold to keep living. Angie Kim Reminiscent of Patricia Highsmiths magnificent Ripley novels...Brilliant and wily...Captivating. Maureen Corrigan Wry, tender, and deeply original. Christina Baker Kline
For readers of Elizabeth Strout and Sigrid Nunez, a darkly funny and moving debut novel about the unforgettable Agatha, whose devotion to a widow with dementia (and an inconvenient attachment to her daughters grave) sparks a radical reckoning with life, loss, and loves aftermath.
Agatha, a bristly painter fleeing her own darkness, decamps to rural New Mexico to live the reclusive life of a small-town curmudgeon. It is there she meets Alice, a mild widow with a deepening case of dementia who keeps steady vigil at her daughters backyard grave. Despite Agathas rough edges and fierce aversion to sentimentality, she surprises herself by falling in love, and her well-worn convictions begin to upend.
As Alices condition worsens, Agatha hatches a plan for them to live together at her remote residence at Mesa Portales. But when Alices wayward son comes along with different ideasand Alice suddenly goes missingAgatha takes matters into her own hands with the help of a faithful thirteen-year-old-neighbor, a pair of shovels, and her trusty pickup, embarking on an unusual mission that calls into question whether some secrets are better kept buried.
Sharp, watchful, at once thrillingly perceptive and hidden from herself, Agatha is as imposing as the vast landscape her rustic adobe home overlooks. Loosely inspired by the life of Agnes Martin, I Am Agatha introduces us to this irascible, indelible character who learnsover a stretch of strange, singular daysnew ways to fathom life, death, and her own heart.
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