Remember This

The author of Norumbega Park returns with a bravura novel about the secrets artists keep--from the rest of the world, and from themselves.

Even though Miranda Rando, a forty-year-old writer living in Brooklyn, is making breakthroughs in her biography of a powerful woman artist, she can't escape the all-commanding presence of her father, Henry. And now that he has written a slightly embarrassing and shockingly successful self-help book, the seventy-year-old playwright is everywhere.

Henry's sudden rise to prominence--along with his need to grapple more deeply with his own religious life-- leads him to join a mission to Haiti. There, he meets a young man eager to come to America. But his motivation to help becomes complicated by his disturbing attraction to the boy. It also comes to threaten his relationships with his daughter and his wife, Lily, a successful actress.

Miranda and Henry play out their separate dramas until the lives of the father and daughter become hopelessly intertwined. Miranda's drive to understand the mysterious artist she's profiling becomes a journey into the past, into the lost New York of the 1970s, a time whose social and political fervency will always be wrapped up with her own childhood. That journey, existing alongside Henry's need to test the boundaries of their relationship, leads her to a new awareness of how much artists will always withhold from their children, and from the world.

Anthony Giardina's Remember This moves through the cutthroat contemporary art world, the New York theater scene, and post-earthquake Haiti to ask questions about artistic legacies, and about the root of family relationships. What secrets are necessary for us to keep? How much can we ask of each other? And what truths will remain forever hidden?

Author: Anthony Giardina
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 03/04/2025
Pages: 384
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.10w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9780374611347


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/27/2025
Kirkus Reviews 02/15/2025
Booklist 02/25/2025

About the Author
Anthony Giardina has written six novels, including White Guys and Norumbega Park, as well as the short-story collection The Country of Marriage. His plays, including The City of Conversation and Dan Cody's Yacht, have been presented at Lincoln Center and the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York, and have been widely performed across the United States. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.