Myla Goldberg's FEAST YOUR EYES Nat'l Bk Critic's Finalist '19

"Feast Your Eyes" is a novel that's a collage of snapshots of a female photographers particularly in the 60s 70s superimposed on Lillian.  Lillian  a single, unwed mother living in Brooklyn in this era.  The story focuses a lens on what it means to be a maverick & creative genius.  Myla Goldberg's fictitious account of Lillian Preston best personifies the struggles of photographer Sally Mann and what she experienced in her groundbreaking controversial & later lionized career as a 21st C photographer.  The framing of the storytelling copies Jane Arbus' daughter's collecting and curating of her mother's works exhibited in the highest echelons of art museums.  The epistolary format is the golden light to Goldberg's storytelling pieced together through Lillian's letters to her daughter Samantha, a.k.a. Jane and to her few close friends who in turn shed light on Lillian's life through their correspondences.  These wide lens perspectives are subliminal to Jane's recount of what was happening in her & her mother's lives referencing Lillian's photographs at the time.  It's worth noting the dire circumstances before abortion was legal in the country.  The exposure into a coven of starving artists is also a bright spot.  Lillian's creative compulsivity elucidates a passion that manifest in a variety of beautiful ways that breaths life into these pages.  Lillian is mostly a loner. Her profound love for her daughter is overshadowed her keen proclivity for capturing images resonating a mote of pure awareness that lingers long after its fleeting moment in time.  Jane's bohemian lifestyle as her mother's daughter leaves an indelible imprint.  Jane's rebellious & unorthodox choices are doubly exposed in Lillian's diary where she express her intense love for her which appears hidden.  Lillian's journal reveals all she felt went unsaid.  Long estranged from her parents since choosing to keep her child out of wedlock, Jane is the catalysis for reuniting Lillian with her parents.  The many years of separation have left a negative space which slowly develops into healing.  Lillian notes in her diary to Jane "you {are} old enough to understand. 'I love you too' is only ever an echo."  Lillian's longest friend Debra is a budding poet and there is a lyricism in much of what Lillian  captures in notes.  Ideas regarding photography as immoral or exploitative are thrashed about and photography's annoying habit of corroding whatever real memories one possess.  Lillian's militant, avant-garde art dealer believes some people are artists whether they chose to be or not.  "Feast Your Eyes" was a Nat'l Book Critic's Pick ('19). I found it clever storytelling but not memorable or something to shutter esteem praise upon.