Spotlight & Giveaway: PICASSO’S LOVERS by Jeanne Mackin

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Jeanne Mackin to HJ!

Hi Jeanne and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, PICASSO’S LOVERS!

Harlequin Junkie, thank you so much for these questions and for your interest in my novel!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

The year is 1953 and Alana Olsen is facing several seemingly insurmountable problems. Her fiancé is pushing for a wedding date which she is reluctant to make; the magazine she desperately wants to write for is not hiring women, and Senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee is searching for her because of her pro-integration marches. But most painful of all, her secretive mother has recently died leaving little behind except one newspaper clipping.
All three predicaments merge into one possible solution, when Alana meets Sara Murphy, a socialite who had been friends with Pablo Picasso in the 1920’s. Hoping to discover unknown materials about Picasso for her free-lance assignment, Alana finds the now reclusive Sara and over several days and interviews discovers things about Pablo Picasso that have not yet been published. Much of what she learns is about Picasso’s notorious love life, and the women who inspired his art. Along the way, she learns more about her mother’s secrets, and her own desires.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

I use a quote from Pablo Picasso which is so important to me as a writer, and as an individual who likes to question everything: “To find is the thing.” To live is to search. If we are lucky and persistent, we find what we are searching for.
Alana is one of the narrators of the novel and I so enjoyed writing her, with her voice full of sorrow for her mother, frustration about the sexism in the workplace, but also hope for the future. She begins her narrative with this: “Let’s begin my story here. Beginnings are, after all, about discovery. About finding what has been lost.”
Discovery is the heart of this novel!

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

It was great, getting to spend so much time with Pablo Picasso, at least in research! What a rogue he was. But also, what a magnificent artist. This novel was the only one I’ve written in which the working title also became the final title. It couldn’t be anything other than Picasso’s Lovers. I also realized, when I had finished the first draft, that even without a plan (I don’t work from outline) I had written about three women who ultimately rejected Pablo! He was seductive, but not invincible. Learning about how his lovers inspired his art was eye-opening. They inspired not just the content, but the style of his work. He was passionate and even though art was always the most important thing in his life, his art would have been weaker, I think, if he hadn’t let himself be inspired by his lovers.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

There are several pairs of lovers in the novel and what unites them all is this: they are attracted to each other because somehow that other person fills a need, helps heal some sort of wound. In Alana’s storyline, she and her lover are both in painful, unfulfilling relationships. Both are having financial and work problems. Both are uncertain of the future. But he likes her determination, her ‘go for it’ attitude. She likes his wit and spontaneity. And there is that spark between them, the attraction that can’t be reduced to formula. Electricity.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

In the opening scene, Irene Lagut, one of Picasso’s lovers, is in bed, in the morning, watching him shave and trying to tempt him back into bed. She is brazen and realistic: she knows she is not the love of his life but one of many lovers. And she has her own agenda: there is something in the studio that she hopes to find, to take away with her.

Pablo returns his gaze to his own image in the mirror and studies it, drawing the razor through the white foam on his cheek and making a curve, olive flesh showing through a white background. Another work of art.
“Hurry up and get dressed,” he says. “Olga won’t give me a divorce. You know that.”
“So you have said for years. Perhaps it is very convenient, having a wife who lives separately and keeps you from marrying any other woman.”
He throws a wet towel at me. “Get up. The car the car will be here soon.”
“Listen to you, my love. A car. A chauffeur. I remember when you had holes in your boots, when you were my young love.”
“That was long ago. And he’s not a chauffeur, he’s my son.”
“Yes, much has changed.” I roll over and light a cigarette, and the sheet falls away from my naked breasts.
I see where his eyes are, and they are not on my face.
He grins. Gazes from Pablo are like brushstrokes. Some are long, lingering, full of texture and pigment. Some are short, shallow, even accidental. His gaze on me now falls somewhere between the two.

Readers should read this book….

Yes, please! Seriously, though, art is not this highbrow thing for others, it is all around us and the more we can understand what it is, how it is, who it is, the richer our lives become. Plus, it is a love story with passion and secrets. And it’s full of scenes in France in the 1920’s as well as New York in the 1950’s, two different but also parallel fascinating times.

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

It’s a toss up. I have two possible stories and haven’t yet decided which one I want to spend the next couple of years with. Fiction for me is a long term commitment! Picasso’s Lovers, my newest novel, comes out in January of ’24 and I’m spending considerable time simply relishing that sense of completion and fulfillment.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: One print giveaway copy of PICASSO’S LOVERS by Jeanne Mackin.

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: I think we’ve all had at least one relationship that ended badly, or at least not the way we wanted it to end. Did your bad boy leave you weaker or stronger, in the long run?

 
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Book Info:

A tangled and vivid portrait of the women caught in Picasso’s charismatic orbit through the affairs, the scandals, and the art—only this time, they hold the brush.

The women of Picasso’s life are glamorous and elusive, existing in the shadow of his fame—until 1950s aspiring journalist Alana Olson determines to bring one into the light. Unsure of what to expect but bent on uncovering what really lies beneath the canvas, Alana steps into Sara Murphy’s well-guarded home to discover a past complicated by secrets and intrigue.

Sara paints a luxurious picture of the French Riviera in 1923, but also a tragic one. The more Sara reveals, the more cracks emerge in Picasso’s once-vibrant social circle—and the more Alana feels a disturbing convergence with her own life. Who are these other muses? What became of them? What will become of her?

Desperate to trace the threads, Alana dives into the glittering lives of the past. But to do so she must contend with her own reality, including a strained engagement, the male-dominated world of art journalism, and the rising threat to civil rights in America. With hard truths peeling apart around her, it turns out that the most extraordinary portrait Alana encounters is her own.
 
 

Meet the Author:

Jeanne Mackin is the author of several historical novels. Her most recent is Picasso’s Lovers, out in January from Berkley. Previously she published The Last Collection – a Novel of Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel, and The Beautiful American,. She has worked as a journalist for several publications, and as a university research and science writer. She lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, has traveled widely through Europe and Great Britain. Jeanne was the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society and her journalism has won awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education