Nancy Foley Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

A conversation with Nancy Foley about her novel, I Am Agatha.

Could you elaborate a bit more on the remark your grandmother made about Agnes Martin that in part inspired I Am Agatha?

A: As a child, I often visited my grandparents in the small town where my mother grew up, not far from Agnes Martin's house at Mesa Portales. Decades later, when I learned that Martin had lived there, I mentioned this to my grandmother, who nodded and said that her best friend had struck up some kind of friendship with Martin, and that a packet of letters they exchanged was destroyed by the friend's son after she died. This was electrifying to me. My grandmother's friend was personally conservative and married; Agnes Martin was unconventional and queer. I couldn't fathom a relationship between them. Are you sure the letters were burned? I asked. And why would her son feel the need to burn them?

My grandmother clearly regretted her remark and rebuffed my questions. She'd been a schoolteacher, wasn't prone to gossip, and could shut down any talk she didn't care for with a sharp look I knew was unassailable. Even after my grandmother died a few years later, something in me resisted tracking down the letter-burning son. I'm not an art historian or an academic. It was the mystery of the story that I loved, ...