Publisher's Synopsis
A woman wants a new life. Finding herself at a crossroads, she falls for one of her older female art students, a move that leads to new entanglements - funny, sexy, violent - which finally push her to make the break with her settled, heterosexual past. She takes a winter rental in East Hampton, near the famous artists? cemetery, Green River, and becomes obsessed with the graves and lives of women artists who are buried there. They?re mostly the wives of more famous men, especially Elaine De Kooning and Lee Krasner, the wife of Jackson Pollock. She plans to write a book in which Lee and Elaine come back as ghosts, as lesbians and as lovers. When Elaine?s stone is discovered to be missing one day, all hell breaks out in the narrator?s real life. She?s forced to start anew, alone, everything different. Her obsession with Lee and Elaine brings her into contact with all of their women artist friends. Eventually, she learns that she has to let go of the past and move on, which she does after a scary, hilarious night alone in the cemetery, if you don?t count the ghosts. At a time when the reputations of Pollock, De Kooning and Abstract Expressionism are at their highest, Lee & Elaine reminds us of the gifted women in the background. This is a brilliantly funny, sharp book about romance, life, death, and artistic creation.
