One Woman Show: A Novel

Summary

From the author of Metropolitan Stories and a writer who spent twenty-five years working at The Metropolitan Museum of Art comes a sly and stylish novel—remarkably told through museum wall labels—about a twentieth-century woman who transforms herself from a precious object into an unforgettable protagonist.

Author Christine Coulson spent twenty-five years writing for The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her final project was to write wall labels for the Museum’s new British Galleries. During that time, she dreamt of using The Met’s strict seventy-five-word label format to describe people as intricate works of art. The result is a bullet of a novel that imagines a privileged twentieth-century woman as an artifact—an object once prized, collected, and critiqued.

Told with poignancy and humor over the course of a century, One Woman Show revolves around the life of Kitty Whitaker as she is defined by her potential for display and moved from collection to collection through multiple marriages. Kitty emerges as an eccentric heroine who disrupts her porcelain life with both major force and minor transgressions.

One Woman Show unfolds with the flare of a blockbuster exhibition and brims with wit, precision, and surprising universality. As human foibles propel each delicately crafted text, we are seduced by flawless Kitty’s many imperfections and left to wonder who ultimately curates her story.