Review: "Take Me Apart" by Sara Sligar
Sligar's second novel, "Vantage Point," comes out in January 2025.
I wrote this review of Sara Sligar’s “Take Me Apart” back when it came out in 2020. Publishing it here in anticipation of her second novel, “Vantage Point,” due out in January from FSG.
The suffering artist is such a pervasive cultural trope, it can be easy to forget that the suffering is meant to be an impediment to the creative process – something the artist must push through and rise above to reach their ultimate creative potential. Too often, the suffering is confused for the creative process itself, as if through the application of pain, one can unlock heretofore untapped reservoirs of creativity and insight. To fetishize suffering in this way can be risky, both for the artist and their audience.
Do we appreciate van Gogh’s “Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear” solely for its skillful brushwork and unflinching, emotional honesty? Or are we titillated by the menace underlying the painting, excited by the knowledge that it exists only because the artist mutilated himself with a straight razor in a desperate attempt to quiet the voices in his head? Without this backstory, would the painting appear so vivid? What kind of incentive does this create for artists looking to capture our attention?
Some artists, sensing an appetite for suffering, have made it their medium. The Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft is known for staging elaborate public performance pieces in which sometimes up to a hundred women are made to hold a pose for hours, often in the nude. These large-scale tableau vivants are meant to be transgressive, exploring the aesthetics of gender, sexuality and race while foregrounding the fraught power relationships between the artist, her subjects and the viewer. Her objective, she told the Guardian in 2005, is to create an atmosphere of “embarrassment and shame.”
This atmosphere, however, is accomplished by creating genuine, physical discomfort, which has led some to accuse Beecroft of exploiting her models. For the women who participate, the stress of these performances can be punishing. As part of a 2016 collaboration with Kanye West, Beecroft’s models were asked to stand perfectly still in direct sunlight for up to five hours. Several collapsed under the strain, their suffering documented in real time on social media by fashion critics like the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan, who tweeted “Is this the show? Waiting until the models collapse one by one? Am I complicit? What’s going on?”
This fine line between appreciation and exploitation runs right through the heart of Sara Sligar’s troubling and provocative debut novel, “Take Me Apart.” At its center is Miranda Brand, a famous fine art photographer renowned for her visceral self-portraits in which she appears to scar or mutilate herself – an aestheticized version of the pain she feels as a student, taken advantage of by her college professor; as a wife, abused by her competitive husband, a fellow artist; and as a mother, struggling with post-partum depression and psychosis.
“Spectacular, yet invisible, messy yet controlled, all-knowing, yet powerless: this is Brand’s vision of the contemporary woman,” writes a critic of Miranda’s first show in 1982. The photographs, part of a series entitled “Capillaries,” depict women in everyday settings, such as a diner or a movie theater, drenched in blood, straining to maintain their composure amid oblivious crowds. Sligar assures us these are powerful, disturbing works of art. By the end of the show’s opening night, all 10 prints are sold to collectors.
Her next series, “Inside You,” in which she photographs deep slashes in her own skin, is an even bigger hit. Her most famous work, “The Threshold,” in which Brand stands in a doorway, facing the camera with a terrified look on her face and a long trail of blood flowing down her leg, sells at auction for $650,000. Throughout her career, critics and connoisseurs debate whether Brand’s self-harm photographs are staged or if she actually wounded herself for her art. The implication being that if they were staged, it would reduce their impact as works of art and, in turn, their value on the market.
We learn all this from a mix of news clippings, diary entries, medical records, and other correspondence because Miranda is dead, having died by suicide at her home in 1993. Twenty-four years after her death, her now adult son, Theo, has hired a young archivist, Kate Aiken, who relocates from New York to California to sift through Miranda’s personal, private papers and organize them for sale to a museum or university, in essence, closing the loop on the commoditization of Miranda’s suffering.
At first, Kate’s interest in Miranda is purely mercenary. Theo has promised her a half-percentage-point commission on the sale of any new prints she uncovers during her work, and with Miranda’s pieces selling for between $600,000 and $900,000 at auction, she has plenty of incentive to do a good job. “You’re going to get super tan,” a friend tells her, “And you can find all kinds of secrets about Miranda Brand and write a book. You can get a million dollars and buy one of those pink Victorian mansions. Go on all the TV shows.” But soon, she becomes engrossed in the drama she finds in Miranda’s papers, a harrowing tale of abuse and exploitation at the hands of the men in her life.
These kinds of framing stories, in which we’re told a character’s story second-hand, through the eyes of the protagonist, aren’t uncommon in literary fiction, but they are tricky to pull off. The protagonist is almost inevitably less interesting than the character they introduce us to; which leads a reader to wonder why the author didn’t just focus on the more interesting character and spare us the middleman.
Sligar does her best to give Kate some depth and a purpose beyond merely narrating Miranda’s life story. A former copy editor for a prominent New York newspaper, Kate has recently emerged from a deep depression after being sexually harassed by a powerful, well-respected editor. A pariah among her peers after speaking out, her aspirations of becoming a journalist are dashed. With the help of her Aunt Louise and Uncle Frank, she lands a temporary job as an archivist for Theo and relocates to Callinas, a small, quintessentially West Coast town in Northern California – a kind of New Age Peyton Place where everyone is in everyone else’s business, gossiping about one another between yoga classes and trips to the store that sells energy crystals.
It’s a prime piece of Callinas gossip that reawakens Kate’s journalistic ambitions. At dinner, one night, Aunt Louise and Uncle Frank let it slip that there may be more to Miranda’s death than meets the eye. “There’s all kinds of theories,” says Louise. “They didn’t think she could have done it herself,” Frank tells her, “Something about forensic evidence. Like on CSI.” The prime suspect? Kate’s boss, Theo, who was twelve years old at the time of his mother’s death – though Frank and Louise suggest that, while most people consider Theo the most likely culprit by far, there are some who believe it may have actually been her husband, Jake, or perhaps even the Zodiac Killer. “You know he was never caught,” Frank reminds Kate.
Kate doesn’t put much stock in these claims initially, but she’s soon seduced by the possibility it presents – that her work isn’t just sifting through trash to find a few salable items so a rich guy can get a little richer, but actually an investigation into a crime and a chance to find justice for a murdered woman. Pretty soon, she’s holed up in her aunt’s guest room, browsing cold case message boards on the internet and weighing the evidence. She can’t help but view Miranda’s story through the lens of her own experiences. “There was no sign of the inconsistencies that Frank and Louise had mentioned… there was nothing to prove or disprove any of the assertions, including the theories about Theo… But. She knew the kinds of things that men could hide.”
As Kate begins to bring some semblance of order to Miranda’s papers and learns more about her troubled history, the suspicions only deepen. Soon, she’s snooping around Theo’s house, following leads and interrogating figures from Miranda’s past: her art dealer, Hal Eggers; Victor Velazquez, the detective who handled Miranda’s case; and the colorfully named Kid Wormshaw, a gruff ex-hippie who seems to know more than he lets on. The excitement she feels is intoxicating.
“A few months before, she had thought her journalistic instinct was dead forever, killed off by medication and exhaustion and unemployment and powerlessness. But now… the old thrill bundled in her blood. She had forgotten how much she loved it: the glorious chase. The rush so bright it drowned out the rattle in the track. However deep this water was, whatever was down there, she was going in.”
But the deeper she gets, the more manic and scattered she becomes. She starts having nightmares and forgets to keep up with her depression medication. Her pursuit of the truth grows into an obsession and she begins to see hidden clues or hints in otherwise innocuous interactions. “Ah-ha,” she thinks. “So Frank hadn’t been coming out here to launch some big intervention in her relationship with Louise. He had been listening during their conversation, and he had known Kate wanted more information. So he had come out to plant a clue for her, tell her where to find Victor.” As her thinking becomes more disordered, she becomes increasingly convinced that the rumors are true.
Perhaps most worryingly, she begins a romantic relationship with Theo. Sligar describes Theo as a Harvard-educated tech entrepreneur and apparently something of a playboy. “Successful, rich, handsome… he had his whole life figured out, and he was used to getting what he wanted.” In contrast, Kate is a sullen, aimless thirtysomething who’s living in her aunt and uncle’s guest room. She has “$180 in her bank account, $4,000 in credit card debt, and $18,000 remaining in student loans.” They seem an unlikely pairing, and Sligar never really connects the dots here; it’s implied that Kate’s easy manner with Theo’s kids, whose mother ran off and abandoned them, endears him to her. Even so, it feels like a thin pretense on which to justify starting a sexual relationship with an employee. But Theo is attracted to her, genuinely so, it seems. As they grow closer, Kate must balance the intensity of her feelings for Theo with her nagging suspicion that he may have had something to do with Miranda’s death.
Yet, despite all the drama and suspense in Kate’s narrative, Miranda’s story is the one that commands attention. Sligar has done an excellent job exploring the mind of a woman pushed to the limits of her endurance by a world that wants to squeeze every last bit of value out of her with no regard for her safety, her sanity or her dignity. “Thank you so much for the invitation to write a ‘confessional essay,’” she sarcastically writes to Hal shortly before her death. “Of course the fans ‘want it.’ They’re cannibals, sybarites, starving predators, they want to sink their teeth into the organ and rip it apart.”
“Confessions,” she says, “should never be exposed to the sun.” And yet, what makes Miranda’s chapters so compelling is exactly what she rails against in her letter to Hal. They’re confessional. They are her private thoughts and deepest anxieties, splayed out for all to see. We read along as she describes the trauma of childbirth, her institutionalization, the abuse she suffers at the hands of her husband. And at each step, her pain is converted into money through her art – by Hal, by Jake (who, in a despicable betrayal, creates a series of paintings based on Miranda’s experiences in a psych ward), even by herself. And so, as a reader, I have to ask myself: what is it about Miranda’s story that draws me in? Is it an appreciation for Sligar’s ability to create a deep, affecting character that deftly illustrates the exploitation of women’s pain? Or is it the more prurient, sensationalist aspects of the story that make it seem more vivid and alive than Kate’s more muted narrative? To put it another way: Is this the show? Am I complicit?
Who killed Miranda Brand? Kate is right to believe that the answer is hidden somewhere in the papers she’s sifting through, the fragmented autobiography Miranda left behind. When pain and art become indistinguishable from one another, and all anyone wants is another pound of flesh, what else can an artist do but cut away at themselves, piece by piece, until there’s nothing left?