Kara Walker’s breakup was in a museum – so I went home and started writing my memoir

Like many writers, I struggle to manage accounting. The only inventory that comes naturally to me is writing books, this interior work of zero use to the local council. I was young when I learned how alarmed one should feel by the arrival of bills, any letter without a handwritten address experienced as body shock. But through my parents I learned that female artists can process these sorts of anxieties through their work. My dad took me, as a kid, to see Tracey Emin at the Tate. My mum accompanied me to Alice Neel , Louise Bourgeois and Sophie Calle . A decade ago, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, I went alone to see Kara Walker ’s My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. I sat on the leather bench reading her righteously wounded break-up letter, and sobbed. Because it was on the wall. So it must mean something. I didn’t mean anything in the world yet and I didn’t mean anything any more to the person I’d loved. But her devastation was in a museum, framed . And that was a big piece of getting me through. Art can do that. You can ride its coat-tails until you find your feet. I went home and started writing my memoir Your Voice In My Head , a call and response – even if she never reads it. I later returned to the exhibition with […] Kara Walker. Photograph: Maria Spann/The Guardian Kara Walker. Photograph: Maria Spann/The Guardian

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