“How It Feels to Be Alive is an essential book imbued with unwavering, attentive, and clear-eyed optimism. Exploring how to navigate an increasingly contentious world with the strength, wisdom, beauty, and history available to us through art, Megan O’Grady brings joy and meaning to everyday living. Reading O’Grady is like taking a long walk with a kindred spirit, through whose perceptive eyes we have gained a deeper understanding of our own minds.” —Yiyun Li, author of Things in Nature Merely Grow

“In an era when the arts feel increasingly imperiled, Megan O’Grady’s How It Feels to Be Alive shines as a rapt testament to art’s ongoing vitality. Her meditations on artists ranging from Agnes Martin and Carrie Mae Weems to Pope.L are a ravishing sensorium of embodied experience, while she also provides illuminating historical, biographical, and metaphysical insight. Rather than asking what art means, she asks what it does—how a painting unsettles us and reshapes the way we inhabit the world—with stunning candor and poetic grace.” —Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

“Megan O’Grady is one of the most astute and openhearted culture writers working today. How It Feels to Be Alive is a remarkable and restless work of clear thinking about mixed feelings.” —Catherine Lacey, author of The Möbius Book and Biography of X

“How—now that you mention it—does it feel to be alive? A bit like reading Megan O’Grady’s book, stained with blood and beauty, as she fearlessly claws at the artificial veil between art and life and shows that, as anyone who has any experience of either knows, life and art are indivisible. In a book that is autobiographical without being an autobiography, astute in its criticism without ever being hemmed in by the conventions of critics, deeply learned without being academic, she invents a new model of writing about art—and that, as it happens, is also a new way of writing about life.”—Benjamin Moser, author of The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters

“Megan O’Grady’s adventures in the art world take her from Agnes Martin’s mystical geometries to the real-life interventions of Pope.L and beyond, reminding us that the best art will ask questions for which there may be no answer, create feelings one can barely name, and generate theories when there’s nothing to believe. For O’Grady, art is a search for meaning, and it’s personal. She shares her inner journey as the artists in How It Feels to Be Alive set out to sculpt the intangible, to interrogate the humdrum, or to reinvent the world, and, always, to look where no one else has. Look again.” —Cynthia Carr, author of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar

“This book is a highly original take on the art and life conundrum. Megan O’Grady discusses these lucky artists and their work in the context of her own life and experiences, elements so tightly interwoven that they often merge, producing a new kind of memoir and a new kind of art writing—some of the best I’ve read. O’Grady is an acute and eloquent observer, not only of art and artists, but also of multiple political, environmental, and feminist issues, especially motherhood, which runs like a subterranean stream beneath the narrative. Her responses to the wizardry of art that is so difficult to pin down are personal, but never exclusive, inviting us all to share or identify or disagree.” —Lucy R. Lippard, author of Moving Targets: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art 1970–1993

“Insightful, broad-ranging, beautifully rendered, this memorable book offers profound reflections on identity, relationships, feminism and the environment. How It Feels to Be Alive reminds us why art matters.” —Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History