The Alchemy of a Blackbird

by Claire McMillan

(Simon & Schuster, July 2023)

Claire McMillan is the author of Gilded Age, (which was inspired by Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth), The Necklace (by her travels to India), and more recently ALCHEMY OF A BLACKBIRD.

We chat with Claire here at AUTHORLINK about the inspiration behind the story, the influence of the Tarot, and the painting ‘The Call’ by Remedios Caro, a Spanish- Mexican modernist painter.   

For fans of The Age of Light and Z, a mystical, historical novel based on the true story of the 20th-century painters and occultists Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, each beginning as the muse of a famous lover and then breaking away to become an icon in her own right through a powerful friendship that springs from their connection to the Tarot.

Desperate to escape the Nazis, painter Remedios Varo and her lover, poet Benjamin Peret, flee Paris for Villa Air Bel, a safe house for artists on the Riviera. Along with Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, and others, the two anxiously wait for exit papers. As the months pass, Remedios begins to sense that the others don’t see her as a fellow artist; they have cast her in the stifling role of a surrealist ideal: the beautiful innocent. She finds refuge in a mysterious bookshop, where she stumbles into a world of occult learning and intensifies an esoteric practice in the tarot that helps her light the bright fire of her creative genius.

When travel documents come through, Remedios and Benjamin flee to Mexico where she is reunited with friend and fellow painter Leonora Carrington. Together, the women tap into their creativity, stake their independence, and each finds their true love. But it is the tarot that enables them to access the transcendent that lies on the other side of consciousness, to become the truest Surrealists of all. connection to the tarot.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Claire McMillan was the 2017–2018 Cuyahoga County Writer-in-Residence and currently serves as a member of the board of trustees of The Mount, Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, Massachusetts.
She practiced law until 2003 and then received her MFA in creative writing from Bennington College. She grew up in Pasadena, California, and now lives on her husband’s family farm outside of Cleveland, Ohio, with their two children.

For fans of The Age of Light and Z, ALCHEMY OF A BLACKBIRD is a mystical, historical novel based on the true story of the 20th-century painters and occultists Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington, each beginning as the muse of a famous lover and then breaking away to become an icon in her own right through a powerful friendship that springs from their connection to the tarot.