Jean Nathan on Dare Wright

Charles Ruas asks all the right questions of Jean Nathan, a journalist who began a quest to find a children's book she loved as a child; she ended up locating not only the book, The Lonely Doll, but also its author, Dare Wright, who was by that point lying comatose in a hospital. In The Secret Life of The Lonely Doll: the Search for Dare Wright, Nathan discovers the complex life of a talented woman who was treated by her portraitist mother as a doll-like child and grew up to become a fashion model, an actress and an artist who photographed her own doll, Edith, as the principal character in the poignant narrative that veils and reflects her own shattered childhood. Nathan has previously written for The New Yorker, The New York Observer, The New York Times and Vogue, among other publications.

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