Remember This - by Anthony Giardina

Book Synopsis

The author of Norumbega Park returns with a bravura novel about the secrets artists keep--from the rest of the world, and from themselves.

Even though Miranda Rando, a forty-year-old writer living in Brooklyn, is making breakthroughs in her biography of a powerful woman artist, she can't escape the all-commanding presence of her father, Henry. And now that he has written a slightly embarrassing and shockingly successful self-help book, the seventy-year-old playwright is everywhere.

Henry's sudden rise to prominence--along with his need to grapple more deeply with his own religious life-- leads him to join a mission to Haiti. There, he meets a young man eager to come to America. But his motivation to help becomes complicated by his disturbing attraction to the boy. It also comes to threaten his relationships with his daughter and his wife, Lily, a successful actress.

Miranda and Henry play out their separate dramas until the lives of the father and daughter become hopelessly intertwined. Miranda's drive to understand the mysterious artist she's profiling becomes a journey into the past, into the lost New York of the 1970s, a time whose social and political fervency will always be wrapped up with her own childhood. That journey, existing alongside Henry's need to test the boundaries of their relationship, leads her to a new awareness of how much artists will always withhold from their children, and from the world.

Anthony Giardina's Remember This moves through the cutthroat contemporary art world, the New York theater scene, and post-earthquake Haiti to ask questions about artistic legacies, and about the root of family relationships. What secrets are necessary for us to keep? How much can we ask of each other? And what truths will remain forever hidden?

Review Quotes

"Through [his] characters, Giardina explores noblesse oblige, suppressed emotions, and the ways that money tends to muck with true art. . . Fitting for a story rooted in upscale New York City with an eye on the past, Giardina writes with a genteel, Cheever-esque grace and charm. . . A cleareyed study of how a scruffier Manhattan and clearer ethics gave way to a more compromised and machined world." --Kirkus Reviews

"Giardina writes knowingly about the worlds of theater and literature, and his deliciously flawed characters are great company. The result is a perceptive look at artists and their limitations. " --Publishers Weekly

"Remember This is so passionate about the making of art, so intelligent, so rich with memorable characters, and so cunningly suspenseful. As the plot moves between New York and Haiti, daughter and father, I fell increasingly under the spell of the wonderful prose and the profound question: what is success in life, or art? Anthony Giardina has written an amazing novel." --Margot Livesey, author of The Road from Bellhaven

"Anthony Giardina knows everything about the complexities and deceptions of family life, the delusions of desire as well, but he has never depicted them so wisely or so expansively as in Remember This. A father, a daughter, and both of them writers. Yet Henry is willful and complacent, his work behind him, while Miranda is growing into strength and just discovering, at forty, how to become the woman she wants to be. This is a magnificent book."
--Michael Gorra, author of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War

About the Author

Anthony Giardina is the author of several novels, including White Guys and Norumbega Park, as well as the short-story collection The Country of Marriage. His plays, including The City of Conversation and Dan Cody's Yacht, have been presented at Lincoln Center and the Manhattan Theater Club in New York, and have been widely performed across the United States. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Harper's Magazine, Esquire, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts