Skip to Main Content

Cleans Up Nicely

A Novel

Published by She Writes Press
Distributed by Simon & Schuster

LIST PRICE ₹741.00

PRICE MAY VARY BY RETAILER

About The Book

When twenty-something artist Erica Mason moves from laid-back Mexico to Manhattan in the mid-1970s, she finds a hard-edged, decadent, and radically evolving art scene. Peppered with characters who could only come from the latter days of the “turn-on-and-drop-out” ’60s in then-crumbling New York (a spaced-out drummer who’s completely given up on using or making money, a radical feminist who glues animal furs to her paintings of vaginas, and icons in the making like Patti Smith), Erica’s New York is fast-moving, funny, and heartrending—just like the city itself. Ultimately, her rite of passage is not only a love affair with art, men, alcohol, drugs, and music in the swirl that was the downtown scene in a radically evolving era in New York, but also a resurrection from addiction and self-delusion. More than the study of a celebrated period of artistic expression, Cleans Up Nicely is the story of one gifted young woman’s path from self-destruction to a hard-won self-knowledge that opens up a whole new world for her—and helps her claim the self-respect that has long eluded her.

About The Author

Linda Dahl graduated from the University of Wisconsin with an honors degree in Latin American Studies, and went on to work as a freelance journalist in Mexico, Ecuador, and Brazil, with a particular interest in the arts. Based in New York since the mid 1970's, her books reflect her interests in the arts and love of research. Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of Jazzwomen (Pantheon, 1984) was called “a brilliant work of oral history” by Publishers Weekly. Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (Pantheon, 2000), was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Haunted Heart: A Biography of Susannah McCorkle (University of Michigan Press, 2006), wrote Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic “is vivacious, tender, saturnine, industrious and deeply intelligent.” Her novel, Gringa in a Strange Land (Robert D. Reed Publishers), won the Writers in the Sky Award for Best Creative Writing of 2010. Linda has just completed a new novel, Cleans Up Nicely, to be published in 2013 by She Writes Press.

Product Details

  • Publisher: She Writes Press (August 25, 2013)
  • Length: 228 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781938314391

Raves and Reviews

“Erica Mason’s rite of passage is not only a love affair with art, men, alcohol, drugs, and jazz in the swirl that was the downtown scene in a radically evolving era in New York, but also a resurrection from addiction and self-delusion. At once fast-moving, funny, and heartrending, this is a deftly handled study of one gifted young woman’s path from self-destruction to self-knowledge, self-respect, and well-being.” —Randolph Hogan, former New York Times Book Review editor

Cleans Up Nicely is a pitch-perfect, picaresque tale of love lost and found, talent squandered and reclaimed, and friendship forgotten and redeemed in gritty 1970s New York. It all spins around Erica, a burgeoning artist with a peripatetic past and a talent for courting trouble. In evocative prose, Dahl gives us an insider’s look at New York’s demimonde, a motley assortment of bartenders, bosses, art dealers, academics, musicians, radical feminists, writers, working girls, pimps, pushers, and hangers-on.” —Joan Duncan Oliver, Editor at Large, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review and author of The Meaning of Nice

Resources and Downloads

High Resolution Images