How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves -- Megan O'Grady, Hardcover
A vital testament to how art makes us who we are--and offers new ways of seeing our world and our lives.
Barbara Kruger once defined art as the ability "to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive." Testing that claim, Megan O'Grady takes us on a journey to explore art's intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world. When O'Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed her life. When she was at the end of an early marriage, art stoked new ways of thinking about connection and transformation. When she was a new parent, it guided her to confront vulnerability and shame. Whether she was seeking a home or contending with crises personal, political, and ecological, art was a critical lifeline, a source of beauty, solace, and provocation. Looking closely at five artworks and the context in which each was made--and often drawing on personal conversations with the artists--O'Grady traces the works' rippling impacts, suggesting sometimes unexpected lineages and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imagination and attention? When bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does art offer? A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to consider all that we take for granted, How It Feels to Be Alive inspires and exhorts, providing a template for thinking through the knottiest problems in our culture and our selves, and the connections between the two.Author: Megan O'Grady
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 4/21/2026
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.92 lbs
Size: 8.54" H x 5.62" L x 1.14" W
ISBN: 9780374613327
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