Description: How does long-term love shape people? What are the practicalities of the mystery? Find out in The Lens of Eternity: Queer Love from Two Pandemics. It addresses the life of photographer Berenice Abbott and her partner, Elizabeth McCausland, a noted art critic, as well as the author's own life while quarantining with her partner. This page-turner also offers an insider's view of photographic and art history, including how, through Berenice's efforts, Eugene Atget, who photographed "Old Paris," came to be known as the Master of Photography that history accorded him. Berenice Abbott, who survived the "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918-1920, is known for, among other things, her photography while living in Paris for a decade in the 1920s and her work photographing Manhattan in the 1930s. Elizabeth McCausland was often overlooked in her lifetime, especially as Berenice's long-term partner. Mason brings together these four queer lives in the past and the present in long-term relationships that require compromise and forgiveness as she gives shape to the shadows and reveals what can be learned from hidden lives. Ultimately, including the author's and her partner's choice to go to a plant-based diet for health and ethical reasons, it's all about love.
Brief description: Janet Mason is an award-winning creative writer. Her book Tea Leaves: a memoir of mothers and daughters was chosen by the American Library Association for its 2013 Over the Rainbow List. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is also the author of four novels. Most recently, she has published CINNAMON: A Dairy Cow's (and Her Farmer's) Path to Freedom.
Review Quotes: "In The Lens of Eternity, Janet Mason explores enduring lesbian relationships, veganism, health, and living one's truth as an artist and compassionate human being on this planet, by juxtaposing her and her partner's lives during the pandemic with the lives of renowned photographer Berenice Abbott, who survived the 1918 pandemic, and her partner, writer Elizabeth McCausland. Readers will enjoy Mason's humor and insights in this wise book."
--Maria Famà, author of Trigger
"A photographer can take pictures of the same scene from different angles, at different hours, in different seasons. Janet Mason movingly tells the story of noted twentieth century photographer Berenice Abbott and writer Elizabeth McCausland, her life-partner of thirty years, through the lives of her narrator and her wife Frannie. Misogyny, pandemics, yoga, homophobia, love, disconnection, veganism, aging--all seen from different angles--will splice you into these stories just as they did me."
--Eli Andrew Ramer, author of Tales of an Urban Mystic: A Spiraling Memoir
"Janet Mason's The Lens of Eternity puts a focus on two long-term loving relationships a century apart while navigating a judgmental society, artistic freedom, a pandemic, health and nutrition, road trips, and what it means to grow old together. Mason's genius lies in her talent for synthesizing two stories from different eras to reveal truths about how to live."
--Louis Greenstein, author of The Song of Life