A stolen de Kooning
–
A marriage
–
A $160 million secret
When The New York Times and the Daily Mail reported it, the world couldn’t look away: a Willem de Kooning stolen in 1985, worth as much as $160 million, one of America’s most brazen art heists, found decades later behind a bedroom door in a quiet couple’s home. A schoolteacher and the music teacher she married. Utterly unremarkable. Reporters circled one disbelief: could these two really have done it?
The headlines told you what was found.
They could never tell you what was hidden: the secret life two schoolteachers kept from their children, their friends, everyone they ever knew, for sixty years.
IN OUR SECRET LIFE imagines the marriage behind the mystery, the story the media never could. In 1955, Jerry and Rita meet in the Catskills: two pickpockets who know their own kind on sight. He romanticizes theft as an art form, a lifted wallet and a de Kooning the same freedom; she is the better thief, practiced at vanishing in plain sight. Recognition becomes a pact, and the pact a life of thefts and forgeries that paid for what most dream of: 147 countries, grand hotels, masterpieces bought and sold beneath an ordinary American marriage. All but one. The de Kooning was too famous to fence, too hot to touch: the fortune on their wall they could never cash or confess.
Told in Rita’s first person, the story moves backward from her final days, when the illness taking her memory threatens the secret she guarded for a lifetime. The mind that hid everything now tries to give it away, and the woman who spent sixty years making the world forget is fighting, at the end, only to remember.
This is the love story the media missed. For readers of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, and anyone haunted by Michael Finkel’s true-crime The Art Thief, it is a meditation on beauty, secrecy, memory, and obsession, and the tenderness of two people who could tell each other everything, and the world nothing at all.
Because behind every headline is a marriage.
And behind every marriage, a secret.
Get a glimpse inside Rita’s world with an exclusive first chapter from IN OUR SECRET LIFE.
A STOLEN MASTERPIECE
A de Kooning worth $160 million disappears without a trace.
A MARRIAGE BUILT ON SECRETS
Two schoolteachers.
Six decades together.
One life no one saw.
A SECRET KEPT FOR SIXTY YEARS
A painting hidden.
A past concealed.
A truth that waited.
THE HEADLINES
TOLD PART OF IT
The world knew the theft.
They didn’t know why.
THE STORY
NO ONE TOLD
This novel reveals the love, the lies, and the ultimate risk.
Rita is the voice at the heart of In Our Secret Life – wife. mother, schoolteacher, world traveler, thief, and the keeper of a secret that survived an entire lifetime.
In 1955, she and Jerry meet in the Catskills — two pickpockets who know their own kind on sight.
Recognition becomes a pact, and the pact a life — thefts and forgeries that paid for what most dream of: 147 countries, grand hotels, and masterpieces bought and sold beneath an ordinary American marriage.
The novel begins near the end of her life, as the illness stealing Rita’s memories threatens to reveal the one thing she and Jerry could never allow the world to know.
And from those fading memories, we travel backward…
To a summer in the Catskills.
To a young woman who could disappear in a crowd.
To the man who recognized exactly what she was.
To the beginning of an extraordinary sixty-year love story built on secrets.
A TRUE STORY THAT CAPTIVATED THE WORLD.
The real-life art theft that inspired IN OUR SECRET LIFE has been covered by more than 100 media outlets around the globe.
