Books I'm Reading: Night Studio

Musa Mayer's Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston (Knopf, 1988) has been in my bookshelves for years - more than 25 years. When I took it down recently to finally read it, the sales slip was still in it. I bought it on September 2, 1989 at a store in Nihonbashi, in Tokyo. I paid $5,900 for it, which in those days was about $40 (¥146/$). I tended to buy whatever looked of interest and was willing to pay what it cost because interesting English-language books were comparatively hard to find in Tokyo at the time.  

Musa Mayer, born Musa Guston, is the painter's daughter. While she is not otherwise a writer, as far as I know, she writes very well, painting a vivid picture (unavoidable pun?) of what it was like to grow up in the shadow of a famous man and particularly of her stained relationship with her father who appears to have been more attentive to his painting than he was to his family – which is not to say that he was cruel or manipulative. He was simply devoted to his work. 

Additionally, the book was interesting on a personal level because it turns out that the author left New York and her parents as a young bride and lived and worked in Yellow Springs and Dayton, Ohio – both locations I know well. It's odd how often Yellow Springs seems to pop up. Among my artist friends here in Sonoma County, two have lived in Yellow Springs, and one, like Musa Mayer, worked at Antioch College, in Yellow Springs. According to the book, Mayer became a counsellor and worked with youth patients at Good Samaritan Hospital, in Dayton. I walked past Good Samaritan every day on my way to high school, although my school is no longer standing and I've heard that Good Samaritan is gone too.