“How It Feels to Be Alive is a remarkable and restless work of clear thinking about mixed feelings.” —Catherine Lacey

After spending hours in the studios of established artists like Carrie Mae Weems and Barbara Kruger and seeing how their lives informed their art, O'Grady began to realize art criticism's inextricably autobiographical qualities, and allowed herself to wonder about her personal stakes, and indeed, our collective stakes, in art's intimate effects. 

How It Feels To Be Alive blends criticism with personal narrative to consider how art might help us find clarity in our ordinary life and uncertain world. From the minimalist grids of Agnes Martin, who believed in the primacy of perception and emotion over intellect, to the urgent public art of performance artist and provocateur Pope.L, How It Feels looks closely at five artworks and the context in which each was made—often drawing on personal conversations with the artists and O'Grady's own experience in the classroom as a professor—to examine the work's rippling impact, implicating unexpected lineages and genres along the way.

Barbara Kruger once defined art as “the ability, through visual, verbal, gestural, and musical means, to objectify one’s experience of the world: to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.” In the years I have written about art, spending many hours in the studios and with the thoughts of artists, this definition has prevailed. Here, the art says, look, this is how life feels. And in looking, I have often been bludgeoned by art’s beauty, energized or pulverized by its emotional content, vacuum-sealed within its force field. I’ve looked at it and thought, This is exactly what it feels like to remember someone I lost, or This is what love is, a tenderness towards experience. — How It Feels To Be Alive, Megan O’Grady

Megan O’Grady is a critic and an essayist. She was a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where she created the Culture Therapist column. Her reviews and essays about art and life also appear in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. She was a contributing editor at Vogue and a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Currently, she is an assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she lives with her family.

Emma Leary is a bookseller and the creator of the Courtyard Conversations event series at Bart’s Books.