Cleans Up Nicely: A Novel

When twenty-something artist Erica Mason moves from laid-back Mexico to Manhattan in the mid-1970s, she finds a hard-edged, decadent, and evolving art scene. Her life there leads her to a self-destructive string of affairs with men, alcohol, and drugs, but also, ultimately, to the self-respect that has long eluded her. ;

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with an honors degree in Latin American Studies, Linda Dahl worked as a freelance journalist in Mexico, Ecuador, and Brazil, with a particular interest in the arts. Based in New York since the mid 1970's, her books reflect her interests in the arts and love of research. Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen (Pantheon, 1984) was called “a brilliant work of oral history” by Publishers Weekly. Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (Pantheon, 2000), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Haunted Heart: A Biography of Susannah McCorkle (University of Michigan Press, 2006), wrote Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic “is vivacious, tender, saturnine, industrious and deeply intelligent.” Her novel, Gringa in a Strange Land (Robert D. Reed Publishers), won the Writers in the Sky Award for Best Creative Writing of 2010. ;
; ; ; ; Linda has just completed a new novel, Cleans Up Nicely, to be published in
2013 by She Writes Press.
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ISBN: 9781938314384
Format: Paperback
Pages: 280
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: August 25, 2013

“Erica Mason’s rite of passage is not only a love affair with art, men, alcohol, drugs, and jazz in the swirl that was the downtown scene in a radically evolving era in New York, but also a resurrection from addiction and self-delusion. At once fast-moving, funny, and heartrending, this is a deftly handled study of one gifted young woman’s path from self-destruction to self-knowledge, self-respect, and well-being.” —Randolph Hogan, former New York Times Book Review editor

“Cleans Up Nicely is a pitch-perfect, picaresque tale of love lost and found, talent squandered and reclaimed, and friendship forgotten and redeemed in gritty 1970s New York. It all spins around Erica, a burgeoning artist with a peripatetic past and a talent for courting trouble. In evocative prose, Dahl gives us an insider’s look at New York’s demimonde, a motley assortment of bartenders, bosses, art dealers, academics, musicians, radical feminists, writers, working girls, pimps, pushers, and hangers-on.” —Joan Duncan Oliver, Editor at Large, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and author of The Meaning of Nice