\u201cThis was the first photograph I ever saw of Susie. It hung in the bedroom of her little flat in Maida Vale in London, and I fell in love with it. Of course, I also fell in love with Susie herself, and thirty years later we are still as devoted to each other as two people can be.\u201d That\u2019s Nick Cave at the jump, setting the terms of this book: The black-and-white images by Issermann, a French fashion photographer and longtime friend of the Caves, are meant to make readers fall a little in love with Susie, too. Here she is, a silhouette on the beach, posing for Issermann in Normandy in 1990; here\u2019s Susie in Rome in 1996, under a long black veil. Susie, too, chimes in, writing that she and Nick married in 1999 and had twin sons the following year. The ensuing photos often include the twins\u2014Nick\u2019s hands are shown drawing with pen on a child\u2019s hand; there\u2019s a blurry close-up of mother and son\u2014and the book transforms into a family album. (A photo index clarifies that the family pictures were taken at an Italian estate in 2008.) Readers may note that only one child is spoken of in the present tense, suggesting what isn\u2019t stated outright: One of the Cave twins has since died. That so few of the family pictures feature crisply focused faces plays like an effort to avert the pain of confronting loss head-on. It\u2019s through no shortcoming of Issermann\u2019s starkly beautiful images that readers can\u2019t possibly find Susie as captivating as her husband does; the book is more successful\u2014immensely so\u2014as a grief album made heartbreakingly public.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThis was the first photograph I ever saw of Susie. It hung in the bedroom of her little flat in Maida Vale in London, and I fell in love with it. Of course, I also fell in love with Susie herself, and thirty years later we are still as devoted to each other as two […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7309,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7308"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7308\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}