Nina Bartos

Nina is Lianne’s mother and a retired Professor of Art at the universities of California and New York. She is described as being pale and thin and lives in an apartment close to Fifth Avenue in New York. In Lianne’s opinion, the apartment almost resembles a museum, with art on the walls and bronze pieces on the tables. After having gone through knee replacement surgery, Nina is reliant on canes and heavy medications that cause her to sleep a lot. She sometimes walks to the Metropolitan Museum or reads books. She divorced Lianne’s father Jack Glenn, when Lianne was still a child. Since then, she has had a relationship of twenty years with Martin Ridnour who she refers to as her lover.

Embraces old age

Lianne thinks of her mother as a woman who embraces old age and has decided to dwell on all issues related to getting old; memory loss, health insurance, surgeries, medicine (cp. 2). Her apartment’s resemblance of a museum and her fascination with revisiting the museum to look at old paintings also falls in line with this wish to hold on to something that is unchangeable and stabile: "She looked at what was unfailing. She liked the big rooms, the old masters, what was unfailing in its grip on the eye and mind, on memory and ...