Have you ever visited a museum—say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—and wondered about the life of any of the objects inside? Not just the paintings, but the furniture? Who crafted the wood frame of chair? Who upholstered it? Who sat in it? Perhaps a casual museumgoer might not have such thoughts, but a 25-year veteran employee of The Met might. And, in fact, one did. Writer Christine Coulson, who started her career as an intern at the museum in 1991, spent two-and-a-half decades exploring The Met’s hallowed galleries, secret tunnels, and legendary collections. Her tenure inspired her to pen Metropolitan Stories ($23, Other Press), a new collection of fictional—and sometimes fantastical—vignettes that take place inside the museum, all rooted in her experiences there.
“I thought about these stories for 23 years, but didn’t draft a single word until the museum gave me a yearlong sabbatical in 2017 to write the novel,” Coulson tells AD. “Living in a museum every day allows you to see the place differently. You’re there when it’s empty, when all you hear are your own footsteps on the marble floors. That experience allows for an incredible intimacy with the place and with the art. Clearly, my imagination ran wild.”
The second chapter of the book, for instance, is written from the first-person perspective of a chair in The Met’s collection. “Sometimes I wish we had a support group,” writes the chair. “We would start by introducing ourselves. ‘Hi, I’m a fateuil à la reine made for Louise-Élisabeth, Duchess of Parma.’” The chair recounts its life, from its birth in a Paris workshop to its days being sat on by the royal family to its existence behind barriers at The Met—you can actually see it in Gallery 526.
“There is definitely something true or existing in every chapter. Those elements were not always the starting point, but they make the storytelling authentic and help the reader embrace the book’s leaps of imagination,” says Coulson. “In the chapter about the 'lampers'—the guys who change the light bulbs—all the characters’ names are artists who are in The Met’s collection, but not on view in the galleries. That seemed appropriate for the lampers’ very behind-the-scenes role.”