Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Self-Portrait with Boy
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.rachellyon.work/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
cofounder of the monthly reading series Ditmas Lit; http://www.rachellyon.work/blog/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Indiana University, Princeton University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writing teacher and writing coach. Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Catapult, Slice, writing teacher; Ditmas Lit. reading series, cofounder and cohost.
WRITINGS
Contributor of fiction to literary publications, including Joyland, Iowa Review, Indiana Review, and Saint Ann’s Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Rachel Lyon writes short fiction, which has appeared in Joyland, Iowa Review, and Saint Ann’s Review. She was fiction editor of Indiana Review when she was a student at Indiana University. She also attended Princeton University. Lyon is a writing coach who teaches fiction at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Catapult, Slice, and other venues. She is also cofounder and cohost of the reading series Ditmas Lit.
In 2018, Lyon published her debut novel, Self-Portrait with Boy, set in 1991 Brooklyn, New York. Living in an old warehouse apartment building, Lu Rile is an aspiring photographer desperately hoping a gallery will show her work so she can establish herself as a professional artist. She vows to take a self-portrait per day to build up her portfolio. One day as she poses in front of her window, she inadvertently photographs a nine-year-old boy falling to his death. It is a terrible circumstance but a perfect photo. As she gets to know the boy’s mother, Kate, Lu struggles with a moral dilemma. She knows the photo will be a sensation if it is shown in a gallery, however, she also knows she will lose Kate’s friendship if she displays it. A gallery has agreed to show it, but Kate’s estranged husband, Steve, also has a piece in the same show. As Maureen Corrigan observed in Fresh Air online at NPR, Lu debates her moral decision between her friendship and sympathy with Kate and her narcissistic ambition. Corrigan noted: “Then the artist’s hungry claim to remake the world to suit her gimlet-eyed vision collides with an idea of empathy. Empathy doesn’t stand a chance.”
“Lyon sympathetically portrays Lu’s struggle to make this impossible decision and to deal with its repercussions,” said Lindsay Harmon in Booklist. Calling Lyon’s handling of the subject matter candid and adroit, a reviewer in Publishers Weekly praised the book, saying: “Written in raw, honest prose, this is an affecting and probing moral tale.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor, who labeled the book fierce and sharp, also noted that the time and place of the book are important characters, focusing on crumbling, run down converted warehouses just before the rents in New York rise and gentrification intrudes, removing cheap apartments for struggling artists. The contributor commented: “It is a book about time: Lyon captures the end of an era. Lu, after this, for better and worse, will never be the person she was before the photograph.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 2018, review of Self-Portrait with Boy, p. 31.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2017, review of Self-Portrait with Boy.
ONLINE
NPR, Fresh Air, http://www.npr.org/ (2018), Maureen Corrigan, review of Self-Portrait with Boy.
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (December 4, 2017), review of Self-Portrait with Boy.
RACHEL LYON
is the author of the novel SELF PORTRAIT WITH BOY. She teaches for the Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Catapult, Slice, and elsewhere, and offers private writing coaching. Most weeks she sends out a free writing/thinking prompts newsletter. She is a cofounder of the monthly reading series Ditmas Lit.
Self-Portrait with Boy
Lindsay Harmon
Booklist.
114.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2018): p31.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Self-Portrait with Boy.
By Rachel Lyon.
Feb. 2018. 384p. Scribner, $26 (9781501169588).
Lu Rile is a struggling photographer working a series of minimum-wage jobs to pay for film and the rent for
her loft in a converted warehouse in early 1990s New York City. As an artistic exercise, she challenges
herself to create a self-portrait a day. Self-Portrait #400, taken in front of her window, accidentally includes
a child falling to his death from the building's roof. Lu is horrified by the photo but also immediately
recognizes that it is the best work she has ever made. Intending to show it to the boy's parents and seek their
permission to share the image, she instead finds herself becoming a confidante to his mother, Kate, and
supporting her as her marriage unravels under the weight of grief. Through Kate, Lu secures an opportunity
to exhibit the photo and launch her career, but doing so will mean destroying their friendship. In her
gripping first novel, Lyon sympathetically portrays Lu's struggle to make this impossible decision and to
deal with its repercussions.--Lindsay Harmon
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Harmon, Lindsay. "Self-Portrait with Boy." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 31. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525185588/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2a5f9a41.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525185588
4/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1524520861069 2/5
Lyon, Rachel: SELF-PORTRAIT WITH
BOY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lyon, Rachel SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BOY Scribner (Adult Fiction) $26.00 2, 6 ISBN: 978-1-5011-6958-
8
When an ambitious young photographer captures an unthinkable tragedy--and creates an accidental
masterpiece in the process--she is forced to make a choice that will define her future.
Thick with the atmospheric grime of early 1990s New York, Lyon's haunting debut hinges on a single
instant: the moment when recent art school graduate Lu Rile, broke and ruthless, sets up her camera for a
self-portrait--the 400th in her series--and captures, by chance, the image of a little boy falling from the sky.
The boy is Max Schubert-Fine, the 9-year-old son of Lu's upstairs neighbors, and now he is dead, having
slipped off the roof of their building, a crumbling Brooklyn warehouse not officially zoned for tenancy. The
building's motley crew of residents--all artists; who else could live there?--come together in the aftermath of
the tragedy, rallying around Max's beautiful mother, Kate, and offering Lu, until now a loner, something like
community. In the weeks that follow, Kate and Lu form an intense and complicated friendship, united in
loneliness, held together by a flicker of unspoken attraction. But Lu doesn't tell Kate about the photograph
of her son falling, the photograph that could--that will--fundamentally change the course of Lu's career,
offering her an escape from both poverty and obscurity, a name and a paycheck. (God knows Lu, whose
father is ailing, needs the money.) From its first sentences, the novel is hurtling toward its inevitable and
nauseating conclusion as Lu chooses between her friendship and her art, a choice that wasn't ever really a
choice at all. More than a book about art, or morality, it is a book about time: Lyon captures the end of an
era. Lu, after this, for better and worse, will never be the person she was before the photograph. And as the
warehouses get developed and the rents rise, the city won't ever be the same, either.
Fearless and sharp.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lyon, Rachel: SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BOY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A516024693/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=44782f8f.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A516024693
4/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1524520861069 3/5
'Self-Portrait With Boy' Explores The
Narcissistic Ambition That Fuels Success
Fresh Air.
2018.
COPYRIGHT 2018 National Public Radio, Inc. (NPR). All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use
and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush
deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final
form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's
programming is the audio.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=13
Full Text:
To listen to this broadcast, click here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=583705669
BYLINE: MAUREEN CORRIGAN
HOST: TERRY GROSS
TERRY GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Rachel Lyon's debut novel captures a time in New York when the
struggling artists could still live in the city, finding cheap spaces in old warehouses and factories. Our book
critic Maureen Corrigan says that Lyon's novel also mulls over timeless questions about art and morality.
Here's her review of "Self-Portrait With Boy."
MAUREEN CORRIGAN: The classic coming-to-New-York story was a mash-up of a few pleasurably
predictable elements - a young person with dreams bigger than his or her bank account, a few roach-ridden
apartments and crummy jobs, some eccentric friends and neighbors and a couple of requisite hard knocks
before success. But those "La Boheme" days are over in the Big Apple. Manhattan and even the outer
boroughs are too expensive now to make room for poor dreamers, which is no doubt one of the reasons why
Rachel Lyon sets her coming to New York novel in 1991 when it was still just possible for an aspiring artist
to luck into a derelict but light-filled loft in Brooklyn and stumble along until the city noticed her.
Lyon's striking debut novel is called "Self-Portrait With Boy." And though it looks backward to the end of
an era in New York, it's not at all nostalgic. Think the tough tone of something like Rachel Kushner's New
York, Italian art and politics novel, "The Flamethrowers" or Olivia Laing's atmospheric nonfiction book
about New York, "The Lonely City."
Lyon's heroine, a young woman named Lu Rile who's just graduated from art school, is a bit like plain Jane
Eyre minus the moral compass. Lu is a loner who arrives in the city without money or connections or the
charm to make them. She's a woman who wears steel-toed boots and cuts her own coarse, black hair. When
she enters artsy gatherings, she imagines the beautiful people there glancing at her and saying, oh, that thing
in the corner - isn't that funny? It thinks it's people. To make ends meet, Lu works three minimum-wage
jobs, one at a health food store that she's shoplifts from to keep body and soul together.
The other thing Lu is hungry for is her art. She's a photographer. In her loft in a crumbling factory building
near the Brooklyn Bridge, Lu takes a self-portrait a day. When the novel opens, she's about to take No. 400.
Inspired by the seagulls swirling outside her windows, Lu decides to take a picture of herself naked and
jumping up. She sets up her tripod and begins jumping. After 10 or 12 takes, she captures herself at the
exact apex of her leap into the air. But she also captures something else.
4/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1524520861069 4/5
Here's one of the many descriptions Lu gives of the photograph that results. (Reading) There was the sky
behind the windows, its smooth, blue gradient. There was my own pale body floating ghostlike above the
floor mid-leap, translucent, caught in blur. There on the left in the middle of the window balancing the
composition was a vertical streak, a perfect counterpoint to the horizontal one that was my body.
That vertical streak turns out to be the 9-year-old son of Lu's upstairs neighbors, a boy full of manic energy
who ran up to the roof that afternoon and either slipped or jumped. His image, as Lu says, makes the
composition of the photograph perfect - falling boy on the left, leaping woman on the right. Lu recognizes
that the photograph is great art, a career maker. It's also voyeuristic, obscene.
In the course of the next few weeks, she becomes genuinely close with the boy's grieving mother. She also
meets a prominent gallery owner through the boy's artist father. A terrible dilemma looms. Actually, we
readers already know what Lu will do thanks to a preface in which an older Lu tells us that her career was
launched because of that photo. By foreclosing the question of Lu's decision, Lyon avoids the contrived
quality built into her plot. Instead the focus here shifts more to Lu's ambition, her tortured rationalizations
and the harsh limits of the world she's desperate to climb out of. Above all, as its title suggests, "SelfPortrait
With Boy" is a smart novel about the narcissistic ambition that's needed to succeed especially in the
art world, especially in New York.
Late in the novel, a new friend reassures Lu that she did the right thing in publicly displaying that notorious
photo. She tells Lu, (reading) you had to do what scared you most to begin to become yourself. That sounds
good until you think about the boy captured in that photo and his parents. And then the artist's hungry claim
to remake the world to suit her gimlet-eyed vision collides with an idea of empathy. Empathy doesn't stand
a chance.
GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Self-Portrait With
Boy" by Rachel Lyon.
(SOUNDBITE OF MISHA MENGELBERG TRIO'S "A BIT NERVOUS")
GROSS: Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, you are being watched. We'll talk about state-of-the-art surveillance
from closed-circuit TV to drones and satellites with Robert Draper. His article about surveillance is in
National Geographic. We'll also talk about gerrymandering, which he's reported on. He says it's subverted
our democracy in ways that Putin himself could never have imagined. I hope you'll join us.
FRESH AIR'S executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.
Our associate producer for digital media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. I'm
Terry Gross.
(SOUNDBITE OF MISHA MENGELBERG TRIO'S "A BIT NERVOUS")
Disclaimer: We are providing links to the third party website only as a convenience and the inclusion of
links to the linked site does not imply any endorsement, approval, investigation, verification or monitoring
by us of any content or information contained within or accessed from the linked site. Gale, A Cengage
Company does not control the accuracy, completeness, timeliness or appropriateness of the content or
information on the linked site. If you choose to visit the linked site you will be subject to its terms of use
and privacy policies, of which Gale, A Cengage Company has no control.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"'Self-Portrait With Boy' Explores The Narcissistic Ambition That Fuels Success." Fresh Air, 7 Feb. 2018.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529600336/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=c20dfc89. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529600336
https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781501169588
12/4/2017
Self-Portrait with Boy
Rachel Lyon. Scribner, $26 (384p) ISBN 978-1-5011-6958-8
Lyon’s candid, adroit debut follows a young artist’s disturbing journey to find an audience. Lu Rile is a photographer squatting in a clapped-out industrial building in gritty 1990s Brooklyn. While staging a self-portrait, she accidentally captures a boy falling to his death outside her window. Although she has shot hundreds of images, this photograph is different, perfect. The boy’s tragic death creates a close community among the building’s tenants, mostly artists, and Lu becomes the confidant of Kate, the boy’s mother, who lives upstairs. Lu struggles to make ends meet and to find a gallery to represent her work, neglecting all along to tell Kate about her brilliant photograph. She manages to place it in an upcoming group exhibition in which Kate’s husband, Steve, also has a work, and tension mounts. Exacerbating Lu’s uncertainty about whether she is doing the right thing, she believes the ghost of the child is appearing at same window from which she captured him falling. But even this is not enough to push her to confess to his mother or pull the photograph from the show. Written in raw, honest prose, this is an affecting and probing moral tale about an artist choosing to advance her work at the expense of her personal relationships. (Feb.)