Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  “I know,” he said, shaking his head. “We should have done this years ago.”

  I had no response. It wasn’t funny.

  “I didn’t think you would come.”

  “I didn’t either.”

  “Was it enough?” he asked.

  “I’m glad you used my film.”

  “We couldn’t—not in the end. We couldn’t do that.”

  “No. I understand.”

  A glossy town car squished to a heavy stop. The passenger-side window rolled down. “Savage?” asked the driver. Tyler popped off the wall, sauntered over the curb, and opened the door. I clutched my heart, fingers working their way up to my clavicle. I didn’t want him to go.

  “Can I give you a ride?” he asked.

  “You don’t know where I’m going.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “How’s Berlin?”

  “What would you do in Berlin?” I asked.

  He leaned in, toward my ear. Out of habit, I angled my neck, and then we were touching, and I felt that old feeling, the golden warmth of him.

  “I’ll be your assistant,” he whispered.

  “I already have one of those,” I said.

  “I’ll be your boyfriend.”

  “I have one of those too.” He blinked in surprise. “I—I meant to write and tell you. But somehow I never did.”

  “Who is it?

  “I’m sorry.”

  He blinked again and shook his head. “I waited too long,” he said.

  “It’s not that.” I steeled myself to say the thing I had mumbled to myself a thousand times, in bathrooms, in backseats of cars, in the airplane, in the taxi, in my seat as the film played. “You told a lie that changed my entire life. Something that was a crass joke to you, a con to make money, was something I believed in. And I understand how it happened. I’m glad you told the truth. But I don’t think I will ever, ever forgive you.”

  An anguished moment stretched between us before he finally spoke. “I know,” he replied. Then he kissed me on the cheek, and I walked away.

  * * *

  A year earlier, in a café in Neukölln, someone tapped me on the shoulder. Someone with big brown eyes and curly brown hair that poked every which way, like Kramer.

  “Pearl,” he said, pointing to himself.

  “Jonah,” I said in wonder. “How are you?” We kissed twice, like Germans.

  “I’m good. I saw your show in Paris,” he said. “Exquisite. I can’t believe you pulled it off. Spectacular, even.”

  I blushed. “Thank you.”

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Oh no,” I said. “I still owe you one.”

  “You bought me a dozen!”

  “But none of them were in person.” He begrudgingly agreed and pulled out a chair as I hailed the waiter.

  “Are you living here?” I asked.

  “I guess so.” He smiled. “I’m doing a language course. I have a yearlong visa.”

  “That’s the scam,” I said, laughing. “Me and you and everyone we know.” I added, “I never asked you what you did outside Pearl.”

  “I was working on a PhD in applied mathematics.”

  “Holy cow,” I exclaimed. The waiter brought our drinks. “For how long?”

  “Uh—fifteen years.” He laughed. “I know. It was too long. If I’d left Pearl I probably would have finished earlier. I liked being around all of you.”

  “I never would have guessed that,” I admitted. “You don’t seem very math-y. I thought you were some cynical arty downtown critic who’d seen it all.”

  “God, no. I like art, but I love math,” he said sincerely. “It has rules. It’s the one thing in the world that tells you what the rules are.”

  “Did you give up on it? I mean—why are you in Berlin?”

  “Oh, I’ll get a job,” he said, reassuring me. “I could have a job now. I—I don’t know. I wanted to see a world that wasn’t New York. Everybody’s leaving. I mean, look at you. You never came back.”

  “I discovered that there was more world I wanted to see,” I said.

  “Me too.” It turned out that Jonah, too, was a different person, once you got to know him.

  After that—we were inseparable.

  I never told Jonah, or anyone, about what happened at Pine City that summer. It took months to sort through it all. I was so lonely, so desperate for a hero, that I looked up to a hoax. I carried her with me like a talisman, like a saint, like an instruction manual, when she was a fraud, calculated to support the ambitions of privileged young people as they sailed around Manhattan, shooting rubber bullets at a world that for them would always ripple, and never break. But there was nothing in this world that could make my compulsion less lonely. There was no one who could show me how to be the person I wanted to be. I had to do everything for myself.

  Carey—Maria, I still have to remind myself, after all this time—was, in the end, so much like the woman she pretended to be: uneducated, vulnerable, damaged—and like me, or at least who I was before the Academy. Yet her lines were merely that: lines. Maria didn’t write the story, and she didn’t learn the lessons. The tragedy was that she never learned to pick herself up after a failure. She never outed Pine City while she was alive; she was brave only in death. It was a shame. She should have been here tonight. She shouldn’t have been afraid to feel like a fraud.

  I feel like one every day. It’s the cost of doing business.

  I checked my watch, hailed a taxi, and scooted across its vinyl seats, the stuffing coming out beneath my fingers. I gazed out the window toward the life that waited for me—the one that I had built, and would keep on building, piece by piece.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to:

  Grand Central Publishing, especially editor Lindsey Rose and creative director Albert Tang and his team for the cover.

  Rose Tomaszewska, my indefatigable editor at riverrun, for her love and enthusiasm for this project, and the rest of the riverrun team for their tireless labor on behalf of my work.

  My agent Victoria Sanders, and her right-hand women Bernadette Baker-Baughman and Jessica Spivey.

  As an amateur artist (I can only claim an undergraduate minor in drawing, and even then, my own hand is drawn to the banal architecture of banks, hotels, and office buildings, and my years in ceramics have yet to result in the perfect bowl) but a professional-grade enthusiast, my work on this book has benefited from many hours of conversations with my husband, Ian, and our beautiful friends, especially David Brooks, Fabienne Lasserre, and Christine Manganaro.

  This book, a love letter to the labor of artmaking, also owes a deep debt to all of the artists whose studios I have had the privilege of seeing in past years, either through friendship, the Maryland Institute College of Art, the Penland School of Crafts, or the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, New York, where I completed a bulk of the edits for the manuscript and acquired a great deal of priceless verisimilitude. In no good order, that especially includes: Eve Biddle, for speaking so openly about the development of TWP and her line about being young and stubborn. Denise Markonish of MassMoCA for her observations about the qualities that make up the difference between art and entertainment. Leya Evelyn for her remarks about the gesso. Wim Botha for showing us his “hot knife.” Ryan Ketchum for all of the conversations about his work in the old days. Nicole Dyer for the wonderful drawing on page 59 of this book. Lena Schmid for showing me the “Wild Hearts” video and telling me that “a third of American women watch this every day.” Katy McCarthy, August Thompson, Eman Alshawaf, Lucinda Dayhew, Will Hutnick, Allie Hankins for our excellent talks and for their friendship, and all of our fellow residents during the winter of 2017–18 at the Wassaic Project, founders Bowie Zunino and Jeff Barnett-Winsby, and staffers Jenny Morse, Paloma Hutton, and Jordan Hutton for their support and dedication to TWP. Special thanks to MICA for bringing us to Baltimore and all that you gave us, including the wonderful Ruth Toulson, the original blond Wednesday Addams, all
of the faculty who so generously allowed me into their classrooms, including Sarah Barnes, Joshua Hebbert, and Robert Tillman, and those I have met through MICA and MICAZA, including Ledelle Moe, Jared Thorne, and David Southwood.

  Fictional reviews in this book were influenced by actual reviews of the work of Lucy Dodd and Marina Abramovich, and a passage on a particular type of brush is directly inspired by the words of Jack Whitten in an interview with Robert Storr, from Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting. Other works that I found valuable during this process include: “Women, Art and Ideology” by Griselda Pollock; “Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out: The Rejection of Lee Lozano” by Helen Molesworth; “The End of Painting” by Douglas Crimp; “The Untroubled Mind” by Agnes Martin; “Making Waves: The Legacy of Lee Lozano” by Katy Seigel and David Reed; statements from Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Anselm Keifer, Elizabeth Murray, David Reed, and Joan Mitchell in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz; The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson edited by Jack Flam; Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous by Jan Verwoert; Art Talk: Conversations with 15 Women Artists by Cindy Nemser; and Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, among others.

  To my good friends and dedicated readers Abbe Wright, Jane Orvis, Fabienne Lasserre, and Alfred Bridi, for their incisive notes.

  To Ian, who never tires of being my own personal encyclopedia, my biggest champion, and the love of my life. Especially, on the ego front, for letting me swerve into your hard-won lane.

  And the Laura Owens show at the Whitney in the winter of 2018 was a necessary reminder of how innovative and exceptional painting can be, so thanks to Owens for setting the bar.

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  About the Author

  BARBARA BOURLAND is the author of the critically acclaimed I’ll Eat When I’m Dead, a Refinery29 Best Book of 2017 and an Irish Independent Book of the Year. People called I’ll Eat When I’m Dead “delectable.” Wednesday Martin, bestselling author of Primates of Park Avenue and Untrue, deemed it “a deft, smart, and hilarious debut.” Kirkus noted that “death by beauty was never so much fun,” and the book was featured in Fortune, Us Weekly, and the New York Post, among others. I’ll Eat When I’m Dead is now available in paperback, and is forthcoming in Hebrew from Matar Press in Israel.

  Bourland is a former freelance writer and web producer for titles at Condé Nast and Hearst, among others. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and their dogs.

  Fake Like Me was written with support from the Wassaic Project in Wassaic, New York, where Bourland was a resident over the winter of 2017–18.

  Also by Barbara Bourland

  I’ll Eat When I’m Dead

  Reading Group Guide

  Discussion Questions

  Bourland never names the narrator of Fake Like Me. Why do you think she made that choice? How would the book have been different if she had?

  The prologue mentions “dramatic rumors of an as-yet-unseen final work” by Carey Logan, the artistic prodigy who committed suicide. In those early chapters, did you have a guess as to what that posthumous piece might be? Were you right?

  When the narrator meets Carey in the first chapter, Carey warns her, “These people will make not only your work, but you yourself into a commodity. They’ll buy you and sell you. Let them. But make sure you always do it on your own terms.” What did Carey mean by this? Would you say that the narrator took her advice, or not? In your own professional or personal life, did you ever get any advice that shifted your trajectory, or that you carried with you for years afterward? Did your understanding of that advice change over time?

  When the narrator’s loft catches on fire and her massive paintings burn just months before they are set to be exhibited in Paris, she loses two years’ worth of work. Rather than admit that she has nothing for the gallery, she resolves to re-create the paintings in secret in the time she has left, terrified of being revealed as a fraud. Yet she is still the creator of the work. Is it possible to falsify your own creations? Discuss what this means in the context of the book’s larger questions around authenticity and commodification.

  In chapter two, the narrator observes that “art has a way of putting everyone at their most transactional. I’m invisible until someone calculates my value.” What do you think she means by this? Do you agree? Do you think this applies only to the art world, or do you see parallels in other parts of life?

  Discuss the following description of painting: “One of my professors once told me that she started all of her paintings with a photocopied picture of her parents and the words FUCK YOU scrawled across their faces…All artists are of course doing that same thing: We are burying our past selves within the work, pieces of which rise to the surface without our permission like bodies in a flood.”

  What do you think of our narrator’s friendship with Max de Lacy? Is it an “authentic” friendship? Why or why not? Do you have any friends like Max in your own life? Have you ever been someone’s Max?

  Jes seems set up to be the villain in the book, the possessive girlfriend who knows more of Tyler’s secrets than anyone. How does your feeling about Jes change over the course of the book? Is our narrator’s wariness of her well founded?

  Why do you think our narrator identifies so fully with Carey Logan? Is she right to have done so?

  How did the twist—the multiple twists—in the book shape your feelings about the characters? Did you find yourself having to recalibrate your impressions of any of them?

  Do you feel the narrator made the right choice in the end? Why or why not? Would you have made a different decision?

  A Conversation with Barbara Bourland

  While both of your novels share your incisive wit and flair for vivid detail, Fake Like Me is a very different book from your debut, I’ll Eat When I’m Dead. What brought you to this particular story? Are there ways in which you see this as a continued exploration of a certain theme in your work, or are you just following your creative instincts wherever they take you?

  The tones are of course quite different, as each book matches [its] tone to the subject material. Personally, I see more similarities than differences: Both books are about women’s work; women’s bodies; women’s selves as self. My work focuses on women as we stand, not in terms of our relationships to others (mother, wife, daughter, etc.). Both novels focus extensively on the costs of our lives. In terms of IEWID, I don’t want to know what makes a beautiful woman “feel beautiful”; I want to know how much it costs her. It’s the same with Fake Like Me: I don’t want to hear some lyrical romantic fairy tale about women’s artwork. I want to know how hard it was. How much does making a painting as big as Joan Mitchell’s or Helen Frankenthaler’s cost a person, exactly? What does it cost to be ourselves?

  One of the most unforgettably immersive parts of this book is the way the narrator abandons herself to the creative process; the descriptions of oil painting are so real as to put the reader inside the work herself. Do you have a background as a painter? If not, how did you make this part of the artistic process come so alive?

  Well, I love painting. I absolutely love painting, though I’m personally not very good at it. I minored in studio art in college and have an ongoing studio practice (drawing and ceramics) that is personally satisfying, although definitively noncommercial. Beyond my own base knowledge, much of the research for this book was conducted by going into artists’ studios, often tagging along with my husband, Ian Bourland, for his magazine writing (he teaches art history at Georgetown, and writes extensive history and criticism, though mostly about photography, not painting). I thanked the artists whose techniques and material habits I stole from most egregiously in the acknowledgments. As for how I made it come alive—I think the key is materiality. I tried to avoid compositional description because I don’t find it to be imaginatively
connective; it’s boring and almost surgical to say, “It was a painting of a horse.” That’s all fine and good for catalogs and wall text, but for a novel I think it’s far more evocative to focus on materials. I.e., instead of, “It was a painting of a horse,” you write, “It was a painting, two inches thick, made from beeswax and pine sap.” With the latter, I think your imagination can really go somewhere.

  Your characters operate on a plane beyond simple “likability,” where the idea of their needing our approval, as readers, feels beyond the point. Yet these are also very real people who crave acceptance, love, and acclaim. Can you talk a little bit about what your process is for writing such deep humanity into such complex people?

  I love this question because it’s a compliment, and I really wish I had a better answer for you! To be honest, it’s neither choice nor process. All I do, as a writer, is sit down and throw out line and see what comes back. If I catch something real enough, I keep it.

  This is a literary novel about the New York art scene that reads like a thriller. Did you start out intending to write one kind of book, or the other? How did the novel come together?

  From the beginning, I hoped to follow the creation of a body of work alongside the narrative pursuit of an actual human body, without being too clumsy in one way or the other. The edit process was fairly long, but I think it was for the best—we shaved each chapter down, bit by bit.

  Has there ever been a Carey Logan–like figure in your own life?

  Nearly. The circumstances surrounding the death of Emma Bee Bernstein, a photographer who committed suicide inside the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice, [have] haunted me since it took place in 2008. Emma was barely an acquaintance—we met only twice, and she was several years younger than I—but the death itself was shocking. I have wondered since it happened if any action so tragic can ever be interpreted or validated as anything other than suicide. In greater contemporary art history, I’ve always been fascinated by the atmosphere surrounding Francesca Woodman and Ana Mendieta, both of whose postmortem hyperglorification struck me as both hopelessly romantic and wildly unfair. Woodman and Mendieta had, like every other female artist, to die in order to be taken seriously. Lee Lozano, too, who made a commitment to leave the art world and die in an unmarked grave (which she did), is hugely fascinating to me, and I genuinely think her Wave paintings are a window to the divine. They’re shockingly, absolutely arrestingly, good. Yet she got pushed out—or pushed herself out—somehow.