Book Spotlight: Tell Me One Thing by Kerri Schlottman

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Good morning friends, and welcome to a new book spotlight! Today we have a book that is already out in the world for you to snap up, right now! I hadn’t actually heard of this book before, but now it’s most definitely added to my reading list. There’s a new special place in my heart for books full of slices of life, and heartwrenching stories. It seems like Tell Me One Thing fits that mold and I can’t wait to read it.

An atmospheric debut novel that spans place and time, Kerri Schlottman’s TELL ME ONE THING (Regal House Publishing; January 31, 2023) examines power, privilege, and the sacrifices one is willing to make to succeed. Against the backdrop of a rural Pennsylvania trailer park, and the complicated world of Manhattan during the AIDS epidemic, it delves into New York City’s free-for-all grittiness while exposing a neglected slice of the struggling rust belt, traversing decades from the 1980s up to present day.

Outside a Pennsylvania motel, nine-year-old Lulu smokes a cigarette while sitting on the lap of a
trucker. Recent art grad Quinn is passing through town and captures it. The photograph, later titled
“Lulu & the Trucker,” launches Quinn’s career, escalating her from a starving artist to a renowned
photographer. In a parallel life, Lulu struggles to survive a volatile home, growing up too quickly in an
environment wrought with drug abuse and her mother’s prostitution.

Decades later, when Quinn has a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art and “Lulu & the Trucker”
has sold at auction for a record-breaking amount, Lulu is surprised to find the troubling image of her
young self in the newspaper. She attends an artist talk for the exhibition with one question in mind for
Quinn: Why didn’t you help me all those years ago?

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Are you ready for an excerpt? A sneak peek into this highly anticipated book? I thought so. Let’s do it!

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Quinn looks around at the installation, pleased with the result of weeks of work and over a year of preparation. Standing in the center of the Whitney Museum of Art’s sixth-floor gallery, it seems as if she has an audience in these subjects. Many are her friends and loved ones. They watch her from their respective photographs, sometimes directly, sometimes as passive observers, but always there, aware. And she can time travel here, among these faces and scenes. They lure her into an elaborate hopscotch over decades or yank her through dense hours and minutes. She closes her eyes for a moment, trying to find some form in the darkness there.

A touch to her elbow brings her back, and William says, “Mom, Gary Radcliff from the New York Times is here. Are you ready?” She nods and follows William to where the young man waits near the massive vinyl lettering at the entrance to the show. He stands, hands clasped in front of him under the Q and U in Quinn Bradford: A Retrospective.

He smiles when he sees her, says, “Quinn, it’s such a pleasure to meet you.” They shake hands. “I really appreciate your time. I know you’re not a fan of interviews, so I’m grateful all the more.” He’s right. She’s not a fan of interviews, though she doesn’t like how it sounds coming from him, as if she’s deliberately challenging. She considers explaining why that is. She could tell him about how she was hounded by journalists after what happened to Billy, but she doesn’t because doing so would invite that conversation here. Instead, they exchange the usual pleasantries as Quinn leads Gary to a bench in the gallery. Workers in white coveralls are busy making last-minute touchups to the walls where things have been rearranged, shifted, and rehung. Gary taps the record button on his phone, and something about that formality changes his tone, deepens it to sound more serious when he says, “I’m excited to dig into the exhibition, but first, I want to ask you about Lulu and the Trucker after what happened this week.” And Quinn thinks maybe this is the real reason she doesn’t like interviews, how they can somehow, still, after all this time, make her feel like an impostor. Even so, she assumed he’d start like this. “Well,” she says, “it
was a surprise, for sure.”

“Maybe not,” Gary says, misunderstanding her. “That photo has long been considered the piece that launched your career.”

“That’s true,” she says. “Although, it’s hard for me to think of it that way. I’ve done so much work since then.”

“Understandably, but considering that it just broke records at auction, I’d say it’s an important one.” His eyebrows raise, and she realizes he’s asking a question with that statement.

“Oh yeah,” she says. “I don’t mean to diminish it in any way. It’s an important photo, and it pushed my career in a direction that I’ll forever be grateful for. It’s why Eric Hoffman ultimately chose to work with me. I meant that the auction was a surprise. It’s challenging not knowing who owns that piece now.” What she would never say is there were so many times she thought of destroying the photo, so many times she held its edges and studied the interaction, hoping to find innocence there, but always returning to the dread that set inside her when the Polaroid first processed in the car, in front of her eyes. And the things the photo doesn’t show, the monster that she still sees plain as day as if it’s a third subject in the composition. How it looms around Lulu, hovering like an aura. She doesn’t need to possess the photo to see it all.

“And we may never know who owns it now thanks to the anonymous sale.” Gary brings her back to now, and Quinn swallows hard, her dry throat clamping to itself. She wishes she had a glass of water. “It has an almost mythical status seeing as it hasn’t been seen in quite some time. Would you tell me about
that?”

She shifts a bit, unsure of how much she wants to say, then leans in toward him. “When I first exhibited it, it was all anyone could talk about. I didn’t want it to be the thing that I became known for, but I could see that was rapidly happening.”

“And so, you gave it to Billy Cunningham.” Gary watches her as if he knows he’s just treaded into a landmine territory.

“I did.” Quinn takes a deep breath. “For safekeeping. I always refused to allow it to be for sale, even though it would have helped me financially. And there were some hard times back then, really hard times. I was worried about what I might do. If I might get desperate enough to sell it. I told him not to
let me do that, and I knew he wouldn’t. But then…” She trails here because she won’t talk more about this, and she doesn’t need to because it’s well known what happened next. She tries to put the lawsuit with Myles out of her mind, the endless arguments about ownership and rights and estates, the things she never wanted to have to fight about, especially not when she had just lost the love of her life.

Gary nods, and his eyes squint in contemplation. “Do you still think about Lulu?”

Quinn tries to hide her disappointment in this question but then realizes that even though Lulu’s part of her DNA after all these years, she’s an invisible part, like an extra organ tucked deep inside of her that no one else could possibly know about. Her words come out husky when she says, “Yeah, of course I do.” She clears her throat to gain more control. “It’s been almost forty years since I took that photo, but I’ve never stopped thinking about her. Now, she’d be, like, fifty. I wonder what her life is like, if she’s still alive, married, kids, you know?”

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