Avery Marchand
Avery Marchand writes historical fiction about the people at the edges of famous paintings: the model, the maid, the painter nobody remembers.
Two decades of travel have taken him to more than two dozen cities in thirteen countries and over forty states. He volunteered in Slovakia, and spent a day at Auschwitz-Birkenau that has never left him. Standing in front of the lists there, recognizing some of them, he thought about all the names that would never be spoken again.
His favorite painting is The Starry Night: organized chaos, violence and peace in the same sky. The Other Olympia is his first novel. He lives on the West Coast with his family.
“What happened to her pearls?”
I didn’t notice her at first. It was 2012, my first time in Paris, and Olympia was one painting in a long room at the Musée d’Orsay. The person beside me had studied art and literature. She stopped in front of it and told me who the woman on the bed was, and why Paris had jeered at her in 1865.
So I looked again, then closer. The orchid. The ribbon at her throat. The bracelet, the earrings, the silk shawl. Luxury all around a woman who was paid to lie there, and a face that tells you nothing about how she felt.
Half joking, I asked her what happened to the pearls. She said no one really knows. My imagination did the rest.
