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Douglas Stuart reads his story “A Private View,” from the April 20, 2026, issue of the magazine. Stuart has published two novels, “Shuggie Bain,” which won the Booker Prize in 2020, and “Young Mungo,” released in 2022. His new novel, “John of John,” will be published in May.

Last week, the actress Elle Fanning arrived in New York for the première of “Margo’s Got Money Troubles”—a black comedy brightened by its colorfully tacky Orange County setting and by the sparkle in her performance as Margo, a nineteen-year-old single mother who begins making “camgirl” content on the adult-entertainment website OnlyFans to pay the bills. “I came from Budapest!” she exclaimed, in a faint Southern accent, when we met for a late lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria. The Georgia native had been in Hungary shooting “The Nightingale,” the story of two sisters in Nazi-occupied France, alongside her own sister, Dakota. It will be the pair’s first time onscreen together, though they’ve shared billing before: when Fanning was just two years old, she appeared as a younger version of Dakota’s character, Lucy, in the 2001 drama “I Am Sam.” Lucy, the daughter of a man with intellectual disabilities, was an originary role in more ways than one. Afterward, Fanning continued to play girls forced to inhabit a maturity beyond their years, including in two films by Sofia Coppola, the auteur of precisely that theme. In “Somewhere,” she was the daughter of a Hollywood star distracted by his own decadence; in “The Beguiled,” a hormonal teen-ager living in seclusion on a plantation in the postwar American South. More recently, in the Hulu series “The Great,” she portrayed Catherine the Great as a sixteen-year-old bride arriving at the Imperial Russian court. Fanning imbues her heroines with a wide-eyed, almost impulsive curiosity that never lets you forget they’re still essentially children; as much as life may try to smudge their youth, her blameless expression can’t be outright erased.

In “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” adapted from Rufi Thorpe’s 2024 novel of the same name, Fanning plays yet another young person saddled with a responsibility that none of the adults in the room seem to be able to handle. This time, it’s the ultimate one: a colicky baby who’s driven out Margo’s roommates (and their portion of rent). The father, Margo’s creative-writing professor, is out of the picture. Margo’s mother, Shyanne (Michelle Pfeiffer), won’t help babysit; she’s trying to outrun her past as a Hooter’s waitress ahead of her wedding to Kenny (Greg Kinnear), a devout Christian, and proximity to Margo’s “out of wedlock” pregnancy feels like a stumbling block. All she has is her baby—and her fans.

On OnlyFans, Margo cultivates a hot-girl alien persona known as “Hungry Ghost.” Hungry Ghost is ravenous for earthly experiences, unschooled in our ways, and might seem childlike, except that she’s fully in control. In short, it’s a quintessential Elle Fanning role. We discussed how she got the rights to Thorpe’s “hot book” (in the sense that it was hotly contested), the campus #MeToo plot, and what she hopes the show does for the public perception of OnlyFans creators. Our conversation below has been edited and condensed.

I cried at the end.

Oh, good.

I never thought I’d be emotional at someone covered in blue paint, dressed as an alien, getting ready to shoot a racy video; it was so empowering after all the shaming she endured. But I was laughing, too.

See, these are the shows that I like. Is it comedy? Is it drama? I like that tonal combination. Even during filming, we didn’t know which it was going to be. At some point, we had to decide. They want to put a label on it, you know. But it is a true “dramedy.” That word!

Right—like, “The Great” was a comedy, but it was also about, you know, serfdom. That show was a hit with everyone, but especially in my circles. Before I was a journalist, I taught Russian literature.

You were probably judging the historical inaccuracies!

No, I was jealous that I never succeeded in making my students laugh about the Nakaz. How did you think about balancing the humor with the history?

I came on early. It was kind of one of the first things I had produced. It was also one of the first things I’d ever pitched. So, I was really learning the ropes of it. It was all new to me. And just being in those pitch rooms—a young girl with a lot of men—it kind of mirrored how Catherine was feeling. She felt underestimated. I was also trying to hold my own. Honestly, I feel like she’s the character I’ve played who I felt most similar to. I don’t know if that’s because Tony [McNamara] had also started writing it with me in mind. I was filming that show between when I was twenty and twenty-five; it’s such a precious time. I felt like life was imitating art. Catherine’s personality was informing mine even when mine was informing her.

But as to the tone, I had never seen anything like that before. “The Favourite” hadn’t come out yet when I read the script for “The Great.” I think I learned comedy through playing that character. I learned to embarrass myself. There was so much physical comedy, and setting up jokes, and having to hit the rhythm, and then suddenly something totally tragic happens. But that’s life: you have both extremes at once.

And the humor does fit into the actual history, too. Like that peeing-on-wheat thing. [In Season 2, Catherine uses wheat to prove she’s carrying an heir.] That’s something Tony found in his research. You would pee on wheat, and if it bloomed, that meant you’re pregnant. Even though there was some absurd stuff on the show, people did legitimately do things that were outrageous back then.

You’re also an executive producer on this show. How did this project come together?

It was a very—you know—hot book. A lot of people were circling this to try to adapt it. Rufi Thorpe, the author, was a fan of “The Great,” and she wanted to meet with me and Dakota. We have our company, Lewellen Pictures. We had produced “The Great.” The book hadn’t come out yet, but I read the story and thought, Wow, this could be an amazing TV show. The characters are so rich and bold. I love Margo. She’s fearless but real. She has this optimism and positivity toward life even when so many hard things are thrown at her, and she takes the tougher decision at almost every turn. It was also something I hadn’t really seen before. I mean, I knew what OnlyFans was, but in a very general sense, like I think a lot of people.

But David Kelley was also circling it. So was A24. Nicole Kidman was, too, with her production company, Blossom Films. And I’m, like—wait, I know all of these people. We banded together and went to Rufi with our take.

You had worked with Nicole on “The Beguiled.” How was it reuniting it with her?

Nicole’s always inspired me. Maybe because we’re both two tall blondes in the business, but she is so daring with her choices. Technically, we did another movie together before “The Beguiled.” It was called “How to Talk to Girls at Parties.” It was directed by John Cameron Mitchell. I played an alien there, too. Nicole plays a seventies-era, punk-Vivienne Westwood type who mentors my character. So that was the first time I met her. “The Beguiled” was also the first movie I did when I was eighteen, so it was the first movie I did parent-less. I got to be on my own in New Orleans!

You said that you all went to Thorpe with your take. What was your take?

We picked up on how every character in the series is judged by what they do, their outward appearance. Like, at first glance, they’re completely written off. Then you see that happen within a mother-daughter relationship. There’s this cycle of disapproving; Shyanne had a dream for Margo, and now she’s going down a different path. But that element is in the book, too. We stayed pretty true to it, even though Rufi was so open. She was so involved, but she understood that a book and a TV show are different forms, and you’re going to have to make choices.

Shyanne is not in the book as much as she is in the series. But David, he had never worked with Michelle [Pfeiffer, his wife of more than thirty years] before. She was in one small scene from “Picket Fences,” but she’s, like, “I don’t count it.” We were all wondering—how do we get Michelle to be in this? And David really saw something in the dynamic between Shyanne and Margo. Also, I love watching mother-daughter dynamics onscreen. I was also excited about getting to play a mother myself.

Why was that?

I want to be a mom! I was that girl growing up who wanted baby dolls for Christmas. But I was also excited to show this messy, authentic look at someone who’s thrust into motherhood, who doesn’t have all the answers. In the same way, I’m not a mom myself, so I relied on the mothers around me on set for advice when preparing for my scenes with the baby, Bodhi. I’d ask them, “So how does it feel when you’re breast-feeding?” and they’d go, “Whatever you think, it’s worse. It’s harder to get them to latch. It’s more painful than whatever you’re thinking.”

I love when Jinx, Margo’s father, sees her getting ready to breast-feed and tells her, “Oh, you should probably switch to the other so you don’t get lopsided.”

Quite helpful! Thanks, Dad.

There’s also really great parenting body horror in the show, like when Bodhi has explosive diarrhea into your mouth.

Yeah, and I was informed that, because the baby was not eating solid foods or baby formula, the poo wouldn’t have smelled. Because I wasn’t sure—I was asking, “Do I need to act like it smells?” And they’re, like, No, no, no, because Bodhi is breast-fed. The things you learn!

What was your research to play Margo like? I read that when Rufi Thorpe was doing her research for the novel, she D.M.’d a bunch of OnlyFans creators, but they get so many D.M.s, she had to start sending them tips through OnlyFans to get a response.

Production had an OnlyFans account. We could all log in, and production covered the fees, because you have to pay to see the content. I just wanted to look at how it was formatted, and I watched some of the accounts that Rufi and Eva [Anderson], another writer on the show, had suggested. I had a preconceived notion of what it was, and then I realized, gosh, this is very vast.

Margo has to research it, too. I love when she logs on and sees these accounts like “Jen Rides an ATV” and “Bethany Bakes” and “Mariel99 Learn Italian with Me.” They’re just like regular influencers, but in low-cut tops and bathing suits. Everyone on OnlyFans has to have a sort of gimmick.

There was one girl who licked doorknobs. And that’s all she did. There’s one person who steps in butter, steps in cakes—you know, you can imagine. Margo starts off rating people’s dicks. I did really love those lines. Like, “If you want to find out what Pokémon your dick most resembles and what attacks it might have, tip me twenty dollars.”

The need for all these gimmicks is something that Margo didn’t initially realize. That’s where the TikToks come in. She needs to tease her Hungry Ghost content on TikTok so she can direct people to her OnlyFans page.

It’s so crazy because OnlyFans is already a side hustle, but then it requires you to have this other side hustle to drum up followers whom you can hopefully convert to fans. Because OnlyFans itself isn’t really searchable; you need a creator’s direct URL to find them.

It’s a lot of work. It’s a full-time job.

Awkwardly enough, her father, Jinx—played by Nick Offerman—becomes a coach of sorts.

Completely, because he was in this W.W.E.-style wrestling scene. He teaches her to have a persona, how to develop plotlines, how to collaborate with other performers.

In many ways, this show is also about art forms that aren’t really considered art forms, that don’t command the same kind of respect, even though there are so many overlapping elements with more celebrated genres.

Rufi is a huge, huge W.W.E. fan. She knows all the wrestlers. She, like, goes to WrestleMania. I was so upset because David, Rufi, and Nick—they all went to this wrestling convention, and I couldn’t go. I was out of town. Nick trained hard. He immersed himself in that world. I think he saw how much pride these wrestlers take in creating their performances. It’s just like acting.

Yes, there’s that moment where Nicole Kidman’s character, Linda—a wrestling star who’s also a lawyer by day—and Jinx are preparing to do a knockdown in the ring, and they’re blocking the scene, like, I’m going to go here and then you do this, but then you think, Wait, that’s also what Nicole and Nick are doing.

It’s getting meta, I know. I think also that’s something I could relate to with Margo. I didn’t have to research playing another person and feeling nourished by that. Margo finds agency in creating her character, Hungry Ghost. It becomes a creative outlet.

It strikes me that just recently, in “Sentimental Value,” you also played an actress—a movie star named Rachel Kemp. There’s a scene where you’re reading for Stellan Skarsgård, who’s playing a director, and it’s not clicking. How did you make that clear to audiences? Because most moviegoers aren’t necessarily familiar with the technical aspects of getting inside a character.

That was the challenge of that part. She’s this girl who’s stumbled into this gritty film and kind of pushes herself in ways that she hadn’t before, and then she lands in this family drama. Rachel was probably too young for that role. I was trying to convey that Rachel is experiencing in real time an emotion that she’s never felt before. She had never been moved by a text before. She’s almost excited that she’s crying. Rachel had been more of a technical actress; she learns her lines, she shows up, she does her stunt training. That scene was also hard because Renate is going to have to say the same monologue later in the film, in Norwegian, but in her case, she’s trying to hold all of her emotion back because it’s authentic to her character. I think in Rachel’s case, you see the performance, you feel the façade. That’s something that was in my head. I hope it translated.

Well, it obviously did. You were nominated for an Oscar! To return to “Margo”: There have been a lot of shows about campus MeToo scandals, but this portrayal felt so different. There are no deans or Title IX officers intervening. The setting is an underfunded community college. Margo is working-class. Perhaps relatedly, the professor who gets her pregnant doesn’t lose his job—and then his mother makes Margo sign an N.D.A.

Margo doesn’t feel like she has much ground to stand on in this situation.

And she doesn’t believe that there are these institutions that are going to come in and rescue her.

She’s self-reliant. And that was something that really struck me in the book. She’s, like, “Well, I have to get out of this myself.”

As an actress, I was also trying to figure out how naïve Margo is in the beginning about his advances. Maybe she sensed what he was after. He tells her she’s a great writer, that she should be at Harvard. But it’s true that she is a great writer. It’s complicated.

He was her first fan.

Hey, he’d probably be watching her on OnlyFans.

You’ve been in so many movies about parenting. I guess it’s just a virtue of starting off as a child actor. I’m thinking of early roles in movies like “Daddy Day Care” and “Somewhere,” but even more recently with “Sentimental Value.” As in that film, in this show, you have adults with adult children, and they’re still learning to be parents. Shyanne doesn’t know how to be there for Margo because she’s still carrying all of this shame from being a Hooter’s waitress. Jinx wasn’t in her life for most of it and now he’s back, struggling with addiction. How did you, Michelle, and Nick talk about how you wanted to portray that dynamic?

Who’s the mother and who’s the child is a switch that flips a lot from episode to episode. Then, at times, they feel more like best friends. Michelle and I are very close. She’s known me since I was two. I played a younger Dakota in “I Am Sam,” and she played Dakota’s mother. So that chemistry was there.

And I mean, everyone has a mother. I’m aware of the grittiness, that short fuse that everyone has with their mom. That was something that we wanted to show. Margo’s not as forgiving with her mother as she is her father. She sees him as a broken bird. This aggravates Shyanne, because she’s, like, He left you, he wasn’t there, you know. But I think the show is also about second chances. Margo’s certainly gotten one. And Shyanne is trying to have one with Kenny.

I really love how David wrote into the script that Shyanne is very glamorous and out of Kenny’s league. Then, later on, when Mark takes Margo to court for custody, the judge can’t believe someone who looks like her is a grandmother. I mean, it’s true, but I also thought—outstanding husbanding.

Yeah, I love when she says, “I’m not good at anything but being pretty.” Only Michelle can say that line and you go “aww.” It doesn’t come off nasty at all.

The show feels very explicitly against there being any kind of shame around the body, be it a mother’s body or an OnlyFans model’s. There’s even a scene where you’re lying in bed all maternal and pregnant, and then there’s a quick flashback to your body in that same bed, conceiving Bodhi. I think my favorite line of the show is when you’re in the mirror and you squeeze your breast and milk squirts out; you turn to baby Bodhi and go, “People would pay to see that.” Also, you’re nude quite a lot in this.

I am!

Why was that important?

It was important. It was important for the story. All three directors were women. I’m not a modest person in terms of my body, and I did nude scenes in “The Great.” When it services the story, it should be there, and, in this case, it’s saying something. It’s never shown in a sexualized way. It’s more utilitarian: I have to feed my child. I have to whip out my boob. That’s what my child needs. And then it just so happens to be a show about OnlyFans and there’s sexy aspects, but I think motherhood marries nicely with it. I’m really proud of how it’s portrayed in the show. Nudity is just there, because that’s how it would be.

I was reading about a teacher in Scotland who worked part time on OnlyFans. She was fired after the school found out. The country’s teaching council said that “her behavior lacked integrity.” There’s so much shame around the body. This thing that brings us into the world can so quickly be deemed indecent.

And it shouldn’t be. In the birth scene, we had this contraption. So, we got the money shot, as they say, but it’s a fake vagina, and it works—you can push the baby through. It’s real movie magic, but it’s also informing the audience: We’re going to go to these places. This is what we’re doing.

Something I found remarkable about the novel was that it wasn’t just about OnlyFans models. It almost felt like a manual on how to become one. And it’s also a bit of a guide on how to fight for custody as a sex worker and how to challenge illegal searches from Child Protective Services.

That’s what David E. Kelley does best: legal. That’s part of why Nicole wanted to be involved. She was, like, “I want to be a lawyer in a David E. Kelley series.” She’s also a lawyer on “Big Little Lies.” She’s, like, “He’s the best.”

That’s funny. I grew up watching “Ally McBeal,” which, now that I think about it, is also sort of about babies.

You know Dakota played young Ally McBeal.

I didn’t know that!

It was an eyeball flashback. She always talks about that. Our show does become a bit of a courtroom drama, though. When you’re pitching shows, they ask for “comps.”

“Juno” meets “Pretty Woman.”

There you go. I think I said “Little Miss Sunshine.” To me, it’s this story of found family, of misfits.

This show didn’t feel like it was just designed to help people outside the sex-work community feel sympathy for OnlyFans models or understand their lives, though it’s that, too. But it also felt directed at people within the sex-work community.

I hope so.

I’m referring to some really interesting conversations and debates that happen between Margo and the two other OnlyFans creators, KC and Rose, whom she collaborates with to make content. (Rose is played by Lindsey Normington, an actress and stripper who also starred in “Anora.”) At one point, Margo goes, “I don’t do porn. I make art.” Rose calls her out on her “internalized whorephobia.”

I think that’s something Lindsey came up with. She’s in that world; she knows it well. I’m just so glad we had her there.

There’s been some pushback to actors playing sex workers, and some critique on social media of how many actresses have won Best Actress at the Oscars for playing sex workers. My personal feeling is that people don’t realize how common sex work is or are in denial about how woven it is into the fabric of daily life. Some surveys put the number of American men who’ve paid for sex at around fifteen per cent. Nearly a fifth of all web searches are for pornography. How are you hoping that this show, and your portrayal of Margo, contributes to or expands the conversation around sex workers and how they’re represented onscreen?

It’s a part of life. I also just felt like I’m playing this girl—she’s complicated. This is what she’s doing to survive in the world. I think there are also a lot of shows about very wealthy people; we see that side of things. Margo’s not completely down and out, but she’s definitely lower middle class, and so it’s also a representation of someone who went to college for a job that she couldn’t get. I hope that people see themselves reflected in these characters, even though they are quite specific. I always find that the more detailed and specific characters are, the more universally they resonate.

To that point, I’ve been thinking about how OnlyFans really blew up during the pandemic. It makes sense to me. We all had to become camgirls, in a sense. And looking good on video has started feeling like a bigger part of everyday jobs. In that sense, yes, she’s very relatable.

Margo’s a different type of sex worker from what we’ve seen onscreen; she’s definitely of the modern age, in terms of having to work through social media and using these different avenues. A lot of people don’t even know exactly what OnlyFans is. It’s new. Rufi was definitely ahead of the pulse.

It’s true—there haven’t been that many representations of OnlyFans in popular culture, despite the fact it has more subscribers now than Netflix. It was a subplot in Season 3 of “Industry,” and more so in Season 4, but that only just came out.

Oh, yes!

I’m curious what the reaction to “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” will be from the OnlyFans community. Did you-all have a screening for sex workers or anything like that?

We have a screening planned in Los Angeles for content creators and OnlyFans models. I hope they feel represented properly—though of course Margo’s story is just one version of being a sex worker.

What are you working on next?

“The Nightingale,” with Dakota. It’s our first time working together. We were wondering if it was going to be awkward, but we’ve just finished the first week of shooting, and it was so the opposite.

That’s also through Lewellen Pictures. You guys produce a lot of true crime, am I right?

We do! Dakota loves true crime. That’s, like, her forte.

Speaking of, I binged her show “All Her Fault” on a flight from London.

That was a great flight, then! She didn’t tell me the twist or anything. I would have never been able to guess what happened. And I pride myself on being able to know which direction shows are going to go in. But when I was watching, I was, like—what?!

But yes, we’ve done two true-crime series: “Mastermind: To Think Like a Killer,” about Dr. Ann Burgess, who trained the F.B.I. to profile serial killers, and then “Death in Apartment 603,” the Ellen Greenberg story. [Ellen Greenberg was a Philadelphia schoolteacher whose death was ultimately ruled a suicide despite her body being found with twenty stab wounds.] But with our production company, we don’t ever want to limit ourselves. It’s kind of why we created it—so we could feel limitless.

And you’re going to be in “The Hunger Games.”

Yes, I’m playing young Effie Trinket. Elizabeth Banks really created that character, with her costumes and comedic timing, so I feel honored to play her. I feel like the fans cast me. The studio called and was, like, We just keep getting these fans saying that you should play young Effie. Would you do it? I said yes, of course!

Nicole and I are also doing another project together. It’s called “Discretion.” And that’s a real two-hander. Everything we’ve done so far has been more of an ensemble piece, so we haven’t gotten to go completely head to head like we will in this.

That’s about N.D.A.s, too, right?

Yes. It’s kind of a thriller, a mystery—very sexy. And it’s set at a law firm in Dallas, so, lawyers again! ♦

The point of cinematic realism is the inner life, and the miracle of movies is their power to portray subjectivity, though few filmmakers manage to attain that power—even despite their best efforts. Sophy Romvari’s first feature, “Blue Heron,” which opens Friday, is among the most inward—and among the most cannily, movingly strategic—of recent movies. Its boldly distinctive method is inseparable from its emotional vitality, and its audacious sense of form is as immediate and personal as the story it tells. It’s a memory-film that captures inner life with physical style: patience, speed, precision, and breathtaking leaps. The story involves the troubles of a beloved brother, and the longtime effort to reckon with his pain and that of his family. Romvari offered a nonfiction version of the story, about her own family, in her short film “Still Processing” (streaming on the Criterion Channel), which is admirable in its candor but offers raw material along with its raw emotion. “Blue Heron” develops the subject with an approach that reveals psychological depths from great aesthetic heights.

The feature is set in British Columbia, largely in the span of a summer during the nineteen-nineties, in a calm residential suburb on the ruggedly alluring Vancouver Island. The movie’s point of view is established with a brief opening voice-over by a woman named Sasha, whose reminiscences of childhood, and of her brother Jeremy, make up the bulk of the film. The story begins with the family moving to a house in that Vancouver Island neighborhood when Sasha (played as a child by Eylul Guven) is eight. Her parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa) are émigrés from Hungary; so is Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), the oldest of her three brothers, who has a different biological father than his siblings. (The other two boys, played by Liam Serg and Preston Drabble, seem slightly older than Sasha.) The parents, who are never named, have rough-edged, quasi-bohemian ways. Dad seems to be some sort of artist; he spends much of his time at a computer in the living room, doing what he calls his work, and he expects his wife to take the children out of the house so that he has peace and quiet to do it.

So Mom clears them out, taking them to a nearby nature preserve and natural-history museum, where the sharp-eyed Sasha notices the teen-age Jeremy stealing a souvenir keychain from a rotating rack. Troubles mount: another day, when Sasha returns home from playing with new friends, Jeremy is lying on the front stoop, prompting a panic-stricken neighbor to call about what appears to be a corpse. Jeremy is, of course, alive and unwell, exhibiting escalating behaviors that a psychologist eventually labels “oppositional-defiant disorder.” While Dad is developing photos in his darkroom, Jeremy flicks on the lights. Another day, as Mom loads the children into the car, Jeremy tosses a basketball against the house, again and again, his passive aggression registering through the ball’s unyielding thuds and his own frozen gaze. Some of his acts are dangerous or terrifying. He walks on the house’s sloped roof. He gets arrested for shoplifting. He makes fearsome threats. Sasha catches glimpses of her parents’ private struggles to navigate Jeremy’s needs, watching her mother collapse tearfully in her father’s arms, putting her ear to the door of the room where her parents meet with a social-services agent, peering through the window of Jeremy’s basement bedroom to see him nearly come to blows with their Dad.

The movie’s fluid observational construction conjures drama by compounding micro-incidents; its narrative emerges from the shaping of young Sasha’s inchoate sensibility as she observes the troubles that surround her. The story is something of a palimpsest, with Romvari’s own perspective intertwining with the character’s and conveying a sense of being both inside and outside the action. Romvari’s images are distinguished by their dual sense of logical efficacy and aesthetic loft. She overcomes the filmed image’s default setting as information, its inherent resistance to revelation, and builds the movie with an unmistakable evocation of Sasha’s point of view, but she does so undogmatically, without limiting herself to the child’s visual perspective. This choice makes those images that do stand in for Sasha’s line of sight all the more startling and forceful. The cinematography (by Maya Bankovic) leaves powerful afterthoughts of dramatic ideas while delivering feelings in real time. Many shots appear to be filmed with telephoto lenses, suggesting, via the camera’s distance from the action, Sasha’s distance from her own past and her struggle to remember. Other times, the camera pans slowly, its drifting movements evoking the associative efforts to make sense of long-ago events. Objects interposed between subjects and the camera hint at the quest for clarity through the intervening years.

Romvari herself grew up on an island in British Columbia, and the natural landscape plays a significant role in her movie’s textures and tones. There are majestic overhead views, grand Pacific sunsets, houses tucked among surrounding forests, their lights showing like fireflies through the foliage. The region plays like a force unto itself, conditioning the mood of the family’s dreamy yet precarious walks on jagged promontories and beach visits from cliff-bound paths. From the opening scene of the family’s move to town, the soft and wistful light shapes the film’s emotional world. The production design (by Victoria Furuya) reinforces the reminiscent tone with details evoking Sasha’s nineties childhood—cordless phone, floppy disks, camcorders. This specific technological moment is played crucially but lightly, gracefully, with a child’s-eye fanaticism for incidentals that anchor moments in memory. The film also highlights, through such enduring artifacts as cassette recordings and photographic prints, the archival basis of memory itself.

Romvari delights in the gleam and glow of children’s play, and she can’t resist showing it tarnished. Sasha makes new friends in the neighborhood, but her parents won’t let her invite them over, for fear that she’ll end up embarrassed at Jeremy’s behavior. The younger two brothers float paper boats in the kitchen sink and Jeremy plays along, sprinkling flour on their heads—but making the kitchen a total mess. In one scene, the kids are bouncing in the back yard on a trampoline when Jeremy returns home with a policeman, under arrest. (The incident endures in iconic fashion—at that moment, Sasha’s father, who was videotaping the jumping kids, hands her the still-running camera.) The actors seem tuned to one another like musicians in an orchestra, and Romvari guides them through performances that feel neither overplayed or understated. Their exchanges take place in a conversational middle range that puts their emotional substance—bewilderment, frustration, anger, quiet despair—into sharp and poignant contrast.

Sasha, the film’s most prominent character, is essentially a Jamesian central consciousness. The real protagonist of the story is Jeremy, whose character is crafted with a daring inventiveness that unites intellectual perspective and love. Though he dominates Sasha’s childhood—and though, in retrospect, his voice seems prominent throughout— he actually speaks very little in the film, and his voice is scantly heard. His few lines of dialogue have a power that far exceeds their word count, but what speaks for Jeremy most of the time are his physical gestures, which blend blank detachment with willful ferocity. His other mode of expression is making maps, detailed ones, which are also works of imagination—one town he’s mapped is called “Fantasyville.” Though these works don’t have a public reach, they nonetheless have a lasting impact on Sasha, and, it turns out, on others.

Some plot twists are just a matter of marketing (see: “The Drama”). The one in “Blue Heron” gave me a thrilling jolt even on a repeat viewing. Suffice it to say that eventually the tale of childhood catches up with the adult Sasha (played by Amy Zimmer), a filmmaker, who attempts to make sense of her past and Jeremy’s fate by undertaking her own investigation, at several decades’ remove. Romvari films Sasha’s efforts by combining authentic documentary elements—the adult Sasha’s interviews with real-life psychologists and social workers—and scenes featuring dramatic monologues of a rare poetic sublimity. With its fusion of memory and history, its blend of nonfiction and torrential imagination, its exploration of the very nature of memory, “Blue Heron” takes a place alongside other recent films, such as “Nickel Boys,” “The Mastermind,” and “The Secret Agent,” that offer similarly original approaches to to the collective and personal past—and to the very terms of its survival, its transmission, its unshakable power. ♦

This week’s story, “A Private View,” takes place at an advance showing for an exhibition at a museum of art in New York. When did you first think that this might make a good backdrop for a work of fiction? How did you decide what should be on display?

The story started with the idea of having an ending take place at an art opening. I wanted to write about a man from a working-class background, travelling through an impressive museum and feeling invisible because the well-heeled patrons ignore him.

For the art work, I was thinking about an exhibition that a mother and son could both relate to. When I was a child, every Sunday I would sit in church underneath the Stations of the Cross and then, after Mass, we would go home and I would watch cartoons. The experiences are jumbled in my mind, and the Stations become a story told over many single-frame images, just like any comic book. Growing up, no members of my family would ever have thought to take me to an art gallery, because they themselves felt unwelcome in those spaces. Like many children, religious art provided my only exposure to painting, and, when I think of my formative years and what has formed my own queer aesthetic, it is the religious iconography I stared up at mixed with the wild Technicolor of cartoon superheroes. It felt natural to create an artist for whom sexuality, religion, and childhood were intertwined. This mixing of the sacred and the camp led me to think of the French artists Pierre et Gilles; the American artist Andres Serrano; and then Cicciolina, the porn star, Jeff Koons muse, and politician. From there, my Italian sculptor emerged.

Jack, the narrator, is Scottish. His husband, David, is an American and a member of the museum’s curatorial team. David is mainly seen from a distance. We spend far more time with Jack’s mother, Jean, who is visiting from Glasgow. Did you always know that Jean would be in the foreground and David the background?

Yes. I wanted to write about the push and pull of an old life versus a new one, or about the different worlds a person straddles when they belong to one social class but are asked to fit into another. There’s a strange pain there, a tension that is worth exploring, and I think many of us who migrate to the big city often wonder, would my family fit in with this new life I’m building?

My own life does not feel like one continuous thing but, rather, two distinct halves that belong to two very different people. I grew up in Glasgow under Thatcherism, when the city deindustrialized too rapidly, working men were cast onto the slag heap of progress, and mass unemployment destroyed the prospects of multiple generations. A free education saved my life and brought me to New York, where I now spend my days surrounded by books and art. It’s almost unbelievable to me. My mother cleaned shopping centers, my granny was an understairs maid, and they worked so hard to insure that I was the first person in my family to finish high school.

I can hardly reconcile myself into a single human, and I worry that the boy I was would not recognize the man I have become. I wanted Jack to be caught between these two things, with his mother representing his true self, and his husband indicating the world he has stepped into.

Jack and David have quite different backgrounds, not just in terms of nationality but also class. Jack grew up in an impoverished single-parent household and David is from a wealthy Texan family. How do they cope with these differences? Is this a particularly tense time for them?

A relationship like this, where lovers come from opposite ends of the social spectrum, would be very fraught in the U.K. That’s probably why class-crossed lovers make such fertile ground for fiction—look at Heathcliff and Cathy, or poor Scudder and Maurice.

On the surface, things seem more fluid in America, but that is only the surface. As someone who immigrated to America, I thought I had escaped the worst limitations of class structures, but the longer I live here the less I think that is true. I came to America in 1996, and at first it felt really liberating. No one asked me what school I went to, or what my parents did for a living. People would ask where I was from, and then, having no real idea where Scotland was, that would mostly be the end of it. But what was liberating was also erasing.

I’m sure class will be a constant undercurrent in their relationship, mostly because, as David says, Jack has a chip on his shoulder and he can never “shut the fuck up about oppression.” But, thankfully, there’s something in Americans whereby they not only tolerate but seem rather fond of British people. I must say, I have a few very average-looking British friends who have reaped huge romantic benefits from that perversion.

Partway through the story, the reader learns something that upends our understanding of what’s going on. Did you know Jean’s status from the outset? Or did the revelation come as a surprise to you, too, as you were writing?

I wrote the first draft with Jean being a very real person, but, as time went on, I realized I wasn’t addressing the grief that was propelling the story. I was raised by an incredible single mother who lost her struggle with addiction when I was sixteen years old. Now, in my forties, I find I am still grieving. Many children of addicts feel that they could have done more to save their parents. As kids, we often feel somehow responsible for their addiction and that if only we were funnier, quieter, tidier, or better at school, then perhaps our parents wouldn’t drink as much as they do. Obviously, that is not how addiction works, and the issue is never with the child, but we often can’t help but think that way. I imagine Jack would feel that, if he’d never come to New York, if he’d only remained in Glasgow, then perhaps he could have saved his mother’s life. I think Jean haunts him in this way.

I say my mother drank herself to death, but it was poverty that really killed her. I was raised on the equivalent of forty-five dollars a week. Now, as a working adult, I have a little more than that, enough at least to improve my own life and, if my mother were alive, to be able to provide for her, too. I carry an enormous amount of guilt, and I imagine that Jack, walking through galleries filled with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of modern art, does too.

Is talking to Jean in his head a way for Jack to keep her alive? Will he be able to give this up? Is this part of a process of grieving or one of denial?

I don’t think Jack is in any sort of denial. It can be such a solitary experience when you’re grieving a parent but are in a relationship with someone who still has both of theirs. I think Jack is going through something that David is unable to understand.

Jack finds great comfort in spending time with Jean. There’s an honesty to her, and he feels understood in a way that he doesn’t by David. Jean knows both the old and the new versions of him, and throughout the story she acts as a mirror and tells him the truths he doesn’t want to admit.

I spent most of my twenties in New York encountering things I’d never been exposed to before—things like eating at a nice restaurant, going to the opera, or just staying in a hotel. I would often feel a great sadness amid all my excitement, because all I wanted to do was to share these experiences with my mother. Even now, I spend a lot of time daydreaming and trying to picture her on the 6 train or just walking over the Williamsburg Bridge with me. She would have loved New York.

Did writing the story make you think about what it’s like to be married to a writer?

It was a chance to admit to an annoying truth. See, I live in a small New York apartment, and so I write at my kitchen table—if you could call that room a kitchen, considering I’m not much of a cook. I wear noise-cancelling headphones so that my husband can go about his day. But, when I write, I speak every word out loud because writing is so much about rhythm. I didn’t know how irritating this was until my husband finally had enough and started recording videos of me doing it. I look like I’m possessed. It drives him out of his mind.

In May, you’re publishing your third novel, “John of John,” which is set on an island in the Hebrides. In 2020, we published your story “The Englishman,” in which a young Hebridean man travels to London. You mentioned then that you’d spent some time in the Outer Hebrides while you were researching a novel. Is “John of John” the result? What was it like to conjure up the landscape and people of the Hebrides?

“The Englishman” provided the first spark for “John of John,” so thank you for publishing it. I have written two novels, “Shuggie Bain” and “Young Mungo,” about the queer working-class experience, but I realized we often overlook rural lives in any conversations about class or political upheaval. In 2019, I went to the Outer Hebrides for the first time, thinking that I might write a novel, but, if that failed, then at least I would come to understand my own country a little better. I spent sixteen weeks gathering research, and travelled up the archipelago from island to island. The moment I arrived on the barren, almost lunar landscape of the east coast of Harris, I knew I had found the setting. Harris is a beautiful, singular place, where many fascinating things converge.

One of the challenges of this new novel was matching its heartbeat to the rhythm of the islands. Nothing happens quickly, and anything that happens is remembered forever. Life is governed by the seasons, and by the changing, often very harsh, weather. Crofting and sheep farming set the daily rhythms, but there’s also a strict church calendar. The islands are home to a very conservative branch of Calvinism which believes deeply in the Sabbath. All work stops, all recreation stops, and everyone turns to God. There’s an absolute silence that descends on a Sunday, and, whether you’re a believer or not, you’re expected to respect it. Underpinning everything is the patient rhythm of a place with a long intergenerational memory. People are very considerate with their words and actions, because they’ll live with the consequences for many, many years. Before I could even begin to write the characters, I had to think about time in a way I hadn’t before.

You studied textile design and spent many years in the fashion business. In “A Private View,” clothes are clearly very important to Jack. In “John of John,” the protagonist’s father is a sheep farmer and a weaver of tweed. What’s it like to think about clothing and textiles from the perspective of a fiction writer?

The discipline required by textiles would be useful training for any writer. Textiles are a lesson in building something from nothing, and you have to be hyper-focussed on the most minute detail. You spend endless hours in the repetitive act of laying one small thing after the other, while also having to be able to stand back and envision the over-all design. Occasionally, when it all goes horribly wrong, you have to find the fault and mend it, or rip it all out and start again. For me, creating cloth can be a lot like writing a story.

When writing, I often think of clothing as I’m building a character. Clothes are so deeply psychological. They hold shame and aspiration, function and desire. They tell us who a person is and who they hope to be. They tell us how a character feels about their body and also what they hope to reveal or conceal from those around them.

I suppose it was inevitable that I was going to write a novel about textiles. In “John of John,” it felt exciting to celebrate working-class men who created something beautiful for a living. It’s far removed from the coal miners of “Shuggie Bain.” Every step of the tweed-weaving is fascinating. I loved having the opportunity to capture all the creativity and sensitivity of that job. I love how the weavers take their inspiration from the landscape, and how they spend decades refining their craft. It felt a little overdue to have working men talk about beauty and color and refinement. I could spend hours in an old tin weave shed watching a weaver work. It’s certainly more visually interesting than watching a writer mutter to himself. ♦

None of the men looked up as my mother came down the museum stairs. I felt sorry for her. I wished I could make them notice. When she reached the middle landing, she paused, and I could tell she was resisting the urge to go back up and give them a second chance to get a good look. I smiled as she began to descend the final set. She gave a little kick with each step so that her long coat parted and revealed a shapely leg.

Jean wasn’t wearing her glasses, which helped to spare her from disappointment. She couldn’t see that the men had ignored her but I was certain she had felt it. She couldn’t see me from this distance, either, but she didn’t squint or search about; she simply arrived in the space knowing I would be there for her. I was always there for her.

As she neared the bottom of the stairs, she unbuttoned her coat. She was wearing her favorite dress, the knitted one with herons embroidered on the front, their necks intertwined and the moonlit sky behind them set with paillettes and sequins. It had the cheap glint of Lurex and although it was loose it clung to her body in the places she was softest.

At the weekend I had taken her to Ann Taylor and then to Eileen Fisher and offered to buy her anything she liked. She came out of the changing room in one outfit after the other and stood before me as though I had talked her into trying on a hessian sack. I wondered aloud if she wouldn’t like to look a little more refined for the opening. We persevered for ages before she said, in a voice so low that I almost missed it, “In all these years, I have never once tried to change you.”

My mother crossed the foyer toward me.

“Do we have to stay long?” she asked.

“Hello to you, too,” I said. “And no. Just long enough to be supportive.”

Earlier that afternoon, my husband, David, had phoned in a panic because he had forgotten a folder full of checklists. I promised to bring the folder to him. I told my mother that I would stay uptown and would arrange a car to bring her to the museum later that evening. I walked her through all the details for recognizing the Uber I’d order and assured her that everything would be all right.

The art crowd made me uncomfortable. I always needed a bracer before one of David’s openings. When I came out of the subway, I went into the first hotel I saw, where I sat at the bar and drank an Islay malt. I would have liked nothing better than to waste the afternoon in a bar with my mother. But Jean was only fun to drink with until she drank too much.

As she stood before me now I realized how she had spent the afternoon in my absence: she had dyed her hair cough-syrup red. She had teased it into its usual, brittle coif and lacquered it with hair spray that made it sparkle like loft insulation.

“For goodness’ sake. I was only gone a few hours.”

She patted the back of her head. “Don’t you like it?”

Jean had recently come to the opinion that her hair color—which had been bottle black since I was a boy—had been prematurely aging her. Now, in her sixties, she had stopped dyeing it and for a while had seemed to embrace its natural pigeon tones. When she arrived in New York, I hardly recognized her because she looked surprisingly appropriate for her age. I told her that the silver brightened her gray-green eyes, but every morning while she had been staying with us, she had worried that her smoking was staining the front. She didn’t trust our bathroom mirror so I took her to the window. I held her chin and turned her in the daylight to see if there was a trace of nicotine in her curls. I liked to be this close to her, so I took longer than I needed to reassure her that, no, her hair was fine and that, yes, she was, despite the years, still beautiful.

I held her hands; the tips of her fingers were stained with red dye. She grinned as if she were my child and I had caught her playing with ink markers.

“I would have paid for a proper salon.”

“I was feeling drab. I couldn’t wait.” Pulling her hands from mine, she looked toward the exhibition.

“Please, Mum, just try and behave yourself.”

She scratched her top lip with her bottom teeth. With a little nod of her head, she indicated that I should look down. I saw that inside her coat pocket lay a quarter bottle of Smirnoff. “Just in case,” she said, and then, with two fingers held aloft, she grinned and gave me the Scout’s salute, “Best to be prepared, dyb, dyb, dyb.”

We walked toward the first gallery and I could tell by the scrape of her left shoe that she was still favoring her right hip.

“And how did the taxi know where to bring me?”

“I told you. I do it all from my phone.”

I loved introducing my mother to new technologies—I could spend hours explaining how dating sites and ChatGPT worked. “When I was a girl, we listened to records,” she would say. “And, when I was done having my own children, we still listened to records.”

The unveiling of the new wing had been timed to coincide with a mid-career retrospective of an Italian sculptor. The artist created devotional scenes representing the fourteen Stations of the Cross. For each station he arranged different figures around the room. Viewers could walk through the scenes and feel as if they were witness to the Passion of the Christ. It was a sprawling work that had taken the sculptor the better part of two decades to complete.

As David and I had lain in bed that morning, I had read the reviews to him. The critics said the show was well worth seeing and David was relieved. They saw a little Koons, and a little Hanson, and they said that the artist had clearly borrowed from Rubens with his mass of twisted bodies and the faithful who were crying out to the heavens. They saw the influence of Tintoretto in the way the minor characters were caught up in their own petty dramas, in the way the baker haggled over bread as Jesus collapsed for the third and final time.

From a distance, the scenes seemed like classical interpretations of the Stations, but on closer inspection things became a little stranger. Throughout, the artist had substituted some of the Biblical figures for characters from popular culture. He swapped Pontius Pilate for a sneering Starscream from the Transformers. The weeping women of Jerusalem were interspersed with a half-dozen inconsolable Smurfs. There were other jarring, anachronistic details in the vignettes. Swiss Guards showed up in the crowd scenes with their feathered helmets and their square, muscular buttocks. Italian nonne stirred pots full of sauce with a look of utter boredom and, here and there, Neapolitan ragazzi sat atop their motorini and gawped at the torture. They held ceramic phones aloft, as if recording the Crucifixion for their social-media feeds.

The critic for the Times had debated whether it was “a triumph of artistic genius or the work of an obsessive shut-in, a grandmother who was mad for porcelain ornaments.” If I were being honest—which I could rarely be with David—it felt like a little bit of both.

The sculptures showed the strain and the delicacy of their materials. They wore their flaws without apology. The figures had cracked in many places and some of the statues revealed their complicated armature. All the reviews had featured one particular scene in which Mary Magdalene was replaced by a tight-faced Melania Trump. She was wearing her military jacket with “I REALLY DON’T CARE DO U?” emblazoned on the back. She had her arms folded and her hands were broken off in what was assumed to be a statement of her indifference toward suffering.

To fill the cracks in all the sculptures, the artist had melted vats of beeswax. To the beeswax he’d added his own blood and cups of semen that he had milked from anonymous Italian men he’d met on dating apps. In a type of kintsugi, he had lovingly mended the fault lines with this rose-colored paste so that all the figures seemed shot through with pale veins. The galleries were suffused with the tang of iron and old cum.

Tonight’s private viewing was for curatorial staff and the museum’s board of directors, but, more important, it was a chance to dazzle the wealthy donors who had bequeathed the permanent collection that filled the other halls. I was here purely because my husband was the assistant to the chief curator. I loved the museum, but I disliked the people who attended these events and how quickly they decided that I had nothing to offer them.

I felt fat and uncomfortable in my only suit. My trouser button was undone, concealed and secured by my belt. Earlier, as I waited for my mother to arrive, I had wandered through the exhibition alone. I knew a few of David’s colleagues and they seemed similarly shoehorned into their best outfits. The benefactors, on the other hand, wore their wealth with ease. The men were in custom suits and the women in sleeveless dresses, all the better to show off the tans they had acquired over Christmas.

My mother walked around the first station. I was relieved to see that it held her attention. The rendering was so lifelike that even if the meaning and the metaphor were lost on her, she could appreciate the dedication that had created it. She stopped and frowned at the intergalactic robot standing in for Pontius Pilate. I wondered if she understood the reference to childhood cartoons. My sister, Louise, had spent hours perfecting the screechy, imperious cry of Starscream, only to use it when phoning the takeaway and ordering curry sauce and chips. I must have been smirking because my mother turned suddenly with the suspicion that I was laughing at her.

“What’s so funny?”

“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just put it in the chat.”

Cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz

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I caught myself, but it was too late. My mother was looking at me expectantly and I scrambled to erase my sister from the story. “You remember the cartoons I liked when I was little, with the robots that turned into cars and jets and things? Well, this guy is the baddie. The second-in-command.”

My mother nodded loosely, as if a fly were buzzing around her head. It let me know that she heard me, but that she barely cared.

I followed her into the next gallery, where a photographer was shooting a large group of people. The man at the center looked so traumatized that I could only imagine that he was the sculptor. A chorus of museum staff was gathered around him, and my mother stopped to watch them. There were two young women, arty types in thick-framed glasses. They were wearing variations on the same rumpled plissé frock, and, just before my mother said it, I knew she would ask me if the women owned an iron.

“The crinkles are deliberate, Mum. They bought them like that.”

“Would it kill them to buy a belt?”

As the tallest man in most rooms, David was usually easy to spot. I searched the crowd for him. It was strange that he was not with this group.

I turned back to my mother, but she had wandered away. I meandered among the statues a while. A magnificent Raffaella Carrà appeared in a celestial vision to a crowd of Roman soldiers, while off to the side a gathering of ceramic youths did the Dougie for our fallen Christ.

“Is there much more to see?” my mother asked, startling me slightly.

“Where did you slink off to?”

She shrugged. “See, that taxi you sent for me . . .”

I thought I could smell vodka on her breath.

“It wasn’t yellow. This man pulled up and rolled down the window and started calling out your name. But I couldn’t understand him because he had an accent.”

“Jeanie, you have an accent.”

“And so I had to walk right up to the window, like a common prostitute.”

My mother could look so small sometimes. I was aware that she did it deliberately. She relaxed her shoulders and let her arms go limp. It was an old trick but I was powerless to resist. “Another half hour and then we’ll go for a drink, yeah?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said with a sudden smile. “You have yourself a deal.”

As soon as I looked up again, I glimpsed David in the next room. He was watching me and frowning. We locked eyes and I smiled and gave him two enthusiastic thumbs-up. “I’m so proud of you,” I mouthed silently, but David only puffed out his cheeks in exasperation.

I wondered how much he had seen of my mother and me.

He was in a group of employees who were following in slow procession behind an older man who was being pushed through the galleries in a wheelchair.

Fredrik Bolin had been the chief curator of painting and sculpture for almost three decades. This was to be the Norwegian’s last show for the museum before he was forced into retirement at the end of the year. David was the first assistant to the soon-to-be former chief curator, while the women he trailed were assistant curators. It was a slight rearrangement of words that annoyed David because it defined roles that were, in fact, very different. It was the women’s job to worry about the art and the artists, to curate shows and concern themselves with provenance. It was David’s job to take care of Mr. Bolin.

We had discussed the wheelchair many times before. It was David’s belief that, as soon as he put his hands on the back of the chair, his career would be over and he would be reduced to some kind of human-powered locomotive. He asked me if that was fair. Didn’t he already order the man’s lunch and pick up his dry cleaning? Didn’t he manage his calendar and decipher every crumpled receipt that Fredrik tossed on his desk? It was too much to be expected to move the man from room to room, from desk to bathroom.

He had perfected the art of looking the other way whenever Fredrik needed assistance. He simply moved toward the back and waited for a woman to feel the pressure to step forward and push the curator. It rarely failed. When I had asked him why Fredrik didn’t just buy a motorized wheelchair, David huffed and said that it was because Fredrik was in denial, and even after fifteen years in the chair he still believed that he would soon be back on his feet.

David looked handsome in his suit. I jabbed my tongue into my cheek, letting him know I would suck him off later. He crossed his eyes quickly. Then he scanned the room to see if anyone had seen him act the fool. I was smiling as he turned back to the curatorial cortège.

He was the tallest of five tall brothers. His father was the fourth generation in a long line of gentlemen ranchers—weekend cowboys who’d made their fortune in Austin as attorneys for large oil companies, but whose identity was still tied to the thousands of acres that the family owned near Marfa.

His mother was caught between the opinions of her church and the newfound liberalism of the Austin élites. One weekend at the ranch, she said that David had broken her heart, but if “you boys”—and she used the phrase “you boys” with a flap of her hands to mean all the little queers in the country—“if you boys can get married now, then perhaps you boys should.” To her mind, if David insisted on being gay, then perhaps matrimony would keep her church friends from obsessing about his sex life.

Until we were married, whenever I visited the ranch, David slept in the main house while I bunked in a well-appointed cabin that sat at the end of a dirt road. At first, David complained that none of his brothers’ girlfriends had been asked to do the same, but it soon became clear that the casita was preferable to the main house, where his mother hovered over everything and darkened the mood if she was not the constant center of her sons’ attention.

As we sprawled in his grandmother’s old oak bed, he made me promise never to write about his family. I agreed on condition that I could become the lady of the house when his mother died. He rolled on top of me and said that my mind was too precious to spoil in the dusty Texan heat.

I had been in Marfa the Thanksgiving that David announced he’d be assisting the chief curator. I had witnessed his father puncture his joy by telling him that no Louden man would ever put his hands to another man’s wheelchair.

Later that night, we drove to a distant gas station simply to escape the compound. I complained about what his father had said and David yelled at me. He said that I didn’t understand how complicated class issues were in Texas but that I should, seeing as I was a Scotsman, who never, ever shut the fuck up about oppression. He mocked me and did a hideous impression of a Dickensian urchin. As cruel as his words were, to hear a Texan attempt a Cockney cretin who seemed somehow related to Mrs. Doubtfire was infuriatingly funny.

I laughed bitterly. Then I agreed that class was indeed a tricky subject, but, in fact, it was quite easy to not be a cunt.

He often treated me like a yokel, like a cousin from the Old Country who didn’t understand the workings of a nation as great as America. His family wore bluejeans and sun-beaten hats, and when they were among their laborers they almost seemed of the people. But I could feel the way they maintained a subtle distance, a faint superiority as defined as any English lord’s. They were Scottish Presbyterians from generations back and so they overlooked it when I used phrases like “council house” and “school dinners,” because although I had been poor, at least I was Scottish, pale and pure from the source.

David’s favorite insult was to tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about. He did it so often that I once made a list of all the things that he granted me expertise over. Those were rain, housecleaning, and alcoholism.

“I’m tired of you looking at my family like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like they’re villains.”

“Yeah,” I said snidely, “I apologize. I do. I was wrong. I see that now. How dare I think badly of a family that stole everything from Mexicans.”

He pulled the car over and told me to get out.

When I refused, he lifted his boot and kicked me out.

He left me there, sitting on an embankment, shivering in the darkness, for an hour or more. There was no phone signal, no passing cars, no house lights for at least thirty miles.

Eventually, guilt or shame got the better of him and he came back to collect me.

“You can’t look down on another person’s family,” he said.

“I know that,” I said.

I had been humbled by the cold. More afraid of the dark plains than I would admit.

“No, I mean you, you specifically. How dare you look down on someone else’s family?”

“A penny for them?” Jean asked.

I made sure that David was out of my line of sight before I replied. “I was thinking about a story I want to write.”

“Oh, not another story about me,” she cried. “Another book about how I was the world’s worst mother. I wish you could find something else to write about.”

“Yeah? Me, too,” I said. “I’m trying, but every time I think I’m writing about something else, I always end up writing about you.”

“Obsessed,” she said. “That’s what you are.”

“It was my childhood.”

“Well, it’s not healthy. It’s high time you got over it.”

“What?” I scoffed. “Just like my sister did?”

At the mention of our Louise, my mother reared back. She turned and said to the room behind her, “Do you hear how he talks to me? How he talks to his only mother?”

But no one was listening.

My sister, Louise, taught art at a secondary school within one of the city’s most deprived housing schemes. She joked that, really, she was a bouncer in a night club where the patrons didn’t need to be drunk to start a fight. She lived with her husband and their three daughters in an airy flat on the leafy south side of Glasgow. It would have taken Jean two short bus rides to visit her. But Louise had cut our mother out of her life many years ago.

Louise’s breaking point had come one Christmas. It was to be the last Christmas before I left Glasgow to live in New York. For several years, our mother had been asking to host us at her small flat, saying that she wanted to make it up to us for spoiling so many of our Christmases when we were growing up. Louise had been able to duck this in the past, but, this particular year, Jean had started her pleading early and I had bullied my sister until she agreed to give our mother one more chance.

On Christmas Day, I showed up on time and knew instantly that something was wrong. My sister was scowling and pacing the path outside my mother’s flat. Her car was parked nearby and the engine was running. I peered into the car. My eldest niece looked to be on the verge of tears. She was wearing a velvet dress and her hair was in ribbons. Her presents were arranged all around her as if she were the centerpiece in a gift basket. I rapped on the glass and waved hello to my brother-in-law.

It had begun to snow. The tip of Louise’s nose was bright red, which made her eyes seem ferociously blue. Without asking, I tried to guess what she already knew: that Jean was lying dead—or, more likely, dead drunk somewhere—and that Christmas was cancelled again.

We waited half an hour or more, debating whether to call the police out on Christmas Day. Then, while Louise was peering through the letterbox, our mother alighted from the back of a black cab. A young man I had never seen before got out and paid the driver with a handful of loose change. Jean was all smiles. She had a single rotisserie chicken in one hand and was swinging a plastic bag in the other. The bag was full of winnings from an all-nighter at the Corinthian. The coins were rattling, and the pale pallor of a sleepless night made her seem more like Jacob Marley than like anyone’s idea of Santa Claus.

Louise never spoke to our mother again. When she fell pregnant with her third daughter, she bought herself a journal with a photograph of a baby wrapped in cabbage leaves on the cover. She wrote a manifesto, a promise to her unborn child about the type of mother she would be: When you’re feeling sad, I won’t tell you that men don’t like that in a girl. When you wake up in the middle of the night, I will be at home.

After the baby was born, she wrote our mother a forty-six-page goodbye. I’d moved to New York by then, and Louise’s letter—which my mother read down the phone—made it clear I would be the only one of her children to stay in contact with her.

For the first few years, I hoped that my mother and my sister could make amends and so I acted as a courier of sorts. I kept my mother updated on my nieces’ progress. If, one day, there was a reconciliation, I didn’t want the girls to be strangers to Big Jean. But if I made it sound as if my sister and her daughters were enjoying their lives, it only sank my mother into the drink. I couldn’t tell her how much joy the girls brought to everyone who knew them. How one was born for the stage or how the other had inexplicably inherited Jean’s love for animal prints. So, instead, when she asked how they were doing, I stuck to the driest narration: yes, they were getting big; yes, they were enjoying school.

When I was alone with my nieces—and out of earshot of my sister—I regaled them with the legends of Granny Jean. If one of my nieces mentioned that she had heard that Granny Jean was a bad woman, I would admit that sometimes she drank so much she fell in the street, but sometimes when she fell, she could catch herself in a forward roll, and spring up to her feet again like an acrobat.

Cartoon by Jared Nangle

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The girls liked that. It made them laugh.

When I was alone with my sister, I spoke of our mother as if I were a social worker, as if Jean were a foster kid who had made mistakes but needed another chance. When our mother achieved fleeting periods of sobriety—a month, four months, a hundred and fifty-three days—I was disgusted to hear myself speak of it with naïve optimism, as though our family had nearly won the lottery, and, if we played again, then next time, maybe next time, we would win.

I looked around for Jean and saw her near a grouping where Jesus meets his mother on the road to Calvary. The sculptor had managed to carve Mary’s robes with such realistic folds it was difficult to imagine that they were not actually cloth. I watched my mother look left and right before she reached out her hand to touch.

“They’re a bit like massive Nativity scenes,” I said. “I don’t get the hype.”

She ignored me and walked on.

I followed her but I caught my foot on one of the pediments and tripped slightly. I locked eyes with the docent and bent to wipe the scuff from the plinth.

My mother wandered ahead and I took the opportunity to regard her instead of the art. I didn’t care for the sculptures, not really. I found them repetitive, and being forced to find the incongruous characters was like playing “Where’s Wally?” over and over. My mother paused by a wall plaque and for a moment I tried to imagine her as an independent New Yorker, as a person who belonged in these circles. Perhaps she was a faded star. An eccentric burnout, someone for whom the eighties had been dazzling but dimming at the same time. She could have been a painter of geometric abstracts who lived in a former squat on the Lower East Side, a woman with many lovers, whose work had never quite broken through but would find an appreciative audience after she died.

We moved along to the fifth station, where Simon of Cyrene was carrying Jesus’ Cross for him. An inquisition of potbellied priests stood at the side of the road. They wore satisfied expressions and appeared oblivious to the suffering of our Saviour. Two priests had raised their cassocks and were peeing into his path. The artist had coated their stubby penises in gold leaf.

I heard my mother tut. She was looking around for someone to protest to. “That’s a fucking disgrace,” she said. “Children could see that.”

“Oh, they have, Jean, they have.”

I considered telling her about the three different penises I had seen by the time I was twelve. It seemed that all my mother’s boyfriends had liked to wear her short, quilted housecoat. Some mornings they would emerge from her bedroom and join me while I knelt before the television and watched cartoons. As the men spooned sugar puffs into their mouths they would spread their legs—perhaps to avoid spilling milk on themselves—and the gown would splay open. One man had sat so close I could smell him.

Years later, I asked my sister if she remembered these men and if they had ever flashed her. I was relieved when she looked at me with genuine horror. As my sister poured more wine, I wondered aloud if it had been carelessness or if these men had in fact enjoyed exposing themselves to a little boy. Louise said that it probably was sexual, considering the idlers and wastrels our mother was attracted to, but perhaps they were also expressing their dominance, stating their claim to the territory by showing themselves to the only other male in the house. I could not forget the long, sallow penis of one particular boyfriend. It had been so much darker than his pale, melancholy face.

My mother said that she had seen enough, so we made our way back through. The reception was in full swing now. I saw David standing in a corner talking to a German gallerist he knew. I could tell by the flush in his cheeks that he had finally had a drink and had managed to relax a little.

“You want to be careful with that one,” she said. “He’s too used to getting his own way.”

“I know.”

“And you’ve let yourself go.”

“It’s the writing,” I said. “The better it goes, the less I move.”

“So, it’s my fault you’re getting fat?”

“What the fuck are you doing!”

His anger took me by surprise. He had raised his voice and several people turned to look.

While I had been distracted by my mother, David had crossed the galleries toward us. He grabbed my arm and pulled me round the far side of one of the sculptures.

“Babe, the show looks so goo—”

“I’ve been watching you all night!” he spat. “You’ve been doing that mumbling again.” He raised his hands to his face. His fingers splayed and writhed like a terrible mandible. “That fucking . . . chattering.”

“I was working up a story,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

It was a bad habit, but when I was writing I mumbled to myself. I was unaware that I was doing it. When it was going well, I imagined whole conversations and spoke them out loud. I couldn’t write without talking to myself.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “You were talking to your mother again.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You were! You were talking to your mother. Everyone can see you!”

Flecks of spume were gathering in the corners of his mouth.

I wanted to wipe them away.

The crowd had gathered in the foyer to hear the sculptor give his speech. The men’s bathroom was empty. I sat on the toilet lid with the stall door open and watched as my mother fixed her makeup at the mirror. The elegant clutch she had arrived with had somehow morphed into the massive, bottomless handbag of my youth. She took a brace of Carlsberg lager from its depths, separated one from the pack, cracked it open, and sucked the foam from the top. “You shouldn’t let him talk to you like that,” she said between slurps. “Once they start they never stop.”

I wanted to say: Look at him, and then look at me. He was the best I would ever get, and anybody who saw us together thought the exact same thing.

But before I could tell her this, I noticed that she had changed her shoes. When had she done that? She was wearing the scuffed black heels that she used to color in with a bingo marker.

This was the problem with conjuring my mother. All the memories I had of her were out of date. All those memories made me sad. I didn’t want to be sad. I wanted to be happy. I wanted her to see how well I was doing here in New York.

“So you fought.” She took a large hairbrush from her bag and brushed the volume back into her hair. “Big whoop.”

“You’re wrong to use the past tense. You need the present continuous.”

“What? I wish you would let me talk in my own voice.”

“I do,” I said, sounding more hurt than I would care to admit.

Jean gave a hollow laugh. “You twist my words. And you do it in your stupit books, too. I don’t sound anything like maself.”

“Don’t say that. Please.”

She laid her meagre makeup on the counter. The dried-out mascara she needed to spit on, the tube of worn-down lipstick. I registered that her hair was no longer cough-syrup red but the bottled blue-black that she liked. When had she dyed it again?

She caught my eye in the mirror and held it a moment. “You’re not going to cry, are you?”

“You’re not allowed to ask men that.”

“Who says?”

“And you can’t ask us about our weight, either. We feel bad about our bodies.”

She frowned at me.

“And you should know that we’re not allowed to flirt with you anymore.”

She spun around. “Why not?”

“You complained.”

“Not me.”

“No, Jean,” I laughed. “Not you.”

She dabbed a little lipstick on the blades of her cheeks then smoothed it in. “Maybe I left at the right time.”

There was a round of applause out in the gallery and I knew the speeches were finished. I came out of the stall and crossed to the sink. I washed my hands.

“I hate to say it. But what if David was right?” she said. “What if you need to stop all this?”

“But I like talking to you. Don’t you like talking to me?”

“But I’m not talking to you.”

I disliked that as an answer and so I screwed my eyes shut. When I opened them again I forced her to say, “Of course I do, darling. I like talking to you very much.”

Two banker types came in to use the facilities. I cupped my phone to my ear and chatted to myself as though I were on a call.

Outside, the galleries were mostly empty. Anyone who was left was gathering at the bar.

David had been watching my muttering for some months before he asked what I was doing. Later, the fact that he had waited those months would be used as evidence in one of our fights to show how painfully self-absorbed he was. When he first asked who I was talking to, I had lied and said I was working on a screenplay and obsessing over dialogue.

He was American, so he liked that.

The next time he caught me was in public. We were heading in different directions on the 6 train when he spied me across the tracks. I had been unaware that he was watching as I talked to my mother. I was laughing out loud, pulling faces in response to some funny little thing she’d said. He rushed up the stairs and along the platform toward me.

People were staring. I thought I should be honest. I told him what I was doing. I told him that I was talking to her. I told him that it comforted me sometimes.

He looked at me like I was mad.

“If he’s going to become an equestrian, I’d rather he did it at home.”

Cartoon by Justin Sheen

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I felt a sadness. I was homesick. But I was not out of my mind. I didn’t feel unwell. I knew what was real and what was not.

If I felt anything then it was a shameful guilt that my own life should be so good when my mother’s had been so tough.

I tried to explain all this to David but I could see he didn’t understand. How could he understand when his own mother was still alive?

It was difficult to calibrate Jean in my imagination. It was horrible, but for all our happy memories I remembered her most vividly in 2014, in the months before she died. She had gone missing for a few days and one of her neighbors alerted the police, who then phoned me in New York. I had flown back to Glasgow and landed mere hours before the police brought her home. Jean had been on a bad bender, and a good Samaritan had found her wandering by the river, shoeless in the January sleet.

It did me no good to think of her this way. That was a bad memory, an old film that should never be rewound.

What I wanted was to share the now with her. I wanted to bring her into my life and spoil her. To do all the things I never got to do with her when she was alive.

I wanted to take her to Las Vegas because she would have loved the ceilings painted to resemble skies. I wanted to bring her to brunch with my friends and then waste a Sunday walking to Tompkins Square Park and feeling a little tipsy as we laughed at the puppies in the dog run.

I looked around for David but he was nowhere to be seen. I figured the team had moved on to dinner, so I went to the bar and got myself a glass of prosecco. I returned to my mother and in my mind I handed a glass to her. She tasted it, then she grimaced.

“You’ll have to develop a taste for the finer things. No more of the cheap Commotion Lotion, you old lush.”

She liked to be insulted. She squeezed my arm and pulled into my side. She was chuckling to herself and I closed my eyes. I loved the smell of her hair spray.

We moved in the direction of the twelfth station. Without discussing it, we had skipped several rooms, coming to the tacit agreement that we didn’t really care for the art. I sipped my prosecco, while my mother downed hers in three gulps.

The bar staff were beginning to clear up for the night. When I turned back to my mother she was wearing a demure shift dress and I smiled to see it.

“You look nice.”

I had gone to Ann Taylor recently. I liked to spend time picking out hypothetical outfits, choosing dresses for a gallery opening or maybe something pretty for a summer wedding. I wanted to update her, to imagine her here and in this moment. I had a hidden folder on my laptop and I clipped images of clothing and hair styles that she might like.

I was often drawn to women on the subway, older, elegant women who took good care of themselves. I sat opposite them and studied their appearance and imagined my mother had lived to her fifties and become one of them. I liked to dream that I had been able to improve her life, and that, as my own circumstances improved, I had spoiled her the way a son should.

We arrived at the final station. Jesus was being taken down from the Cross. The rendering of his lifeless body was so realistic, the grief etched on the faces of the crowd so plaintive, that despite feeling lightheaded from the wine, we both fell silent. We walked in opposite directions around the sculpture. As though in reverence to Mary’s pain, the sculptor had limited the substitutions, but there, at the edge of the scene, sat Bambi and Thumper. Here, in this new context, their large eyes did not seem wide with their usual wonder but swollen with grief and disbelief. We stood for a while considering the gouges in our Lord’s hands. Nicodemus, looking on as the body was unhooked, had a face that seemed familiar—a strong nose, a soft, curling beard, an expression that said he could bear this weight with dignity.

“Don’t you think that looks like your dad?” she said quietly.

I swallowed the last of my prosecco and winced. All the grit and sugar had settled at the bottom.

Jean took a step toward the sculpture. “Your father could have done better than me. I always thought that.”

“We could all have done better than you, Jeanie.”

My mother laughed.

“I like to look at your wedding photo,” I said. “You were so young.”

“We thought we knew it all.” She took my hand and squeezed it. “I wish you hadn’t changed your name. I like Jack, but you were always my wee Jimmy.” She seemed lost to her own thoughts for a moment. Then she said, “Mary Magdalene is a hard act to follow.”

I forgave her the cliché because it felt very much like a thing she would actually say. Besides, wasn’t the whole thing a cliché? I dared not look at my life from the outside. I mortified myself when I did.

I texted David. Where are you? Can I come?

I watched the dots as he started typing. Then I watched the dots disappear.

I went to the coat check and collected my puffer. I imagined that they’d given me my mother’s coat, too, and that it was a thick, floor-length fur.

I returned to her. She was standing alone in the empty gallery. When she saw me she smiled. For all my mother’s faults, she rarely dwelled on sadness.

Her stomach made an audible gurgle. She placed her hand on it. “I was so nervous that I couldn’t eat. Do they not feed you at these things?”

I helped her into her coat. “Listen, Mum. I can’t see you for a while.”

“I know,” she turned and put her arm into the sleeve. Her hand was so small. “Och, you go on now. Sure, I’ll be all right.”

“I always wanted to see you in a museum.”

She looked up at me a long moment. Then she placed her hand on my cheek. I could almost feel it.

She didn’t dissolve or blow away in a gust of rose petals. There was never any cinematic ending. I simply turned away. I stopped thinking of her and she was gone.

I zipped up my jacket and headed up the stairs with the last of the patrons. Out on the street, the snow had turned to slush again. I took out my phone and texted David that I was sorry, that I would try harder. This time he didn’t bother to open the text and I knew that he was punishing me with silence. ♦

On October 30, 2023, shortly before my sixty-ninth birthday, I stepped into a music store a few minutes from my house, in the southern suburbs of Milan, to buy a mandolin. At first, I thought that I would come away empty-handed. It’s a big store, with long rows of guitars and orchestral instruments on every wall, the floor space taken up by pianos and keyboards. But eventually I spotted them, high in a cobwebby corner: two mandolins—one a folksy flat-back and the other a classical bowl-back. After getting them down with the aid of a ladder, the store assistant had to wipe off the dust. Though Italy was the birthplace of the mandolin, both had been made in China.

I hesitated. I hadn’t touched a mandolin since adolescence, and, even then, I’d only fooled around. My wife was beside me. “Do it,” she said.

At home, I pulled the flat-back from its case. The sound box had a teardrop shape, just a couple of inches deep, with a golden-brown polyurethane finish that darkened to black at the edges. The whole thing was only two feet long and very light. Its eight strings were arranged in pairs and tuned in fifths, like a violin: G, D, A, E. When I plucked them with the plastic pick provided, the sound emerged, bright and metallic, from F-shaped holes on either side of an adjustable bridge.

The first weeks were a roller coaster of pleasure and perplexity. Touching the strings, my fingers started to remember things that I had long forgotten. Here was the Irish jig “Father O’Flynn,” here the English lament “Water of Tyne,” and here, even, the opening bars from Vivaldi’s concerto for two mandolins. Simply holding the mandolin had transported me back fifty years.

But although I played for two or three hours a day, I struggled to make progress. My fingers were stiff. I had no technique. And these memories soon lost their shine. How many times do you want to hear “Father O’Flynn”? Or an English lament? And, if I were to tackle the Vivaldi, I’d have to learn to read the music reliably as I played. Was that really going to happen at my age? Asked by friends to play something, I’d become impossibly nervous. Why? Does music have value, I wondered, if you play only for yourself? What had seemed like a good way of chilling out was actually plunging me into a kind of crisis.

If this attempt to reclaim the instrument of my youth had been a mistake, I wasn’t alone in making it. Asking around, I became aware of other older people who were returning to music or even taking it up for the first time. My brother, in upstate New York, was one of them. We live oceans apart and rarely speak, but in an exchange of e-mails I discovered that he’d gone back to the piano and joined a Facebook group called Adult Piano Returners, which has forty-six thousand members. It was uncanny, we agreed, that we’d both felt this compulsion to make music on the threshold of old age.

Was it a kind of collective dotage? A little research suggested that the trend was global. In Germany, in 2023, the national association of music schools reported that the number of seniors in music education had grown six-fold since 2000. Perhaps as a result, various European countries had introduced academic programs in the new field of music geragogy—the study of music-learning in old age. In Genoa, a school started to offer a course in drumming for people over sixty. Academic papers abounded: “The Meaning of Learning Piano Keyboard in the Lives of Older Chinese People,” “Exploring Motivation for Older Adults in South Korea to Engage in Musical-Instrument Learning After Retirement.” Inevitably, there were commercial repercussions: in May, 2025, the Financial Times reported that Yamaha would now target older people when promoting its saxophones in China.

Far from being a sign of dotage, scientists concurred, music practice in old age confers all kinds of cognitive benefits. After four years of following a group who’d taken up piano in their seventies, neuroscientists at Kyoto University found that the putamen and cerebellum areas of their brains—crucial for motor control, learning, cognition, and memory—were surprisingly free of the atrophy that usually accompanies aging.

All this was reassuring but not entirely helpful. One doesn’t labor over scales and arpeggios just to stimulate one’s neural pathways. And why was I the only older person to have chosen the mandolin? As a teen-ager listening to folk music in London pubs, I’d been attracted to the instrument’s nimble, tinkling cheerfulness, its being on the margins, not too demanding, perhaps. Now, exploring mandolin courses online, I found that they were teaching mainly bluegrass, which I’ve never been interested in. There seemed to be an unwarranted frenzy in the speed at which everything was played, as if music were as much a sport as an artistic pursuit.

Speed in general was a problem. A note played on the mandolin doesn’t resonate for long before decaying. Perhaps a second or two. This is owing to the high pitch of the notes, the tension of the strings, and the small body of the instrument. A note played on the guitar lasts about three times longer. As a result, music arranged for the mandolin tends to multiply the notes or the number of times each note is picked in order to fill the space, a process that culminates in the famous Neapolitan tremolo—in which the same note is repeatedly picked at upward of ten strokes a second, a speed I found hard even to imagine.

“You need a teacher,” my wife told me. But my only music teachers—Miss Mellor, who taught me the piano when I was seven, and Mr. Padmore, when I was in the church choir, before my voice broke—had both terrified me, to the point that I came to associate musical performance with exposure to humiliation. How much worse would it be now that I was older and supposedly competent? Unsurprisingly, experts identify the “threat to the ego” as a major obstacle for older learners. However, right when my resolve was wavering, I upped the stakes by buying another mandolin. In London for work, I passed a store with twenty or so beautiful instruments. What harm could there be in taking a look? An hour later, I walked out with a handmade Celtic flat-back with a marvellously rich, warm tone. So rich and warm, I felt ready to face a teacher.

“Life in tune with mandolin soul,” Paolo Monesi’s website proposed. He had founded the Southern Comfort Band, an Italian bluegrass group, decades before. His photos had a nineteen-eighties feel: long hair, drooping mustache. But the man I eventually sat down with exuded a clean-cut, salt-and-pepper sobriety, and on his lap was not the F-style flat-back featured on his website but a pretty Neapolitan bowl-back with mother-of-pearl inlay.

“Play something,” he said.

It was the moment of truth. “Father O’Flynn” was my choice: simple, plonky, and utterly familiar. My hands had different ideas. All at once, I became not an integrated self but an amalgam of twitching body parts. I switched to Vivaldi, with much the same result. Returning home in a foul mood, I decided to call time on this mandolin madness.

And yet.

“If you want to go on,” Paolo had suggested, “why not take a look at the sonatas of Francesco Lecce?” He himself, he explained, had given up folk music to concentrate on the classical repertoire and was studying under the world-renowned maestro Ugo Orlandi, at the Milan Conservatory, where his special interest was the Baroque. Since I’d played a snatch of Vivaldi, perhaps that might attract me.

The only Wikipedia entry for Francesco Lecce was in German. A Neapolitan, it said, whose name turned up in the second half of the eighteenth century as a musician at the Royal Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro in the Naples Duomo. There were no dates of birth or death, but a manuscript of sixty-seven short pieces for solo mandolin or violin had been unearthed from archives in recent years.

On YouTube, a young man in a gray hoodie played Sonatina No. 1, exactly seventy charming seconds of it. To the right of the frame, there was a facsimile of a handwritten score—“Sonate e Partite del Sigr. D: Francesco Lecce.” The notation was curiously quaint, dots and curly tails swimming along like so many tadpoles. Tackling it myself, I felt that the music was different from anything I’d played before, as if I were being invited to a decorous dance, at once intimate and impersonal.

Photograph courtesy International Music Score Library Project

“You’ve got your pick directions wrong,” Paolo told me. The dotted notes required two downstrokes, followed by a snatched upstroke, the closing appoggiatura a powerful downstroke followed by an upstroke picked so softly it was barely heard. Surely I’d noticed the appoggiatura? In general, I’d have to completely relearn my right-wrist movement.

He played the piece himself: the sprightly snatched notes like brisk turns of the heel; the dying fall of the appoggiatura a gracious curtsy. The bowl-back was exquisitely mellow. “A nineteen-seventies Calace,” he told me. “They get better with age.”

Calace, I discovered, was a Neapolitan workshop that had been making mandolins since 1825, and Raffaele Calace, the grandson of the founder, had been the greatest composer for mandolin in the late nineteenth century. But his music was quite different from the pieces that Paolo introduced me to over the next year, all of which were written in the mid-eighteenth century. With each composer we studied—Emanuele Barbella, Gabriele Leone, Giovanni Battista Gervasio—I dived a little deeper into the history of the instrument, and slowly, unexpectedly, my own attraction to it began to make sense.

Invented in seventeenth-century Italy, during a period of intense experimentation with plucked-string instruments, the mandolin came in various versions and sizes, with four, five, or six strings, single or double. Everything was fluid. There were gut strings, then metallic strings. You could pick with a quill—ostrich feather or raven—or, later, with a tortoiseshell plectrum. By the mid-eighteenth century, the mandolin had become hugely popular in Naples, Rome, and, above all, Paris.

Why? Why was it so successful then but not now? This was the only question I dared ask, sitting in on a seminar at the Milan Conservatory. The teacher was Orlandi himself, both an authority on the history of the instrument and a virtuoso performer. Because the mandolin, unlike the violin, he said, quoting from Leone’s method book, published in 1768, “can tolerate mediocrity.” Music was overwhelmingly domestic at that time. There were no concert halls, and, if people wanted music, they had to make it themselves, in houses where perhaps only one room was heated. A poorly bowed violin screeched. Since it had no frets, learners were frequently off pitch. Even played badly, the fretted mandolin was pleasant and relatively quiet.

Given these circumstances, most of the music written for mandolin (eighty-five volumes were published in Paris between 1761 and 1783) was intended for amateurs, often women. The playing position was thought more decorous than the position for the violin, and the mandolin itself was visually attractive, appearing as a fashion accessory in any number of paintings. An instrument made “pour les Dames,” Gervasio noted on the title page of his method book. The dominant composition was the intimate duet; often, mandolins were made and sold as twins, to be played together. Noble families, Orlandi tells his students, sometimes hired musicians to accompany their amateur efforts.

In the seventeen-seventies, Gervasio composed six duets dedicated to his student the Princess of Prussia. I remember the rush of excitement the first time I managed to get through one of these with Paolo. The mandolins weave intricate patterns together, in counterpoint or unison. Everything is light, zippy, and gently ironic. In the fun of it all, I simply forgot to be nervous.

“You need to work on your expression,” Paolo observed with a sigh.

The fact that the mandolin is easy on the ear doesn’t mean that it is easy to play. Leone taught and codified dozens of complicated pick-stroke combinations, to give depth and expression. “This artist’s skill was astonishing and he was a genuine success,” a review of Leone’s performance at a concert in Paris in 1766 enthused but added ominously, “which was all the more flattering for him because his chosen instrument is not loud compared to the size of the venue.” The era of the concert hall was at hand, and the same qualities that had made the mandolin attractive at home now put it at a disadvantage. The violin and other stringed instruments were redesigned to improve projection and volume. Attempts were made to do the same for the mandolin, but they were never enough. The fact that the instrument was popular with amateurs, particularly in Naples, and often purchased as a souvenir by tourists led to its being disparaged by the state-sponsored academies. So, in a general process of professionalization that changed the way that music was experienced, raising standards while widening the gap between expert and amateur, the mandolin fell out of fashion. Beethoven’s lovely duets for mandolin and harpsichord, written in the seventeen-nineties “pour la belle Josephine,” the wife of a Bohemian nobleman, were not published or publicly performed in his lifetime. By the mid-nineteenth century, the instrument and the music written for it had been largely forgotten—to the point, Berlioz complained, that it was hard to find a mandolinist to perform the serenade in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.”

Is domestic music a second-class thing? Discovering this history, I felt strongly what a different phenomenon music is when you make it yourself. You’re inside it, living it, experiencing a pleasure so intense that pleasure is perhaps no longer the word. This surely helps explain why older people are turning to it. After countless hours of practice, I was able to play one of Beethoven’s duets with my wife on piano. But she found it hard to make her instrument quiet enough for mine to be audible, and I struggled to play loudly enough for her. Volume is a real issue for the mandolin. The harpsichord was also a victim of the orchestral era.

Then, in the late nineteenth century, the mandolin experienced a second flowering, albeit in a different guise. In the newly unified Italy, it became the national instrument par excellence. Margherita of Savoy, the country’s first and much loved queen, played and promoted it. The composers Raffaele Calace and Carlo Munier set out to write music of a quality the academies could not ignore. The mandolin quartet was developed, mixing treble and bass versions of the instrument, and the technique of the tremolo was taken to new heights of sophistication. Calace’s “Fantasia Poetica” is a madly ambitious romantic keening up and down the fretboard, singing and wailing in a helter-skelter of shrill, sustained tremolo. Not a piece for the amateur.

Equally important was Queen Margherita’s association with what would become the Reale Circolo Mandolinisti, in Florence, which established a full mandolin orchestra using mandolins, the larger mandolas, and mandocellos. In just a few years, such ensembles became all the rage, spreading through Europe to the U.S. and even Japan and Korea. As early as 1888, Kansas City was reported to have a hundred mandolin clubs, and, by the turn of the century, all the major East Coast cities had mandolin orchestras. Again, women played a leading role. In eighteen-nineties London, where it was generally frowned upon for “respectable” women to play professionally, there were dozens of all-female mandolin orchestras, some involving forty to fifty women. So the instrument became part of a process of emancipation and socialization.

To meet increased demand, factory-built mandolins appeared. In Chicago in 1894, Lyon & Healy turned out seven thousand of them. When, in the early nineteen-hundreds, Gibson developed the F-style flat-back, inspired by the Stradivarius violin, the idea was to produce a louder instrument that could be used for classical as well as folk music, while being assembly-line-friendly. Instead, the success of the flat-back led to a further separation between popular and classical music, with the punchy F-style becoming the trademark instrument of the celebrated Bill Monroe and his newly invented bluegrass style. The bowl-back, thanks to its shape, produces a greater number of high partial harmonics that give it a distinctive, delicate tone preferred by most players of classical music. However, neither design took well to electrical amplification, and, by the nineteen-forties, production lines had been given over to the guitar.

“Know the history of your instrument,” Orlandi exhorts his students. “Its range, its possibilities.” He describes how Vivaldi’s music was rediscovered in the nineteen-thirties, after two centuries of neglect. How scholars became aware of the Gimo archive, which includes nineteen works for mandolin, collected in Italy by the son of a Swedish iron manufacturer in 1762. But to one class he also brings along a jazz mandolinist from Puglia, who learned to play as an apprentice at a barbershop in the nineteen-seventies. Barbers, tailors, grocers, and bakers would often keep a musical instrument handy to pass the time when there were no customers.

It was this sense of a variegated community, stretching across time and space, always struggling for recognition, that so attracted me. “The mandolin is a ghetto,” Orlandi laments. But a cheerful one, I’d say. After a year of lessons with Paolo, who, I discovered, plays in a mandolin orchestra in Milan, I travelled down to Naples to buy a Calace bowl-back. Not an impulse purchase this time but a sort of yearning for initiation.

Now in his seventies, Raffaele Calace, Jr., is the great-great-grandson of the workshop’s founder. He operates, with his daughter, Annamaria, and a handful of craftsmen, from the first floor of an old palazzo in the narrow Vico San Domenico Maggiore. There’s a small, cluttered reception area where an espresso pot is coming to a boil as I arrive. From the big room beyond, where men are working with chisels and planes, wafts a powerful smell of wood glue. The bowl of the mandolin is created with twenty-five or more hand-cut strips of maple or rosewood, each heated, bent, then glued around an inner shell.

It’s summer, and there’s no air-conditioning. A big fan turns slowly on the ceiling. The benches are blackened with age, strewn with tools. On shelves from floor to ceiling are mandolins in every phase of construction. “We mostly sell for export,” Annamaria tells me, “to Japan and Korea, among other countries.” She regrets the decline in amateur musicianship, and the mental space that is now occupied by TV and social media, and hopes that more people can find pleasure in the instrument they’re so proud to produce. On the other hand, she adds, “Few can make a living playing the mandolin.”

Raffaele tunes an instrument for me with enviable speed, striking a tuning fork on his desk. This mandolin is quite different from my flat-back, the strings closer together, the arm shorter, the frets more tightly spaced. The bowl is so big and deep that when I hold it against my chest I can’t see where my fingers are. But everything is silky and precise to the touch, and the sound astonishingly full and sweet in the small room, with the strain of an accordion coming in through the open window.

“I never asked you,” Paolo remarks a month later, at the end of another duet, “if you were interested in playing with the mandolin orchestra.”

“If I’m ever good enough.”

He pulls a wry face that might mean anything, and I realize that he’s given me something to work toward. I doubt I’ll actually get there, but, as a solution to the existential question of what to do with your time in old age, how to avoid the toxic pull of the newsfeed or the temptation to work on forever as if you were immortal, the prospect is alluring. ♦