A Review of Robin Oliveira’s I Always Loved You

By Kim

About I Always Loved You (from the book jacket):

The young Mary Cassatt never thought moving to Paris after the Civil War was going to be easy, but when, after a decade of work, her submission to the Paris Salon is rejected, Mary’s fierce determination wavers. Her father is imploring her to return to Philadelphia to find a husband before it is too late, her sister Lydia is falling mysteriously ill, and worse, Mary is beginning to doubt herself. Then one evening a friend introduces her to Edgar Degas and her live changes forever. Years later she will learn that he begged the introduction, but in that moment their meeting seems a miracle. So begins the defining period of her life and the most tempestuous of relationships.

In I Always Loved You, Robin Oliveira brilliantly re-creates the irresistible world of Belle Époque Paris, writing with grace and uncommon insight into the passion and foibles of the human heart.

Photo by Deborah Downes

About Robin Oliveira (from the book jacket):

Robin Oliveira is the New York Times bestselling author of My Name is Mary Sutter. She holds a BA in Russian and studied at the Pushkin Language Institute in Moscow. She received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is also a registered nurse, specializing in critical care. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

My Review:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this photo says it all. That’s my copy of I Always Loved You. Each sticker represents a passage of extreme brilliance, one that I likely read over two or three times before marking the spot and continuing on. You can’t see all of them, by any means.

I knew from the first page that this was a novel that would stay with me well after I finished it. When I came to this passage on page 43, after swallowing a lump of writer’s envy, the book shot into my top ten books of all time:

“Mary thought he might as well have said he had seen her at her bath, had seen the imperfections of her figure, had spied the most personal things about her. Instead, he was undressing her mind and rummaging around in the pleats and folds of her brain, a voyeurism more intimately invasive than any physical violation would have been.”

This passage was taken from the scene where Mary Cassatt first meets Edgar Degas. That tired old cliché about being able to cut the sexual tension with a knife does no justice to Oliveira’s portrayal of their relationship. In this case, you can’t chop through the tension with an ax. Every glance, every touch, nearly every word exchanged between the two is charged. The scenes where one or the other creates art in presence of the other are especially sensual.

While it is not necessary to have knowledge of the Impressionists to enjoy I Always Loved You, it will add a further layer of tension if you do. Any love story involving Edgar Degas could not be conventional in scope and will not involve a happily ever after unless the author takes major liberties with history, which Oliveira does not. What she does do, brilliantly, is find the story hiding in a gap of known history. After Degas’ death, why did Mary Cassatt search his apartment for her letters to him? Why did she burn she burn both sides of the correspondence when she sensed her own end was near?

Interwoven into the novel is a second, yet equally doomed, love story between painters Édouard Manet and his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot. Some reviewers thought this story detracted from the first, but I disagree. I believe it enhanced readers’ understanding of the societal constraints of the time and served as an interesting foil to the Degas/Cassatt plot line.

I made the mistake of reading the ending of I Always Loved You at a local Starbucks, mentally cursing my eyes for clouding up (much like Degas’) and preventing me from reading easily. It wasn't until I closed the book that I fully realized the “cloud” was tears. On my way out, the barista asked what book I had been reading because she wanted a copy.

I Always Loved You is literary historical fiction at its best. Highly recommended.

Have you read this novel? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

An Evening With Cathy Marie Buchanan and Robin Oliveira

By Kim

Those of you who have been reading the blog for a while know that I’m a huge fan of Cathy Marie Buchanan. (You can see my review of The Day the Falls Stood Still here and The Painted Girls here.) I was so thoroughly haunted by her debut novel back in 2009 that I wrote her fan letter, and we've periodically kept in touch online ever since. When I learned she was coming to speak at the Dallas Museum of Art on February 18^th, I jumped at the chance to finally meet her in person.

Robin Oliveira's My Name is Mary Sutter has been on my to-be-read list for quite some time. I knew nothing of her new book, I Always Loved You, until a few days ago. How I missed a love story about two artists, I have no idea, because that’s the sort of book I devour. I am, in fact, scrambling through this post because I’m anxious to return to I Always Loved You. I’m currently on chapter ten and already I know this story of Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt will stay with me. Expect a review here in the next few weeks!

About 300 people packed into the Horchow Auditorium at the Dallas Museum of Art. Cathy Marie Buchanan spoke first, making the audience laugh when she confessed to being a terrible speller who wanted nothing to do with the written word until the invention of spell-check. In fact, she had chosen her college major (biochemistry) partly because it would involve very little writing. Her inspiration for The Painted Girls came from the years she spent training as a classical ballet dancer in her hometown of Niagara Falls, Ontario. Degas prints hung on the walls of her dance studio. Years later she watched a documentary about Degas’ statue, Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen, and knew she must write the model’s story. Her reading of the passage in The Painted Girls when Marie first sees her statue drew sympathetic gasps from those seated around me, especially as Buchanan had already discussed the hateful comments made about it at its unveiling. I admit I got misty-eyed, partly because Buchanan significantly changed the tone of her voice. I "heard" Marie and I ached for her.

I'm surrounded by brilliance! - Photo by Deborah Downes

Robin Oliveira then took the stage and entranced the audience with a story of how Edgar Degas’ friends come to his apartment to sort through his things after he had died. Mary Cassatt and her maid were among them, and Mary was on a mission to find something in particular—the letters she had written to Degas over the years. She found them and kept them alongside his letters to her until near the end of her own life. Rather than risk their correspondence being found and published later, she elected to burn them, leaving the nature of her relationship with Degas forever a mystery. This sort of gap in historical record is gold for both a novelist and their readers. One of the most moving parts of Oliveira's speech came when she showed a picture of one of Degas’ prints that featured Mary Cassatt. A reader once showed up at an event with a copy of this picture tucked into a manila folder and said Oliveira would be interested in it. In the print, Cassatt stands in front of an Etruscan tomb featuring an image of a man and woman resting in each other’s embrace. A message to Cassatt? Perhaps. I like to think so.

During the Q & A, both authors agreed their favorite part of the writing process is research and that they much prefer re-writing to composing a first draft. Buchanan is already researching her next book which, from the little she was at liberty to say, sounds both engrossing and entirely different from her other two novels. I Always Loved You just launched a couple of weeks ago; Oliveira is sorting through ideas for her next project, which is certain to be brilliant.

I made sure I was last in the book-signing line, so I could chat with both authors and they graciously posed for a picture with me. My mom, also present with her ready camera, snapped a few more candid shots while my father was left carrying all our bags and books. (Thanks, Dad.)

If you have the chance to see Cathy Marie Buchanan or Robin Oliveira speak, definitely go. They are both brilliant speakers. Click on the author’s name to be taken to their ‘upcoming event’ pages and see if they will be coming to your area soon.

An interesting side note:

After we left, I realized that I have in my possession original correspondence written by a Civil War nurse whose name Oliveira surely encountered in her research for My Name is Mary Sutter. The letters were written, interestingly enough, to my 3x great-grandmother, Martha Angell, in the 1840’s, when both girls were teenagers. Martha Angell is the grandmother of the protagonist in my novel. Such a small world! Wish I had thought to bring copies in a manila folder of my own. (Robin, we must talk!)