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It was a fall day. I stood on an island peninsula in Maine, where the ocean tide swept over giant rocks. My husband’s art studio was just a stretch from our doorway, along a path of rounded stepping stones laid by his father’s hands. I smelled sun-dried salt in the drifting leaves, their colors vivid as they tumbled from the trees and crunched under my feet. As I walked over rocks settled between moss and grass, their tones grey-blue like a seal’s skin, something in me was already turning.
I was longing for that sweet, sensuous expression: the way the scent swept through the air, as crisp as the apples draped on the trees, a dancing red. If I could have bitten into that moment, I would have pressed my mouth right into that apple’s core. I was hungry for something I could not explain, something I rarely felt anymore. That yearning took me away from all that was right before me. I had not noticed it then, not as I do now. Perhaps I was hungry for myself.
David’s art takes form as tall sculptures of dignity in stone and bronze. If you ask him about his art, he will tell you he is not an artist. For David, art comes from imagination; his own work comes from the fortitude of replication. He believes an artist dreams a form into being. “I just repeat what an artist sees,” he will say firmly. Working in stacked stone, clay, or carved wood, he insists, “I am just a sculptor.”
A couple of years earlier, he had finished another life-size sculpture, The Last Geisha. She stood by the pond, visible from our bedroom window. In the figure, I saw an inward, composed stillness, a mystery I imagined she held close. I had never moved through the world that way. I was spirited, expressive, always reaching outward. She seemed to belong to a world I could not enter. Each morning, she was there.
When I walked inside his studio, my eyes took a moment to adjust. The light had dropped sharply. The place smelled the way it always smelled: of wood, dust, damp clay, and the sweetness of wax. Then I saw her in the middle of it, a life-size woman wrapped from head to foot in cellophane.
She was me. Finished and waiting to be cast in bronze. Clay, still. That was the reason for the plastic veil: to keep the lingering summer heat from taking her.
His inspiration had begun years earlier with a photograph that still sat on his workbench. It had been taken in South Africa, in the dunes near the Cape of Good Hope. In it, I was wrapped in nothing but a sarong blowing in the wind, a woman smiling at him from the other side of the world. I felt exactly that far from him now, even while standing in the same room. Perhaps he felt it too.
I often posed for him, especially during measurements, holding still and saying nothing while he worked. All year, his hands moved between me and my likeness, measuring my body and shaping hers, while his eyes studied us both with focused attention. I never doubted that he loved me. But we had different experiences of what love was supposed to feel like. We learn love early, usually by watching our parents. He gave the kind of love his father gave his mother: quiet and steady, careful, made with his hands. I wanted the kind of love my father gave my mother: loud love, spoken, reached for, out in the open. Both were real. Neither one translated. Neither of us knew how to say so.
From where I stood, I felt bronze in the light of his gaze. Seen and not heard.
I felt compelled to start unwrapping her. The clear cellophane around the sculpture felt suffocating and heavy. It cracked in my hands, the sound rising into the rafters.
There she stood. Uncovered, silent, and fully visible. She was nearly an exact replica of me. Her exposed clay body, measured and perfected, mirrored my form. My face, hair, shoulders, breasts, the exact turn of the wrists. The way I turn my feet inward. But she is not me.
I thought of a phrase often said to me in the late 1970s, usually when I was being myself—alive and spirited: “Ladies are meant to be seen, not heard.” I never managed it. I knew it wasn’t true. So I talked openly. When I was present with people, I didn’t hold back. I took up the whole room. Later, I would lie awake with a flood of thoughts. I wondered if I should apologize for how I had been.
I stayed there in silence longer than I meant to. Something was arriving, and I didn’t have the language for it yet. Only a sense of what was right before me. “You are not Pamela,” I said to her. “Who are you?” The question came back at me: “Who am I?”
This was the day Gracen's story Unveiled was born. It came the way the weather came. I did not choose it; I recognized it.
As the sculpture was unveiled, something within me awakened, subtle but undeniable. I was looking for myself. Gracen is what I found on the way.
Gracen Thorne is not just a creation; she is the story. She is an intimate exploration of identity and perception. Gracen carries the echoes of a woman who was both known and unknown, visible and hidden. She reflects the beautiful complexity of being seen and unseen, loved and lost, present and absent.
I did not know that afternoon that she would become a book. Three of them. Songs. A whole world. Something had opened in me. I did not yet understand it, but I could see the shape of the life I had been living inside. I wanted to create something meaningful, something entertaining, a fictional memoir with room to breathe. But I did not want to leave readers standing in the chaos. I wanted to walk them out of it.
After that day, I went back to my old journals. I began asking questions that I had avoided for a long time. Without judgment, I wrote them down. How did I get here? Who am I? I knew success. What was it worth? Why did I feel misunderstood? What was love? What did love ask of me? I knew what love was not. And I knew guidance, subtle and loud, was always with me.
For a long time, I believed that being measured so closely and cast in bronze meant I had not been seen. Over time, I began to understand that I was asking a different question. I wanted to know whether I was fully present in my own life—whether I knew myself beneath the roles, the preferences, the work, and the image I had learned to maintain. Perhaps this is what it means to fall in love from behind a veil. We see what first draws us in: a face, a charm, an accomplishment, the life someone has built.
We fall in love with each other’s qualities and with who we become beside one another. We do not always get all the way to the person underneath. We may be operating from preference alone, before we understand precision. Precision asks different questions. Does this let me become more real? Does it give me energy rather than take it? Does it feel harmonious when nothing is being performed? That is the precision of recognizing whether someone is truly right for you.
At the time, we saw life very differently. We did not always know how to communicate without one of us feeling hurt, misunderstood, or wrong. That was the veil—ego and image obscuring who we were. Work, lifestyle, responsibility, and the habits of a shared life kept us moving, but did not bring us any closer.
When we lack self-awareness, we can be hard on one another—less kind and understanding than we would like to be. I was learning that being close to someone is not the same as being present with myself.
I do not think this is a rare story. Most of us stand at some point in a room with someone we love, both of us doing our best, speaking two languages that do not cross.
Then, one day, you wake up and ask, “Why is this so hard?”
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