I Always Knew: A Memoir

✍ Scribed by Barbara Chase-Riboud

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 481
• Edition: Signed
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The extraordinary life story of the celebrated artist and writer, as told through four decades of intimate letters to her beloved mother

Barbara Chase-Riboud has led a remarkable life. After graduating from Yale’s School of Design and Architecture, she moved to Europe and spent decades traveling the world and living at the center of artistic, literary, and political circles. She became a renowned artist whose work is now in museum collections around the world. Later, she also became an award-winning poet and bestselling novelist. And along the way, she met many luminaries—from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Salvador Dalí, Alexander Calder, James Baldwin, and Mao Zedong to Toni Morrison, Pierre Cardin, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Josephine Baker.

I Always Knew is an intimate and vivid portrait of Chase-Riboud’s life as told through the letters she wrote to her mother, Vivian Mae, between 1957 and 1991. In candid detail, Chase-Riboud tells her mother about her life in Europe, her work as an artist, her romances, and her journeys around the world, from Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East, Africa, the Soviet Union, China, and Mongolia.

By turns brilliant and naïve, passionate and tender, poignant and funny, these letters show Chase-Riboud in the process of becoming who she is and who she might become. But what emerges most of all is the powerful story of a unique and remarkable relationship between a talented, ambitious, and courageous daughter and her adored mother.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Contents
Preface
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
Plates
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
Plates
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
Color Plates
1978
1979
1980–81
1982–84
1985–87
1988–90
1991
Acknowledgments
Glossary of Names
Index of People and Places
Credits