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How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves
A beaming testament to how art makes us who we are and offers new ways of seeing our world and our lives.
Barbara Kruger once defined art as “the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.”
Turning that question to the witness, to those of use who look to art for ballast, How It Feels to Be Alive braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art’s intimate effects and how it might help us find a clearer sense of ourselves in an uncertain world. Art can stoke our dreams and shape our politics; it can challenge or make granular our abstract notions of beauty and belonging. It can make visible and even reconfigure our relationship with the histories and geographies we thought were givens, including the exploited planet we inhabit.
In each chapter, Megan O’Grady looks closely at an individual artwork and the biographical context in which it was made, often drawing on personal conversations with the artists. From there she traces the work's unfurling impact in her own life, implicating other, sometimes unexpected works, lineages, and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imaginations and attention, and to what end? At a time when bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our fracturing public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does it propose?
A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to live one’s deepest life, How It Feels to Be Alive both inspires and exhorts, providing a template to think through the knottiest problems in our culture and in our selves, and the connections between the two.
Barbara Kruger once defined art as “the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.”
Turning that question to the witness, to those of use who look to art for ballast, How It Feels to Be Alive braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art’s intimate effects and how it might help us find a clearer sense of ourselves in an uncertain world. Art can stoke our dreams and shape our politics; it can challenge or make granular our abstract notions of beauty and belonging. It can make visible and even reconfigure our relationship with the histories and geographies we thought were givens, including the exploited planet we inhabit.
In each chapter, Megan O’Grady looks closely at an individual artwork and the biographical context in which it was made, often drawing on personal conversations with the artists. From there she traces the work's unfurling impact in her own life, implicating other, sometimes unexpected works, lineages, and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imaginations and attention, and to what end? At a time when bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our fracturing public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does it propose?
A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to live one’s deepest life, How It Feels to Be Alive both inspires and exhorts, providing a template to think through the knottiest problems in our culture and in our selves, and the connections between the two.
272 pages, Hardcover
Published April 21, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 25, 2026
I leave How It Feels To Be Alive more thoughtful and present to my life and the art around me. I dog-eared a good dozen moments that I must return to and reflect on.
O’Grady writes with precision and warmth as she welcomes and challenges the reader to experience the art that makes her feel alive in all its multifaceted complexity. She never speaks down to the reader, something I often feel as a novice in the world of art criticism and literature.
O’Grady writes with precision and warmth as she welcomes and challenges the reader to experience the art that makes her feel alive in all its multifaceted complexity. She never speaks down to the reader, something I often feel as a novice in the world of art criticism and literature.
May 11, 2026
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."
*
These days I find myself less interested in what art means than in how it is lived and experienced.
*
No act of making or beholding art takes place outside the conditions of living.
*
The risk of art has to do with the vulnerability and exposure inherent in making it.
*
If art can change the color of the sky, what else can it do?
*
We humans keep making marks, as I do now, to record the remarkable-the meanings we mark out in our minds.
This was what I saw, and it meant something to me; it mattered that I was here. This is how it feels to be alive.
*
These days I find myself less interested in what art means than in how it is lived and experienced.
*
No act of making or beholding art takes place outside the conditions of living.
*
The risk of art has to do with the vulnerability and exposure inherent in making it.
*
If art can change the color of the sky, what else can it do?
*
We humans keep making marks, as I do now, to record the remarkable-the meanings we mark out in our minds.
This was what I saw, and it meant something to me; it mattered that I was here. This is how it feels to be alive.
Read
June 11, 2026I will leave this unrated as I don't like to rate non-fiction. I know nothing about art but I read the synopsis of this book and it made me want to read it. I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. I really enjoyed the deep dive into each piece of art and how the author wove in her personal story into her experience with the art and the impact that it had.
June 16, 2026
“Art has always presented us with such clues, reminding us that the past remains with us. And maybe also, that knowledge isn’t ever really lost; it just hasn’t been found or understood yet.
We humans keep making marks, to record the remarkable― the meanings we mark out in our minds. This was what I saw, and it meant something to me; it mattered that I was here. This is how it feels to be alive”.
We humans keep making marks, to record the remarkable― the meanings we mark out in our minds. This was what I saw, and it meant something to me; it mattered that I was here. This is how it feels to be alive”.
April 26, 2026
DAMN FINE LIT
November 21, 2025
Going into this book, I was expecting hardcore nonfiction. Something about Art and how it relates to our self-awareness. Philosophy.
Instead, if feels a lot like meeting a friend at a cafe. Imagine that you have a very cultured friend, who is an art teacher. She is witty, funny, interesting. She seems to have an opinion about everything, and her life sometimes feels like fiction. You remember, the time she moved with her husband to Colorado with they young daughter, after their home was destroyed by a fire and they lost nearly everything? That friend. Megan O'Grady.
So we hang out with Megan, and she talks about art (both at the philosophical level, but also through a lot of anecdotes, biographies of artists, personal experiences with their work...). She also talks about motherhood, divorce, moving to Berlin, sexism, parenting during Covid times, aging... This type of things. I am lucky, because all those topics actually interest me. So here I am, as a captive audience: I read, I learn, and I reflect on what she says. This is not what I thought the book would be, but I definitely enjoyed it. It was light, funny, witty.
I think the perfect audience for this book would be a woman in her fourties or fifties, with an interest for art and politics.
Thank you NetGalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and of course Megan O'Grady for the ARC.
I would love to listen to Megan in the real life one day. She seems like a very interesting person.
Instead, if feels a lot like meeting a friend at a cafe. Imagine that you have a very cultured friend, who is an art teacher. She is witty, funny, interesting. She seems to have an opinion about everything, and her life sometimes feels like fiction. You remember, the time she moved with her husband to Colorado with they young daughter, after their home was destroyed by a fire and they lost nearly everything? That friend. Megan O'Grady.
So we hang out with Megan, and she talks about art (both at the philosophical level, but also through a lot of anecdotes, biographies of artists, personal experiences with their work...). She also talks about motherhood, divorce, moving to Berlin, sexism, parenting during Covid times, aging... This type of things. I am lucky, because all those topics actually interest me. So here I am, as a captive audience: I read, I learn, and I reflect on what she says. This is not what I thought the book would be, but I definitely enjoyed it. It was light, funny, witty.
I think the perfect audience for this book would be a woman in her fourties or fifties, with an interest for art and politics.
Thank you NetGalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and of course Megan O'Grady for the ARC.
I would love to listen to Megan in the real life one day. She seems like a very interesting person.
May 23, 2026
Art history memoirs are tough because there is this underlying sense that the author/narrator is the least "interesting" in the cast, that their memoir sections must be read differently to the artist bios despite the through-lines presented. Art obviously reflects/has a relationship to reality so the artists considered, using both their bodies and work and their bodies, generally help to illustrate the social dynamics which are then more personally explored by author. But at the same time, the author self-describes as a liberal white woman whose political self was brought to consciousness by like Trump/Kavanaugh and COVID inspiring an empathy overload inside her. Which then ballooned into the reflections presented in this book. Probably I don't need to say that I find people like this naïve if not suspicious — especially when a book was published within the last two years or so and the extermination of indigenous people, the forced migration of Roma/Jewish/etc. people during WWII, are brought up while the Palestinian genocide is entirely skipped over. There was at times an easy reversion to simple "solutions" like institutions healing themselves through idk, rigorous internal processes. At other times difficult topics were handled with more serious thought. So kind of a mixed bag.
December 8, 2025
[ARC review] This book blends art critique with biography and auto-biography. If you enjoy heavy meanderings that fuse artwork and life, and moreover, have a particular interest in the spotlighted artists (Agnes Martin and Carrie Mae Weems, among others) then you'll enjoy your time in O'Grady's chapters.
For me, it felt somewhat overwritten (by this I mean literary and detailed, which is typically the type of writing I tend to avoid) and I struggled to find a lasting purpose for the book or a reason for me to stick with it (although I did appreciate being introduced to Carrie Mae Weems, who I hadn't heard of before), but hey-ho, that is what a lot of writings on art can be like.
O'Grady is fundamentally a good writer, and I don't think any review by me can appropriately evaluate this work or do her justice. In short, I'm afraid this book is just not wholly my vibe despite having a general enjoyment of the visual arts. In contrast, others might find this to be an indulgent delight.
For me, it felt somewhat overwritten (by this I mean literary and detailed, which is typically the type of writing I tend to avoid) and I struggled to find a lasting purpose for the book or a reason for me to stick with it (although I did appreciate being introduced to Carrie Mae Weems, who I hadn't heard of before), but hey-ho, that is what a lot of writings on art can be like.
O'Grady is fundamentally a good writer, and I don't think any review by me can appropriately evaluate this work or do her justice. In short, I'm afraid this book is just not wholly my vibe despite having a general enjoyment of the visual arts. In contrast, others might find this to be an indulgent delight.
June 12, 2026
Beautifully written and very informative. I did feel sometimes that we were covering too many topics, so that we couldn’t go really into depth about any one theme, but O’Grady’s thoughtfulness and ability to express the way she interprets the world through art absolutely made up for that.
I was really partial to the chapters that spent a lot of time on the lives of the artists themselves, maybe because O’Grady is a skilled biographer or maybe because I’m nosy or most likely both.
I was really partial to the chapters that spent a lot of time on the lives of the artists themselves, maybe because O’Grady is a skilled biographer or maybe because I’m nosy or most likely both.
May 28, 2026
The writing in this book leaves no crumbs as the author takes you through adventures in contemporary art and their own life as a writer. I read this book in 4 sittings. The author's prose is so good that I reconsidered many of the artists they wrote about and now I'm going to obsess over them.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Beautifully written.
May 22, 2026
Now THIS is how you write criticism. Let’s go.
May 30, 2026
4.5 Witness to the way art has an effect on us in so many ways. Excellent.
June 8, 2026
O’Grady is a damn good writer. This is truly original
July 10, 2026
Meandering, personal, not particularly forceful (though I don't think it's trying to be). I really enjoyed the first essay.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews