How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves

by Megan O'Grady

A vital 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.” Testing that claim, How It Feels to Be Alive braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art’s intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world.

When Megan O'Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed her life. At the end of an early marriage, art stoked new ways of thinking about connection and transformation. As a new parent, it guided her to confront vulnerability and shame. Whether seeking a home or contending with crises personal, political, and ecological, art was a critical lifeline, a source of beauty, solace, and provocation.

Looking closely at five artworks and the context in which each was made—often drawing on personal conversations with the artists—O’Grady examines the work’s rippling impact, implicating sometimes unexpected lineages and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imaginations and attention? When bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does it offer? A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to rethink all that we take for granted, How It Feels to Be Alive inspires and exhorts, providing a template to think through the knottiest problems in our culture, our selves, and the connections between the two.

Genres: Nonfiction, Art, Memoir, Biography Memoir, Audiobook

252 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 21, 2026

Reviews

[Alexa]

Wow, stunning. Newest Megan O'Grady super fan!

This made me nostalgic. My favorite chapter (essay?) was the second, which touched on (part of) my thesis topic and also a bunch of artists I learned about through the many classes I took with my favorite professor in college. I always love reading memoirs which are merged with some form of art criticism. It is nearly impossible to separate how we feel about art with how we feel about ourselves, our lives, and our world. I like that more arts literature seems to be embracing this subjectivity lately.

I do, however, find myself shying away from reading anything about the 2016 first Trump era world. I just can't ever bring myself to read about that time. I always skip over it in books. But that's a me problem, and has nothing to do with the book.

[Christopher McQuain]

4.5

[Ryan King]

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.

[victoria marie]

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.

[Emily Nguyen]

“My inability to feel at home became my (disorienta-tion toward the world. When we leave a place, we are un-selfed, removed from our usual bearings. I was happiest when I didn't belong, when anything still seemed possible, the slate clean, the street names and language yet to be learned. Moving mimicked, in some low-level way, some of my best encounters with art: relieving me of my old assump-tions, my way of being and beholding.”

[Jennifer Jane Blackwell]

I 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.

[Mary]

beautiful, meandering, & written in a voice that I was sure was speaking directly to me. I was joyful like a dog hearing all my favorite words. how I felt reading both Elizabeth Kolbert & Rebecca Solnit for the first time.

[Maggie]

“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”.

[Jenina]

DAMN FINE LIT

[ROLLAND Florence]

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.

[NZ]

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.

[Samantha]

O’Grady is a damn good writer. This is truly original. Her thoughts in Home Fires are like talking to two glasses of wine me at a balcony at a party. It is dreamy, it is striking, it is GOOD. I almost didn't buy this because of how much it cost when I was browsing the McNally Jackson Soho with Jess on a Saturday afternoon but I kept picking it up and all the words kept popping off the page and I knew I had to have it and now the book is a friend. It beautifully captures how she has lived life, encountered ideas and people and works of art that moved her or helped her think about something from another perspective in some way, and helps you look at items in your own life a little differently and find more meaning and care from them

Fave quotes:
- "Color, like art, is contextual and subjective, contingent on the conditions in which we see it and on what our eyes have grown accustomed to. We are goggled by experience and circumstance. What I see is not what you see; my transcendence is not your transcendence. There is an ethics to seeing, to being precise about how we look at things."
- "Barbara Kruger once defined art as 'the ability through visual, verbal, gestural, and musical means, to objectify's one's experience of the world: to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.'"
- "I've wondered if life could ever live up to art."
- "What is the relationship between what is experienced and what is made? How does art mark us and our lives rushing by? How can we better understand the revelations that arrive not as watersheds but in slow accumulations along the shoals?"
- "Art slices deeply into our certitudes and comforts."
- "I do in fact sometimes feel as though I am trying to meditate with a siren blaring. But for me, art has never been a consoling distraction or a refuge from the cyclones of policies and social and environmental change. Art is an unfixed mooring, not a secure berth, in the face of the blackening sky."
- "A catastrophe is a catastrophe only for those who register it."
- "It was a time in my late twenties when the company of friends, and the company of the person I planned to spend my life with, didn't abte my loneliness but worsened it."
- "The richness of the gold soothed me, made me feel replete, as though I were facing the sun rather than embarking on the demolition of my life."
- Martin speaking: "I left New York in 1967 because every day I suddenly felt i wanted to die and it was connected with painting. It took me several years to find out that the cause was an overdeveloped sense of responsibility... I suppose yo could say I wasn't up to the demands and everything, the life I had to live, there. But there was something else; that I came to the place of recognition of confusion that had to be solved. It was just like painting; I waited patiently for something like permission to leave."
- "I boarded a plane to Berlin with a laptop and a suitcase filled with books. I had sublet an apartment on a high floor of an ungentrified neighborhood - a new city, a new perspective."
- "What to do with the accumulation of past lives ,with the rubble of memories and guilt and stories that have ended?"
- "Always becoming, never being."
- "It is strange to think of Berlin as the place I recovered my innocence, though i did, with the help of new friends, people who were passing through indeterminate zones of their own. Their innocence was the kind found at dinners that ran late, in meetups of a particular bookstore or coffee shops..."
- "the coexistence of deep love and ambivalence"
- "Before Athens left New York, she'd sent me a parting gift: a seventy-page personalized star chart and the first three seasons of Sex and the City on VHS. The keys to life for someone, no doubt. During my time in the Vogue office, I thought a lot about how other people's lives looked - via books, art, interiors, fashion - but I had not even begun to work out a vision for my own. I still have the star chart. Once while moving house, I opened it for the first time. 'Seek beauty!' Athena began. 'You desire the illusory, the mysterious. You are very lively to live in two worlds.'"
- "To what extent can we imagine those on the other sides of the divides of gender, class, and politics? Can we really place ourselves in another person's shows, body, or circumscribed reality? Or are we trapped in our bodies and circumstances of birth?"
- "'I try to understand my life as movement through different spaces.'" - Do Ho Suh
- "I had lived in so many places, for no reason I found simple to explain. I'd moved for the usual reasons, like college and work, to learn Spanish, to teach English, to avoid student loans, to see who I might become in a different context. I'd moved for love and after a breakup. I'd moved when I didn't know what else to do, with too little information, knowing only that something needed to change, and it was easier to change my surroundings than myself."

[Zo Smi]

[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.

[Cat]

I was sorry to finish this book, sorry to have to stop living inside the author’s head, which is a lovely place to spend some time. It’s such an interesting book—a group of essays, each beautifully woven out of reflections on art, bits of memoir, cultural commentary—there’s no overarching narrative and while I usually hate books that are collections of essays I liked this one. I think that’s because my sense of the author’s personality, her life story, does evolve throughout. I was impressed by the intuitive braiding throughout the essays: the author jumps around but as a reader I did not question her moves—reading was an immersive, mind-tingling, stimulating experience.

[May]

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.

[Luca Siletti]

Wish I had read this at a faster pace to hold cohesion. Still very introspective and interesting. At its best when dissecting the interpretation of the shared human experience and telling the stories of artists who mostly exist behind their works, and while the reflections of the political connotations of art were well articulated and interesting, they weren't exactly what drew me towards the book, being far too contemporary and American in focus.

[Steven Frost]

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.

[Hannah Bonner]

Beautifully written.

[Jeremy Liang]

Now THIS is how you write criticism. Let’s go.

[Julie]

4.5 Witness to the way art has an effect on us in so many ways. Excellent.

[Catherine S. Ducayen]

Meandering, personal, not particularly forceful (though I don't think it's trying to be). I really enjoyed the first essay.

[E.J. Levy]

Wonderful, like a great conversation with a smart and thoughtful friend. Highly recommended.

[Edna]

Her thoughts on her life mixed with her thoughts on artists. I especially enjoyed the one chapter which had a lot of Agnes Martin - it gave me a deeper understanding of Martin.

[foolscap]

my expectations were wildly different from this and often it felt a bit too rambly