A Warhol Girl with Banksy Talent

First published on The Daily Beast, August 3, 2014. Read the original here.

Forever ago in the mid ’60s, a sylph of a girl named Edie Sedgwick captivated the world—or at least Andy Warhol, and through his Factory and his films and his photos, everything and everyone else that mattered. She was the American art world’s “It Girl,” the source material for numerous plays, books, and movies, even the alleged inspiration for Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”

Perhaps that’s part of what inspired the name of the eponymous heroine in Adele Griffin’s addictive new YA novel, The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone. In a phone interview, Griffin says the book is, in part, homage to Sedgwick, whom Griffin stumbled upon as a child when a library mis-shelved the biography Edie: American Girl in between the Nancy Drews and theHardy Boys.

“It sounds like it could have been a kid’s book, right?” says the two-time National Book Award finalist with a sly laugh. “But … I knew it wasn’t.”

Sedgwick has haunted Griffin ever since. “There was no one in my neighborhood who lived this kind of fabulous, decadent life,” she recalls of her childhood, which she spent mostly on Army bases. “It set my mind on fire.”

That blaze of childhood adulation burst into full flame in the character of Addison Stone, a post-millennial Edie Sedgwick who is “more gorgeous, more reckless, more tragic, more talented” than the original. And this time, she’s also her own Warhol, making her own art, creating her own image. Or as Griffin puts it, Stone is “Edie as Banksy,” referring to the British graffiti and installation artist whose work routinely pushes the boundaries of what high art is and says.

Griffin’s book pushes genre boundaries as well. Conceived of as a “docu-novel,” the story is told entirely in interview segments, as an attempt to reconstruct the meteoric rise and terrible fall (both literal and figurative) of Addison Stone. Griffin is herself a character in the novel, the invisible hand on the other end of the tape recorder in all the interviews. Stone is a precocious artist who goes from lower-middle-class suburbia, to the Whitney Biennial, to her own mysterious death in just a few short years. Along the way, she manages to pick up a Victorian ghost, a wealthy patron, a sleazy agent, two not-always-good-for-her boyfriends, and a cast of trust fund friends that one could easily imagine are the Rich Kids of Instagram.

The main challenge for Griffin was to imbue this art-world story with enough energy to work as young adult fiction, where everything is bigger, brighter, and more. “I needed less of my trip to Frieze with my husband,” Griffin jokes, and more of a young girl’s fantasy life. Luckily for Griffin, that life literally walked into her kitchen one day, when a friend brought over up-and-coming model Giza Lagarce.

“She was so stunning, and so … Edie,” Griffin recalls. “I thought, ‘More of that! More of that!’”

Lagarce became the embodiment of Stone, bringing with her not just her stunning looks, but her wealth of Facebook photos, which Griffin began to “write into” in order to breath the necessary life into the novel. She cites finding Lagarce as the “major rewrite” of the process, and the resulting meld of obviously real images with supposedly real interviews helps to further shatter the line between fake and fact in her story.

But Lagarce isn’t Addison Stone’s only real world analogue. Griffin mined the portfolios of four artists to create the vast collection of images that dot the book. The particulars of the plot, Griffin says, emerged from the interplay between the Sedgwick story she imagined, and the artworks that captivated her. Sophie, a minor character, was created specifically so that Stone could use a portrait by Michelle Rawlings of a young girl with a bloody nose—a portrait she now owns, along with a few of the other “Addison Stone” pieces from the book.

Yet despite all of the photos and paintings and interviews, Stone remains an enigma—this isn’t a mystery novel with a stunning twist at the end, which may disappoint some readers. The mystery here is Stone herself, not what happened to her. But what rises unexpectedly from reading the novel is a lesson that all teenagers would do well to learn: We are all of us mysteries. As characters debate the true nature of Addison Stone, they reveal just how little they know each other and themselves, and how much they project their own beliefs, fears, and hopes onto the world. Stone might shine a little brighter, take up a little more of the oxygen in the room, but she is no more mysterious than anyone else—there are just more people asking questions.

My oasis is a garden in which nothing survives but the flowers I always hated

First published in The Guardian, August 3, 2014. Read the original here.

We grew common begonias when I was little: in terra cotta pots tucked on occasional tables, as borders around the “real” plants (irises, lilies, pansies, impatiens and endless roses), and in the shady areas in the lee of the porch where little else would flower. Growing up, begonias - waxy of leaf and spindly of stem, whose washed-out flowers seem to retain only the memory of color – were everywhere.

And how can anyone love a common begonia?

I hated the vulgar fleshiness of their red stems, how meat-like they looked; I despised the ones with leaves the color of brackish water, a muddy indeterminacy at the intersection of red, brown, and green. Begonias seemed to revel in those cast-off colors that you only find in bargain basement clothing, never anything pure or bright.

Every summer my brother and I were conscripted to work under the careful tutelage of my mother, father, and grandmother (who’d been raised on a subsistence farm in Ireland). We were the only house in our small suburban town to tear up our lawn and replace it with a food garden in which we grew tomatoes, peas, squash, and strawberries, corn, watermelon and even gooseberries over the years. It was a comfort to my grandmother, a revelation to my city-raised parents and a character building experience for my brother and I – about which we loved to complain. Aside from the year that we tried to dig a hole to China, my brother and I mostly spent the summer weeding, watering, and harvesting crops growing in between the ever-present begonias. I learned to love sun-warmed strawberries and peas straight from the pod – and to loathe begonias, which seemed neither pretty nor functional enough to be worth the space we gave them.

A few years ago, I received a genuine Manhattan miracle: an affordable ground-floor apartment with a private backyard. But miracles can be messy: my tiny slice of the great outdoors was little more than a trash heap when I moved in. Its hard-packed dirt was covered by a glittery lawn of broken glass, dotted with a few scraggly trees whose branches held more plastic bags then leaves. To this day I can’t plant so much as a marigold without digging up a broken bottle, a bent syringe, or the twisted plastic packaging of some bygone snacky-treat. The soil is bad, the direct sunlight is nearly nonexistent, and, six inches down, there is a mysterious and haphazard layer of concrete that bedevils my every effort at landscaping.

It is my perfect piece of paradise.

In my first year there, pretty much everything that I planted died: raccoons (yes, raccoons) dug up the bulbs, the seeds never sprouted, and a thriving ivy shrivelled to nothing a month after being potted. Local cats used my mulch as kitty litter, and workmen from next door accidentally poured lead paint dust on my lavender. The holly got a fungus, and the strawberries were besieged by spit bugs. The only thing that did well was a poison ivy vine – thick around as my wrist – which slowly tried to pull down the fence that separated my yard from the construction site next door.

But then there were the begonias, which my mother had recommended and my boyfriend had purchased. I’d given them a gimlet eye but dotted them dutifully around the yard, figuring I was writing their death sentence in potting soil. But in shade or partial sun, in the ground or in a pot, the begonias persisted.

Begonias, I discovered, were dependable. No, not just dependable – indefatigable. In the hot heart of summer, when the pansies fainted like fops in a Victorian novel, the begonias sat squatly undisturbed. They flowered before the lilies burst into showy banana-yellow blossoms, and were still flowering when those yellow petals showered to the ground … six days later. They adapted to being overwatered, but, like a middle child, were also fine if forgotten for a week.

And there were weeks when I forgot to tend my private paradise. I never realized how much time it takes to keep up a garden (even a tiny Manhattan-sized one). As a child, gardening seemed like a fun summer pursuit, at least for my parents; as an adult, I couldn’t figure out how they worked full-time, raised three boys, ran what sometimes felt like a halfway home for our enormous extended family, and maintained a beautiful garden.

The answer, it turned out was begonias (and impatiens and geraniums) – common flowers that we could afford and that were easy to maintain. While my parents carefully tended their roses and the crops that we ate, almost everything else we planted (I have since learned) were the super troopers of the botanical world – flowering cockroaches that can survive anything.

And who doesn’t love a survivor? Let the horticulturalists raise fickle exotics, high-maintenance orchids, and all the other divas of the dirt. I want a peaceful refuge, not one more stressful thing that demands my constant, unwavering attention. Perhaps a fancier garden would be easier in a perfect, south-facing plot, with soil that hadn’t spent 100 years accumulating city toxins and trash. I suspect I’ll never be able to afford to find out – but the begonias and I are content.

Each year I still try a few new plants: some make it and most don’t. Every time some fancy new flower wilts and dies while I watch helplessly, I’m simply left with a better view of the begonias. The more I look, the more I see that maybe their colors aren’t washed out, just subtle. It takes time to appreciate a begonia – time that I have because they are there, in full flower, from March to October, a constant flower for an inconstant gardener.