i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

1The Creation (of a) MythI lived in the little town of Colwyn, Pennsylvania, where everything happened, butthere was no artist and no writer. We lived on a street that had been a pear orchard.And it was utterly beautiful in the spring, but there was no artist to paint it.And once a man exposed himself at a window, but there was no writer to write it.The grocer’s wife committed suicide after the grocer died, but there was no writerto write that. There was no culture there. I hated that little town. I just despised it.And in the summer I used to sit on the porch and try to keep my blood from circulating.That’s why my own kids had a much better life than I had. Because boredomwas what killed me.Thus opens “Alice by Alice,” Alice Neel’s autobiography, published the yearbefore she died. 1 Neel was a painter: her strong visual sense pervades herspeech. In her old age, the images from her childhood, indelibly painted inher mind, carried with them all of the emotional weight of their initial impression.Colwyn, Pennsylvania was a sight, but there was no one there to record itsbeauty or its perversity. Neel’s words suggest that as a child she knew that shehad to become an artist in order to record that life in all its aspects. But ofcourse, these are the words of an adult at the end of a long and productive artisticcareer. In the manner of any good storyteller, Neel has created a parable to3