Violet Swan lives a peaceful life with her son and daughter-in-law in the little town of Nestucca Beach, on the Oregon coast, far from the fame she has earned as a celebrated abstract painter. At ninety-three years old, she still works every day, covering canvases with translucent colors held in place by ladders of repeated graphite lines. (Author Reed writes that she was inspired by minimalist Agnes Martin.) When an earthquake hits, long-buried memories—dormant as daffodils—of trials and travels shake loose and mingle with unresolved emotions. Violet’s son, Francisco, is full of rage, and her daughter-in-law, Penny, suffers from anxiety. On top of everything, Violet has lung cancer. She’s aware that “The screws of time [are] tightening.”
Then comes a jolt of a different kind. Violet’s grandson, Daniel, a filmmaker in Los Angeles, comes home for a long-overdue visit, bringing an unknown three-year-old girl with him—his daughter, Dani.
As someone who has taught and written about women’s art history, I made sure to read this book as soon as it was available. It didn’t occur to me until after I’d finished reading it that part of the story paralleled my own life. When I’d just turned five years old, my father put me on a plane in Los Angeles, and I ended up at my grandparent’s house in Manzanita, Oregon (the inspiration for the fictional Nestucca Beach.) Looking back, I can see how not just surprised, but delighted they were that I had come to live with them. My grandfather built a playhouse in the trees behind our house, and my grandmother helped me built driftwood forts on the beach. So many homes they created for me.
Similarly, everyone in Violet Swan’s family recalibrates around Dani; the family see the world anew, through the eyes of a child. Connections are rearranged as nimbly as light dancing across the ocean. Memories, anger, anxiety and fear abut and blend at their edges, like watercolors on paper or the streaks of color when the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean, “ultramarine on the horizon, a layer of peach above the sea.” 
The sense of place in this story is palpable. From her window, Violet can see a giant cedar…nearly two hundred feet tall…forming a dark shelter of fragrant shade around its base. And the ocean, blue upon blue upon blue, though none like the other. The wet, green forests that come right down to the driftwood-strewn beach. Agates, elk, moss-covered Hemlocks, moss, sand dollars, seagulls and eagles, evoke the primordial northwest coastline.
Agnes Martin said “Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.” Reed’s writing is equally subtle. It isn’t easy to paint a picture with words, but with a touch as light as Violet Swan’s graphite lines, Reed conveys the ineffable. Here is Violet remembering one of her paintings:
The painting now hung in a museum in Reykjavik, the translucent blue and Venetian-green palette of grids at home among Iceland’s rolling grasses and the grays and blues of fjords. For a moment, Violet was transported to waterfalls and lagoons.
I enjoyed the surprise cameo appearance of Lee Krasner. I’ve never come across anything suggesting that Krasner visited the Oregon coast, but how I would have loved to have a drink with her at the Neahkahnie Tavern! Violet’s New York agent, Betty Johnson, is surely a stand-in for gallery owner Martha Jackson. And Portland artist Mark Rothko is one of Violet’s influences. These mentions connect hermit Violet Swan with the post-war Abstract Expressionist movement.
Violet’s story is deceptively simple until she, a private, even secretive person, reveals herself to Daniel when he makes a documentary of her life—fire, molestation, a journey across the country, the loss of family and her dearest friend. Agnes Martin said that her paintings were not about what is seen…They are about what is known forever in the mind. Violet’s revelations build until they fill in the final brushstrokes, completing the picture of Violet’s life so that her family can at last understand the pain and love she’s carried forever in her mind, and what it took for her to create the life she wanted. Reconciliation, new love, and a new life provide a satisfying look at the complexity of an artist’s family in a small town.