Through the Window

I wanted to share the cover of Girl Through Glass and why I am so thrilled with it: to me it evokes the magic and beauty of dance during the era when I fell in love with it---and also something of the gritty feel of New York City during my childhood (the 1970s and early 1980s).

At one point, after the book was finally done, I looked in my files and found a photo I clipped from the New York Times that accompanied a great Sloane Crosley piece. The piece was about watching a dance class and then taking the class to, in essence, spy on yourself.

The photo: a girl, back-lit, through a lighted window. Night out. We know from Crosley’s piece that she is a dancer and this is a dance class, but this is incidental. What we feel is the focus, the effort of a craft, a girl in a room, by a window, a private act of becoming, but also, in a sense a public act. She is aware of being by a window. Someone could---might---be watching.

And as a girl growing up in New York City, I remember being fascinated by all of the windows that surrounded me. The mysterious lives they contained. The publicness of life amidst millions, but also the mystery of private spaces. The lighted window---windows in general---contained all of this discrepancy and tension and mystery.

I sent this photo along to my editor during the cover design stage---I imagine it inspired the designers because, here, in this cover unpacked, are echoes, the layers, of my fascination with windows, and dance, and the spaces they contain.