I am a terrible mother. I love my daughter, love her so much I’m amazed I actually have to hold her in my arms, that she doesn’t just stick to my side, my heart heavy as a black hole, dense with love, trying to suck her into it. I love her like this, then, minutes later, can’t wait to get out of the house, leaving her behind. I’m told all mothers are like this, more or less, and are all wracked with guilt because of it.

The week I found out about Mary Rose, my beloved Stella Marie was six months old. She had black stick-straight-up hair, blueberry eyes that would find their way eventually to a less exotic shade of hazel, an abiding affection for the decorative moldings of our seventy-year-old house.

She liked to gaze at the corners of windows and doors, reach out as if to grab them, then wag her hands excitedly, like a palsied lady trying to open a wide-mouth jar. Her basic look was one of consternation. She was not a silly baby, even though I’d been known to make her wear a bonnet. She is perfect. The world’s cutest human. Really the world’s cutest human.

The Diamond Lane was first published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1991, Overlook Press published a trade paperback in 1993. What’s it like to have a book go out of print, then be reissued in a gorgeous new edition with sexy French flaps, and an introduction by Jane Smiley?

Long before The Diamond Lane was published the first time, Dr. Egon Spengler prophesied that print was dead. And yet, it lives on. The only way print can continue to survive can is in beautifully designed editions like this new one from Hawthorne Books. So far, there’s no app that can completely satisfy the human need for the tactile experience, and if you’re a reader, eventually you’re going to tire of Kindle, that cheap floozy, and settle down with something you can gaze upon, you can feel and hold. Also, crack open a book and take a whiff. There’s no smell like that ink-on-paper smell. As far as being lucky enough to have Jane offer to write an introduction, I am humbled beyond measure. I have been a huge fan of hers since The Age of Grief. She’s one of our greatest contemporary writers, plus a kick ass horsewoman.

Freak accidents ran in the family. What else was Mimi to think? First Fitzy, now Shirl. What happened to lingering diseases? What happened to people dying in their sleep at eighty-five? The world was as reliable as patio furniture in a hurricane. It was so awful it made her laugh. The day after it happened she called in sick. She was convinced if she went to work, on the twenty-first floor of a building on Sunset Boulevard, the FitzHenry luck would bring on an earthquake. Mimi and Mouse were ten and nine when their father, Fitzy, was run over by a dolly.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a life that’s been more mythologized than Georgia O’Keeffe’s. By the time she was anointed Most Famous Woman Artist in America so many people had gushed so flagrantly over her singular style, her huge erotic flower paintings, her snappy (and occasionally snappish) bon mots, her long and unconventional marriage to Alfred Stieglitz, the other-worldly landscape of northern New Mexico with its voluptuous land forms and many large dead animals, whose skulls and vertebrae she immortalized, and her prickly devotion to her privacy, that it’s amazing there aren’t more O’Keeffe folk songs, limericks, totems, feast days, rituals, annual pilgrimages, and bank holidays. Given our feelings for everything she represents, it speaks well of the human race that we haven’t fetched up a minor religion around her that worships independence, focus, creativity, and wearing those bad scarves my mother used to don the day before she went to the beauty parlor.

Explain your fascination with these long-dead 20th century icons.  Frankly, it’s a little weird.

It’s a good question. Which doesn’t mean I have a good answer, or even a mediocre one.  I don’t know. Writers tend not to know.  This is true for pretty much all artists, if they’re being honest.  We do our work  in order to find out what we think, what we feel.  Our work is a form of inquiry.  A book is not a remodel.  A painting is not a retirement plan.  A song is not an itinerary.

That’s deep, and evasive.

I do one thing, then the next thing.  I have no master plan.  In 2004 I wrote a memoir about taking care of my dad during the last year of his life.  You can imagine what a cheery undertaking that was.  The writing of some books kill you.  Writing that book was like a bad break-up. After writing it, I wanted to date around. I wanted a rebound book. So, How to Hepburn was born. Katharine Hepburn was my mother’s favorite actress. When I was growing up, people would stop her in the produce aisle and tell her she looked like Hepburn. Then I went to film school, and I fell in love with her all over again. To do a book about Hepburn would mean a year of reading wonderful biographies and watching wonderful old movies and immersing myself in a time when cinema was new. Plus, I knew I wouldn’t be writing a standard biography. I have neither the interest in writing a comprehensive biography, nor the scholarly chops, nor the necessary OCD component to my personality.  It would be a cross between How Proust Can Change Your Life (by Alain de Botton) and U and I (by Nicholson Baker).  It would be my own thing. Even though Hepburn probably would not have approved of the book, she would have approved of the spirit with which it was undertaken.

Whatever you did seems to have worked.  After Hepburn came Coco Chanel, and now Georgia O’Keeffe.  

I’m calling it my Kick Ass Women trilogy.

Is that you, or the publicity department talking?

They called it my iconic women series, which I thought lacked a little cha cha cha and ooh la la.

Define “kick ass,” please.

The thing I love about them all was their unerring belief in themselves, their opinions, their style and their creative vision.  Chanel and O’Keeffe were contemporaries, and Hepburn was twenty years younger. All of them were born before women had the vote, when the goal of most women was to marry whomever would have them, the richer the better. They were stubborn.  They were not very nice. I love that they were not nice. Most women I know, even in this day and age, worry they are not nice enough. My kick ass women couldn’t give a shit. Seriously.

With the greatest respect, who cares what you think? I mean, these women are world famous, and you’re just some fan girl.

Fan girl and proud of it. I’m no different than every other person out there who’s bewitched by these women and their astounding achievements. I even have a Georgia O’Keeffe kitchen calendar, that’s how middle-brow I am.  I’ve delved into these women’s lives to see what it is that continues to attract us to them, even though they’re long dead. I write these books not only to figure out how I should live, but also, I hope, so that some of their luster might rub off on me, and by extension, you.

None of these women are mothers.  Are you saying that at the end of the day you have to forego kids to have an interesting life? That’s pretty retro.

The current thinking flies in the face of what people thought only ten years ago, which is that kids take up a lot of space in your life. I have friends who are having three and four kids, and still think they can start a company while going to medical school. But this is neither here nor there. I don’t think Hepburn wanted children, but Chanel did and so did O’Keeffe. But it didn’t happen for them, and so they threw themselves into their work. This is an old cure-all, throwing oneself into one’s work.

Did you ever imagine you’d be the inventor of this weird mash-up genre, or is it the natural outcome of having written your way through everything else.  Short stories, novels, creative non-fiction, YA mysteries, screenplays, essays, articles and reviews.  Is there anything you haven’t written?

I’m something of a poetry moron, although I did win a prize for a poem in college, so who knows what’s ahead.

In case you’re feeling a little smug about all this work, may I remind you that a Writer Without a Platform is a Writer Without a Career.

Don’t I know it. I’ve flown under the radar for twenty years, in part because I can’t settle on a specific subject or genre.  To be known for writing only about birds, or marriage, or thermonuclear reactors would be the end of me. I’d get bored. Writing would feel like homework, or doing my taxes. I cannot move forward in a piece of writing without passion, curiosity, and a sense of venturing out into the unknown. And yet, I haven’t had to make good on my promise to become a dental hygienist if stuff doesn’t work out.

Tell me something about Georgia O’Keeffe I might not already know.

She had a fabulous sense of humor. Also, she sewed her own underwear.

What’s the best piece of wisdom you’ve found in examining O’Keeffe’s life?

O’Keeffe was not immune to what other people thought about her work, but she made a habit of ignoring what other people said. “Flattery and criticism go down the same drain, and I am quite free,” she once said.

Does this mean you don’t read reviews of your work?

I stay as far away from reviews as humanly possible.  But given that in these modern times we authors are expected to leverage the hell out of every review we’re lucky enough to garner—good, bad or ugly—ignoring one’s reviews is not as easy as it once was, but I’m fighting the good fight.

Is print dead?

It’s on life support, but until the day comes when we can upload books onto chips implanted in our heads, there will still be books. Recently I was on a long flight, and the woman next to me was fussing with her iPad. Some file or app wasn’t opening for her, then her battery died.  She was forced to read Sky Mall for the next four hours. I had a paperback stuffed in my purse.  Need I say more?