The Artist and His Mother

The Artist and His Mother is a work of creative nonfiction in the form of a novel whose narrator, a painter and writer, composes not only a portrait of himself and his mother, Zaroohe, but a story of a century from when, as a child of ten, she survived the Armenian Genocide in 1915, to her death in America in 2006. The title is after Arshile Gorky’s famous paintings of himself and his own mother, and here also the composition is inspired by the ghosts of the massacre.