The fact that the photographer was unknown gave us some cover for using it. This photo came out of the Connell papers at the Stanford U library. My editor at the University of Missouri Press really liked the image we ended up with on the cover. What the hell, I’m posting the photo here, and we’ll see what happens.

She may still be with us, but I couldn’t break through to her.

Eve Crane, a well-known Bay Area photographer known especially for her pictures of Hell’s Angels, took a wonderful photo of Connell at a chess board for the back cover of Mr. I had one in my files, but preferred one or two others. Trouble is, most of the prints were inaccessible because of the pandemic shutdown of the Counterpoint office. Thomas Victor, a well-known author photographer in the publishing world, shot several photos of Connell for books published by North Point and Counterpoint Press. She’d shot a very good portrait of Connell and when I asked about it, she said it would cost me $1,000. To name names of living photographers: I got in touch with Jill Krementz, whom I’d once met while interviewing her husband, Kurt Vonnegut. Several of the portrait photographers were either dead or their heirs or representatives could not be reached. Bridge, trapped in her garage as her novel ends.As I was gathering photos for Literary Alchemist, I was often confronted with running the hurdles that go along with seeking permission to use images. A fly caught unawares in amber for eternity is no more immobilized and exposed than Mrs. The raised evening newspaper becomes almost a fire screen to deflect any possible spark of conversation. Bridge recedes more and more into doubt and confusion as her three children and husband become more remote and silent. With a surgeon's skill Connell cuts away the middle-class security blanket of uniformity to expose the arrested development beneath. Bridge is comprised of over one hundred titled chapters, containing vignettes, an image, a fragment of conversation, an event-all building powerfully toward the completed group portrait of a family, closely knit on the surface but deeply divided beneath by loneliness, boredom, misunderstandings, isolation, sexual longing, and terminal alienation.

Connell is expert at sketching the banalities and trivialities of middle-class values, customs, and habits.

Mr and mrs bridge novel