After I read L'Origine, I had the unique honor of being able to talk to the author, Lilianne Milgrom. One of the things that excites me most about historical fiction is the kinds of research rabbit holes one can tumble down while reading. Did this event really happen? Did these two people actually meet? How old was she when she died? How did she really die? She had children! What did her children do? As a reader, it is easy to allow oneself the pleasure of following those rabbit holes, but what is it like to be the writer—someone who is tasked with stringing those winding paths together? I asked Lilianne about her process and she told me that she had originally planned to write a nonfiction book about the history of the painting, L'Origine, but that the research revealed too many gaps of the unknown in the past of L'Origine. The painting was hidden for such long stretches that the best way to fill in the gaps left by the passage of time was through fiction.

Milgrom is an artist, as well as a writer, and I was struck, when reading the novel, by the lively and knowledgeable way she wrote about making art. I was curious, then, to learn more about her personal practices, and how they influenced the writing of the novel. She told me that she paints, and makes ceramics. Over the years she's moved into multimedia work, work that defies genre, much like the novel. Is it historical fiction? Is it a memoir? Why not both? We see ourselves in the past, and thus, we see the past in ourselves.

Learning history teaches us about who we are (and who we aren’t). It removes us from our own time to show us the mistakes of the past—the triumphes, too—lest we repeat them. The criticism of the painting L'Origine stems from a misunderstanding of the context it was created in. It was a private piece, Lilianne told me, meant to be seen by one man. It only became shocking when the whole world was invited to see it. It reminded me of the modern phenomenon of leaked nudes, where photos celebrities took to share privately with a partner get leaked to the whole world, and suddenly, something private is public, and thus susceptible to judgement. Lilianne told me of her experience as a copiste of L'Origine, and how staring into the painting with the intention of copying it taught her to love it. Part of the intention behind the research and the writing of the novel stemmed from an intense need to protect the painting by illuminating the truth of its past.

For a painting that has been in the public eye for only about twenty years, L'Origine has inspired a great many other pieces of art: art in conversation with Courbet’s original work. Most notably, in a performance art piece created and enacted by Deborah de Robertis, which resulted in her removal from the museum for sexual exhibitionism. The painting and the flesh are technically the same, but the response to the “Mirror” and what it was mirroring were different. Of course, it is harder to separate the woman from the original painting now that I know her name, thanks to L’Origine. And isn’t that the glory of learning about history? We gain new perspectives on the world we live in, and are thus, are able to create new things ourselves. Historical fiction, I am learning, is a conversation. It’s fascinating to see how many ways we can talk.