(bell dings) (gentle music) - I'm Christine Coulson, and this is One Woman Show.

(gentle music) So I've written a novel almost entirely in museum wall labels, which are those little descriptions you see next to a work of art in a museum.

A standard label is 75 words.

And so, that was the constraint, to take that form and stretch the form to its greatest capacity, and I've used that to create a kind of retrospective exhibition of a life.

And the subject is a woman called Kitty, who is not always likable, but she is treated much like a work of art in that she is evaluated, critiqued, prized, and collected from when she's a child throughout her whole life.

(gentle music) - How did you even come up with this idea?

What was that nugget that was like, ooh?

- It's one of those unusual times where I know exactly where I was, where I was standing, what was happening.

The process of writing those labels involved a lot of brilliant curators, and we would meet, and we'd determine what the story was going to be for that label, and that involved a lot of back and forth.

And after one kind of contentious meeting, we were all breaking up and I looked at my colleague and I thought, I'd love to write a label about him.

In that way, that was sort of a catalyst.

It was a sarcastic thought in my mind 'cause it would've been frustrating.

But at the same time I thought, that's what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna use this language, and I'm gonna write about people as exquisite works of art.

(gentle music) - Tell us a little bit about your background, how you came to work at the Met and all of the fun things that led to this moment.

- I feel like I'm only really qualified to work at the Met in some ways.

I had this, you know, I was kind of plucked off the playground in a way.

You know, I started there as an intern in college, and once you get past those galleries, you know, and get to that behind the scenes world there, I literally, my first novel is about that and about the magic that exists beyond those walls.

And once you're in that place, it's so intoxicating.

And so I knew that was it.

And as soon as I got out of graduate school, that's where I wound up and stayed for 25 years and was not unusual in being there for that long because so many of my colleagues had been there for 40 years, 50 years.

And so they do kind of raise you, you know?

If you think arriving there at 22 years old and leaving just before I turned 50, I mean, those formative years, so it was a place where I was allowed to really pursue what I was good at, and I could always write.

And so that was the thing I had, that was my talent in that museum to be exploited in any way they wanted it to be.

So I was hired to write exhibition descriptions, and then I wrote thank you notes, and I would ghostwrite correspondence.

And then I became speechwriter for the director and wrote everything from small toasts to hour-long lectures.

And then they asked me to do this job, which, I had ghostwritten a few labels before, corrected some, but to take this on and write all the labels for these galleries, which cover 400 years of British design history, and work with this team of amazing curators, who were led by someone who wanted the galleries themselves to have their own voice.

So rather than having labels written by six different curators who were gonna inflect them with their own personality and point of view, he wanted to kind of consolidate that and let the galleries be a very cohesive experience.

And so, for me, it was like I was a speechwriter writing for the galleries.

That was the voice I was channeling in my head.

(gentle music) - [J.T.]

Tell us a little more about Kitty.

- You know, Kitty arrived in a very haphazard way.

I did not sit down and intend to write like, "Oh, this will be the vehicle.

"I will write about this woman "and I'll use labels to do it."

It was very much the reverse.

I wanted to write labels about people, and I had to just give it a try.

And so, I wrote about this patrician woman standing in the galleries, not an unusual situation at the Met.

She's a kind of Park Avenue matron.

I called her Kitty.

I had no particular investment in her as a character, but there she was, and she kind of took over the book.

'Cause once I did it, I thought, "Well, now I'm gonna challenge myself "to write 20 labels about Kitty and now I'm gonna write 40."

And I just kind of let her reveal herself to me.

So the book wasn't written at all in a linear way, but that label, that first label I wrote is at least three quarters of the way.

She's 91 years old when she's writes that.

So that sits there as this seed, and I think it's a very speechwriter thing to do, too, to write to an ending, so I had that, and then the book kind of spread like an ink blot as I filled in moments or thought about, what if this happens and what if this happens?

And I write on a wall.

So I put the pages, I tape them up on a wall.

And so I was also kind of filling it in.

I have pictures, I take pictures of the wall sort of at the end of the week.

And so you can see how this thing kind of spreads out and grows organically.

The last label in the book, which I won't give away what that one says, but that was probably the third label I wrote.

And so there's this sense of how Kitty's life sort of populates itself, and it surprised me a lot, a lot of times.

But part of it was also stretching the form.

So can I write an emotional label?

Can I write a funny label?

Can I write a sexy label?

So pushing that constraint as far as it can go.

(gentle music) The best labels are a catalyst, not an explanation.

I think a label that explains what you're seeing is a waste of time because you can just look at the thing and see it.

I think the best labels drive looking.

Send the visitor back to the object.

And you should also ask, what's being left out?

I mean, 75 words for an object that's been around for 300 years, clearly something's being left out.

And that gets back to something I'm trying to get at in the novel, that you're going through this exhibition and you're exploring a life that traverses almost an entire century, but at the same time, and I think there are moments where the book undermines itself to sort of allow the reader to question, what am I not being told?

What's missing?

Because inevitably, when you only get 75 words, you have to leave so much out.

And I think that is reflective, too, of the world we live in.

I mean, it's an Instagram parallel, right?

- [J.T.]

Yeah.

140 characters.

- That sense of, like, what you're presenting to the world in those images, and, you know, you're not actually including the messiness of life, and there's a lot of messiness in this book, but I think there's also room for questioning that narrator and the story they're presenting.

(gentle music) - [J.T.]

Do you have a favorite label?

- I do have three favorite labels, which I know is not fair.

- No, it's totally fair.

- And I don't think it's giving away a major plot point, but I'm almost most proud of the label about Kitty's miscarriage.

So there was something about that, using the terms of art to describe something so physical, so emotional, so tragic, and so impactful.

I was proud I was able to do it, you know?

As a writer, I was just, that was a big challenge.

- I think we're gonna have to have you read that so that the audience can actually get a sense for what, we can say we're talking in 75 words.

You know, we can say that, but I think they need to hear it, and I think they need to hear it in your voice.

So if you wouldn't mind.

- Let me find it.

You know, there's no page numbers in this book.

- [J.T.]

There's no page numbers.

- Because wall labels don't have page numbers.

- [J.T.]

I know.

- I really stuck to the form.

And part of what we've done here is to have the book, have the text on the right, the blank page on the left, because I want you, as the visitor to this show, to be conjuring that image that I'm describing.

So it's almost reversing the dynamic of a museum where you look at the object and then you go to that label.

It's that reverse, but it's also kind of a, I dunno, it's kind of a metaphor for reading, isn't it?

We're always conjuring.

So first, I'm gonna just explain these first three lines.

These are what we call, in the museum world, the tombstone information.

Artist, date, medium.

Whose collection does it come from?

And so, every page has tombstone information so you can situate yourself.

Where are we in Kitty's life?

Mother.

Age 21.

1928.

Mrs. William Wallingford III, known as Kitty.

Collection of William Wallingford III.

Ex-collection of Martha and Harrison Whitaker.

With stopwatch precision, a baroque swell of fertility secures Kitty's place as a traditional vessel, but studio malfunctions propel the glossy pink snuff box through Kitty as if she were constructed of lace.

The baby survives for the sole beat of Kitty's whispered, possessive greeting, "Mine," before vanishing like an erased line.

Kitty's blue period begins.

Like a faint fissure from within, the clutching memory of those few seconds will break Kitty below the surface, a persistent interruption beneath her varnish.

- Perfect.

It's absolute perfection.

- Well, it also shows how, you know, I talk about Kitty in terms of porcelain a lot, and that really lends itself to a kind of human presence.

You know, it's hard but fragile, particularly Kitty, who's made of fire.

They're easily, porcelain's easily moved and grouped with other people, and it's very hard to hide its damage.

- This is an amazing book, and I can't wait for everyone to read it.

Congratulations.

It's just a masterpiece.

Thank you so much for being here.

- Thank you.

- Thank you for watching A Word on Words.

I'm J.T.

Ellison.

Keep reading.

(bell dings) (gentle music) - [Christine] In museums, we call flaws condition issues.

What better term for human beings and their flaws?

We all have condition issues.

(gentle music)