How To Raise an Art Star - Paperback

After a freak water taxi accident at the Venice Biennale claims the lives of her first mothers-Nadia, a notorious enfant terrible of the LA art scene, and Lorraine, the quiet heir to a beauty-care empire-their bi-racial, precocious tween daughter Vabeh is placed in the care of two women whose life plans did not include children.

Devon Gregson Bennett, an artist entering mid-career, is determined to protect Vabeh's future while guarding her own precarious standing in a competitive art market and the delicate hierarchy of collectors who influence it. Morgan Gregson Bennett, a corporate strategist and writer, is wrestling with the dissonance between her carefully managed life and the sudden responsibility of mothering a child whose legacy-and losses-precede her.

As Vabeh moves between schoolyards, art studios, and the sharply lit rooms of collectors and gatekeepers, she becomes the bold-faced witness to the ways ambition, grief, and desire shape the adults who orbit her. Devon's work evolves under the pressure of being both seen and misunderstood. Morgan's writing life-and the expectations placed on it-grows uncomfortably close to the story she is living at home. And Vabeh, absorbing the aftershocks of her mothers' choices, begins to craft her own understanding of who she is and who she is allowed to become, reshaping both the art world and the playground in the process.

How to Raise an Art Star is a sharply observed, emotionally exacting novel about family-making, creative ambition, and the fragile negotiations that hold a life together after everything has fallen apart. With humor, tenderness, and a clear-eyed look at the art world's seductions and distortions, the novel asks what it means to raise-and to be-an artist in a world that loves talent, exploits it, and reshapes the people closest to it.

Perfect for readers of contemporary literary fiction exploring art, ambition, unconventional motherhood, and the stories we inherit and remake.