How It Feels to Be Alive

A New Yorker Best Book of 2026 So Far

“Wide-ranging and deeply personal.”
–The New York Times

“Beautiful … It’s the thoughtful and careful writing that makes the book work so wonderfully … It’s a curated tour through one life, with its disasters and joys, complications and clarities, all set alongside the wonders of paintings and performances that add perspective to the aforementioned disasters and joys and et ceteras.”
–Robert Sullivan, Vogue

“To allow art to change your life, you must come to it vulnerable, naked. Still, some truths are only discovered when put in writing. Combine these two and you get Art Writing, O’Grady’s vocation, passion, and tool of self-discovery. The book holds serious value as an art-historical resource, but its best parts are the author’s intimate revelations about who she is, and who she hopes to be.”
–Hakim Bishara, Hyperallergic

“Gorgeously written … I love many things about this book, but partly I love that it is accessible, meaningful and captivating even if you aren’t someone who dwells regularly in the world of art. You might find yourself, though, as I did, inspired to seek out more art in your life after reading it.”
–Hillary Rosner, The Colorado Sun

“In lucid prose, O’Grady tracks how art has shaped and reflected her own life, both at times of success and catastrophe.”
–Mark Lamster, The Dallas Morning News

“O’Grady makes a graceful and absorbing book debut … an eloquent celebration of art.”
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Mesmerizing.”
–InsideHook

“Marvelous … Know anyone who questions the value of art? Hand them a copy of this book.”
–Shelf Awareness

“Enlightening … [O’Grady] exhibits a remarkable fluidity, leaping across continents and centuries with ease.”
–Publishers Weekly

”[O’Grady] has put together a wonderfully welcome book–a hopeful treatise referred to as a mash-up of arts criticism and personal narrative … O’Grady cites the desire to explore ‘the tangle of art and life, ’ which she has done beautifully.”
–Center for Fiction

“O’Grady’s voice is beautiful and inventive … the writing is exhilarating … In this timely collection, O’Grady articulates powerfully the value of art, reminding us how vital it is to our very existence.”
–Amanda Norton, Newcity Lit

“How It Feels to Be Alive is an essential book imbued with unwavering, attentive, and clear-eyed optimism. Exploring how to navigate an increasingly contentious world with the strength, wisdom, beauty, and history available to us through art, Megan O’Grady brings joy and meaning to everyday living. Reading O’Grady is like taking a long walk with a kindred spirit, through whose perceptive eyes we have gained a deeper understanding of our own minds.”
–Yiyun Li, author of Things in Nature Merely Grow

“In an era when the arts feel increasingly imperiled, Megan O’Grady’s How It Feels to Be Alive shines as a rapt testament to art’s ongoing vitality. Her meditations on artists ranging from Agnes Martin and Carrie Mae Weems to Pope.L are a ravishing sensorium of embodied experience, while she also provides illuminating historical, biographical, and metaphysical insight. Rather than asking what art means, she asks what it does–how a painting unsettles us and reshapes the way we inhabit the world–with stunning candor and poetic grace.”
–Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

“How–now that you mention it–does it feel to be alive? A bit like reading Megan O’Grady’s book, stained with blood and beauty, as she fearlessly claws at the artificial veil between art and life and shows that, as anyone who has any experience of either knows, life and art are indivisible. She invents a new model of writing about art–and that, as it happens, is also a new way of writing about life.”
–Benjamin Moser, author of The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters

“Megan O’Grady is one of the most astute and openhearted culture writers working today. How It Feels to Be Alive is a remarkable and restless work of clear thinking about mixed feelings.”
–Catherine Lacey, author of The Möbius Book

“This book is a highly original take on the art and life conundrum. Megan O’Grady discusses these lucky artists and their work in the context of her own life and experiences, elements so tightly interwoven that they often merge, producing a new kind of memoir and a new kind of art writing–some of the best I’ve read.”
–Lucy R. Lippard, author of Moving Targets: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art 1970-1993

“Megan O’Grady’s adventures in the art world take her from Agnes Martin’s mystical geometries to the real-life interventions of Pope.L and beyond, reminding us that the best art will ask questions for which there may be no answer, create feelings one can barely name, and generate theories when there’s nothing to believe. For O’Grady, art is a search for meaning, and it’s personal. She shares her inner journey as the artists in How It Feels to Be Alive set out to sculpt the intangible, to interrogate the humdrum, or to reinvent the world, and, always, to look where no one else has. Look again.”
–Cynthia Carr, author of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar

“How It Feels to Be Alive is an exquisite floodlight on the many vital gifts afforded to us by art–including our best argument that we need each other. Here is the ecstasy, here is the power that art invites into our ways of living. It is a celebration of what it means and what it takes to truly see ourselves and our world.”
–Canisia Lubrin, author of Code Noir

“Insightful, broad-ranging, beautifully rendered, this memorable book offers profound reflections on identity, relationships, feminism, and the environment. How It Feels to Be Alive reminds us why art matters.”
–Claire Messud, author of This Strange Eventful History

Megan O’Grady is a critic and an essayist. She was a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where she created the Culture Therapist column. Her reviews and essays about art and life also appear in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. She was a contributing editor at Vogue and a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Currently, she is an assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she lives with her family.

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