By the end of 1973, I was just trying to stay out of jail. That’s how I got interested in art history. My roommate Annette was attending Loyola University in Chicago and was accepted into an art history program at the University of Loyola in Rome, Italy. She was ambivalent about going to Europe alone for so many months. I was certain it was the perfect escape from my very bad choice of an Italian boyfriend. So, I volunteered to go to Europe with Annette and told lover boy that I was going to Rome to learn more about his culture. He said, “What am I, a football?”
He had already given me a gold necklace with a gold horn as a symbol of our almost betrothal. Problem was that he was a forty-year-old, card-carrying member of the Italian American Police Association and I was a nineteen-year-old waitress trying to decide what to do with my life. The necklace was very nice. Then he introduced me to his mother who fed me pickled eggplant and homemade mozzarella. Once I passed inspection, he insisted on taking me to meet his older brother. In prison. Yes, I have been inside a federal penitentiary. With his brother’s blessings I was accepted as part of the family. I was trusted. Then I was introduced to a lot of old Italian guys. Were they grooming me? Was I in their private club? I thought so. But I was wrong.
Not long after, I was alone driving my boyfriend’s Chevy Impala on Lake Shore Drive and got stopped for going 105 miles per hour in a 35 mile an hour zone. I offered my bona fides. Gave the captain of the watch my boyfriend’s name and insinuated I had permission from high authority to exceed the speed limit. It did not occur to me that the captain of the watch was my boyfriend’s boss, and also, Irish. He took my driver license. Evidently, I missed my court date. I was in Rome by the time by my parents received the warrant for my arrest.
By grace alone I was saved. For nine months, from January to September 1974, Annette and I toured museums, galleries, mosques and cathedrals, catacombs, castles and ruins, from Stonehenge to the mosaics in Thessaloniki to Michelangelo’s David and Goya’s portraits of madness, Ireland to Istanbul, Sweden to Malta. Annette’s academic requirements gave our learning structure and blessed me with an immersion in the study of art that was life changing. And yet, I don’t think I could name one woman artist who got my attention on that journey.
Then while I was world-building my new novel, Ride the Light: How to Escape from Esmeralda Women’s Penitentiary, I discovered Katy Hessel’s encyclopedic tome, The Story of Art Without Men. Hessel’s 2023 telling of art history is so different from what I learned fifty years ago that I am radicalized. From ancient peoples to the present there is a long history of women artists who were masters, but fifty years ago they were systematically excluded from exhibition and academic accounts of history. In some places today, they are still omitted from the record. To create the character Nelsa Floratunia, an art historian in prison for stealing books, I wanted a wise old woman who could bring this radical feminist perspective into a room of desperate women. Nelsa makes the point that a woman may choose what to become the way an artist chooses what to create. Artemisia Gentileschi. Marie Cassat. Hilma af Klint. Frida Kahlo. Wangechi Mutu. As they have done, we have the power to make ourselves, to create ourselves, to redeem and renew ourselves.
Today I am that wise old woman and I see how the future is a choice we make with every step we take. Over the years we master the process of creating ourselves, and along the way, we make mistakes. While I was in Europe, I wore the gold necklace with the Italian horn and the St. Christopher medal my bad cop gave me as a going-away present, but I did not return to Chicago for obvious reasons. Did I learn my lesson? No. I got into trouble with a man again in New York City, and then again in Boston. For another decade I continued acting out my inner rage, rebelling against the system by choosing criminal boyfriends. I didn’t see the risk to myself until I was already exposed. By grace alone I am here. Ride the Light: How to Escape from Esmeralda Women’s Penitentiary is fiction based on that experience of my own very personal bad decisions. As they say—write what you know.
