Why Subscribe to Two Houses. Two Painters. Two Parents?
“Two Houses is so powerful and wrenching! What a tale you’re telling.”
- Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships
"You're a brilliant and indefatigable detective, and I'm fascinated by what you've found here."
– Joan Larkin, recipient of Lambda Literary Awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy of Poets
I go between my parents as I would two worlds. I have two identities. They do not talk to each other; they do not know who I am with the other.
– Eliza Anderson, Two Houses, A Memoir of Art and Divorce (in progress)
Join me as I excavate my mother’s loft, where she lived and painted for 40 years. I’m writing stories of life in Soho and Park Slope during the 70s and 80s and my parents’ art world of the 50s and 60s. Posts are illustrated with the work of Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson, whose names rarely appeared together during their long-divorced lives. My mother often said, “Stay out of my studio!” and so I never explored there. Now, suddenly, it’s mine to share with you.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
- Adrienne Rich, from “Diving into the Wreck”
About Two Houses. Two Painters. Two Parents:
My childhood was divided between my parents: the painters Lennart Anderson and Mimi Weisbord. They married in 1958 and split apart during the women’s movement in 1972.
Until 1978, they lived two blocks from each other in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Then Mimi bought a loft in Soho, and my brother and I rode the subway between the boroughs.
I wrote in college: “I go between my parents as I would two worlds.”
Lennart died in 2015. Mimi died in 2020. Her loft was left packed with artwork, letters, manuscripts, photos, and journals. These included materials she’d saved over decades, from my parents’ life together, from when our family was still intact. Writing is how I survived the task of digging out her studio and living spaces (along with enormous support from my spouse, Kim). During that year-and-a-half-long excavation, I drafted a memoir. But there is too much for one book, so I continue on Substack.
Thank you for joining me.
