My Death

September 15, 2023
A grieving author, a mysterious painting, and an aging femme fatale of the Modernist set collide in Scotland with uncanny results. This slender but richly evocative novella opens with its main character at a crossroads. Tuttle's unnamed narrator, a lifelong writer, is in the throes of a deep grief that has robbed her of her impetus to create. In the year and five months since her husband's death, she has isolated herself in her coastal Scottish cottage, but now an invitation from her agent, Selwyn, as well as the pressing economic urgency of her dried-up income have brought her to Edinburgh to pitch a new project--if only she knew what it would be. A fortuitous stop at the National Gallery brings the narrator face-to-face with Circe, a favorite painting by fictional early 20th-century master W. E. Logan. The model for Circe was the enigmatic Helen Elizabeth Ralston, whose own novelistic career flashed like a meteor across the Modernist literary landscape and who has deeply influenced the narrator's work. Still under the spell of Logan's painting, a rendering of Circe among the swine, the narrator proposes to Selwyn that she will write a biography of Ralston, examining the truth of her tumultuous affair with Logan and the long career that followed the dissolution of their relationship. Selwyn's connections bring the narrator to the home of Alistair Reid, an elderly collector who has in his possession a lost Ralston painting entitled "My Death," which hides within it the key to the provocative mystery surrounding the true nature of Ralston and Logan's relationship and the sudden, unexplained blindness that ended his career. The narrator sets out to interview Ralston, now in her mid-90s in Glasgow, but the answers she finds there threaten to destabilize everything she thought she knew about the literary world and her own life story. Full of twists and turns, the book conjures the rich inner lives of women working on the fringes of artistic communities that often forget to memorialize or acknowledge them, even as Tuttle keeps taut the thread of suspense that animates the story. Powerful and empoweringly weird.

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