Peggy

This is a fiction book about Peggy Guggenheim that reads like an autobiography or personal memoir. I have mixed emotions! I think it is so well done (I can’t imagine what Godfrey’s research process looked like!), but the book ends just as Peggy is opening her gallery. Frankly, that’s the part of her life that is most interesting to me, so it killed me a little bit to feel like we were just getting to the good stuff as it ended. That being said, I was so impressed by the writing. It was transportive and felt like it really was Peggy Guggenheim (the heiress, gallery founder, and legendary art collector) telling you her stories. And the stories of her younger years are genuinely intriguing. At age fourteen, her beloved (philandering) father dies aboard The Titanic. Her sisters have their own major dramas and struggles. We meet her husband Laurence, and see their marriage through to completion. I really loved it, I wish it was longer and covered the parts of Guggenheim’s life that I was most interested in. Tragically, the author Rebecca Godfrey died of lung cancer. Her friend Leslie Jamison finished the book.