"I Am You"

Victoria Redel is a first-generation American author of four books of poetry and six books of fiction. Her newest novel is I Am You. Redel’s work has been widely anthologized, awarded, and translated in ten languages. Her debut novel, Loverboy (2001) was adapted for feature film directed by Kevin Bacon. Redel’s short stories, poetry and essays have appeared in Granta, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bomb, One Story, Salmagundi, O, and NOON among many others. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center. Redel is a professor in the graduate and undergraduate Creative Writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York and Utah.

She applied the Page 69 Test to I Am You with the following results:

I love the Page 69 Test because I’m a full-throttle believer that a potential reader should be able to open to any page in a novel and begin to tease out the threads that weave through the novel. So, I confess I was relieved to see that page 69 of I Am You stays true to my belief.

At the top of page 69, a scene where Gerta, a maid and narrator of the novel, which takes place in the 1600s, has revealed to Maria, her master and a masterful painter, that she has, in secret, taught herself to paint. She shows her new skill by boldly painting directly on a still-life of Maria’s. But true to Maria’s nature, she hardly flinches, instead moving forward as if this is not a revelation but an inevitability. Gerta reflects, “Her reaction was as I’d hoped. Pragmatic. She needed an apprentice. And she knew it. If she was annoyed by anything that morning, it was only that she hadn’t realized before me that I’d become her apprentice. Though, of course, that’s eventually what she told the others. That she’d taught her maid. That she’d done what no one else had done before and turned a servant girl into a painter.”

Over the course of page 69, a browser would encounter a few of the essential threads in the novel—the power current between the two women that keeps shifting throughout the book and the role of secrets. That secret, that Gerta is Maria’s assistant, also leads to greater intimacy between the two women, and a new facet of their relationship begins to emerge as Gerta emerges as a painter in her own right. The two women at that point in the novel have forged a union determined to increase Maria’s position in the male-dominated art world of the 17th century.

Visit Victoria Redel's website.

The Page 69 Test: Before Everything.

--Marshal Zeringue