Carry the Dog

For Bea Seger, life has meant years of running away: first from her home at age 19, when she elopes with a rock star, and then from herself, as an old scandal continues to haunt her. When she was a child, her mother, a photographer, was investigated by the FBI on charges of child pornography when, over several years, she took posed photographs of Bea and her brothers, three years her elders, pictures in which they were always either partially or totally nude.
 
With her mother and one brother dead—a long-ago suicide and a death in a mysterious fire, respectively—and her other brother estranged, Bea finds herself by default the one responsible for the library of work her mother created, much of it never publicly seen. Complicating Bea’s life is the fact that the cancer she thought she had conquered seems to have returned, and she must find a way to care for herself. When a film producer suddenly becomes interested in doing a biographical film about her mother, and MoMa’s photography curator decides to do a retrospective of her work, Bea finds herself having to deal with her mother’s past and her legacy, exposing old wounds that she hoped had begun to heal.
 
Carry the Dog brims with truths about the human condition of a sophisticated yet earthy late-blooming feminist, and it reverberates with the echoes of the rock and roll world thanks to Bea’s ex-husband, an aging rock star who still is a part of her life. Reading this novel is to be swept into Bea’s world, to bear witness as the little girl in the photographs and the woman in the mirror meet at the blurry intersection of memory and truth, disappointment and gratitude, trauma and—most especially—resilience.