Maureen Corrigan

Martin lived for years in New Mexico near Georgia O'Keeffe.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Martin was a solitary person, although she had significant relationships with women.

Nancy Foley, who grew up in New Mexico, says that her novel was inspired by rumors of such a relationship between a friend of her grandmother's and Martin.

I Am Agatha takes place mostly in the 1970s, with flashbacks to Agatha's rough youth in Canada and allusions to a hard time in New York, including a stint at Bellevue.

New Mexico offers Agatha a new start and an austere landscape that jibes with her art and her own personality.

Here's Agatha, in her typical brusque, pared-down manner of speaking, describing the view from the adobe house she built herself, high upon a mesa.

My house looks west, out over a canyon, that although far from any ocean whatsoever, yet resembles one in scope and light.

This ocean canyon heaves waves of shale and basalt, quartz and silt.

Cloud shadows flit across its rock floor like ghost boats.

There is no other place on earth like Mesa Portales.

I have traveled to many places, so mine is not an uninformed opinion.

The truth is that there is a hierarchy.

Some places are objectively better, just as some people are objectively better than others.

The objectively better person Agatha wants to bring to live with her on Mesa Portales is her longtime secret love, a woman named Alice, who's now declining into dementia.

But there are two obstacles to Agatha's caretaking plan.

The first is Alice's adult son, Frank Jr., who plans to move his mother into a care facility in Taos.

At one point, Agatha and Frank argue over this plan, and Frank Jr.

drops some bombshell news.

I'm startled, Agatha tells us, but won't let him take my own breath away from me and puff himself up with it.

It's hard not to root for a character who knows how to sling words around like that.