Writing Pentimento

I wrote the first draft of Pentimento about thirty years ago. Only later, when I read Writing a Woman’s Life by Carolyn Heilbrun, did I realize what I had done. I had written my way into a new life, “unconsciously and without recognizing or naming the process.” If I had named the process, I might have lost my nerve. But by the time I did, it was too late. Fiction had become fact.

Even in that long-ago first draft, Pentimento was a künstlerroman, the story of an artist’s coming of age. Decades ago, James Joyce laid claim to this literary genre in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Pentimento makes the case for a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Her name is Phoebe Theos. And in 1973, in search of her self and her calling, she has come to “the magic mountain” of Charlottesville to study architecture at the University of Virginia. Pentimento has always focused on the intense friendship between Phoebe and a beautiful but troubled classmate, Suzanne. As the two women seek self-definition with and through each other, they develop the kind of deep bond that, in works like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count, and even the film Wicked:For Good, has more recently been claimed by female as well as male characters.

Slower to surface in Pentimento were qualities that, thirty years ago, were largely off-limits to women, both in life and in literature: anger, ambition, and, as described by Heilbrun, “the open admission of the desire for power and control over one’s life.” As these traits asserted themselves, it became clear that Pentimento was not just a quest story, but “a woman’s quest for her own story,” one whose themes grew along with Phoebe.

Two of these themes—race and gender inequality—are as timely now as they were in the 1970s. Scenes involving Tuna, a major Black character, illuminate the poisonous discrimination that has festered for decades and erupted in the early 2020s with the Black Lives Matter movement. Likewise, the Me Too movement and ongoing struggles related to reproductive rights, economic inequality, and other issues make clear the relevance of Phoebe’s emerging empowerment to women in today’s world.

Regardless of Pentimento’s fate as it tries to escape my computer and make its way into the world, I am grateful for what it has done for me. Writing this novel changed my life. Perhaps reading it will do the same for others.