Christine Coulson, who spent 25 years working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has written a short, clever novel that tells the story of a woman over the course of her life in a series of museum wall labels. In doing so, she acknowledges a sad but undeniable truth — that for much of the 20th century and perhaps even today, a certain kind of wealthy, white socialite in America was nothing more than an object to be critiqued, described, evaluated and displayed.
The woman’s name is Caroline Margaret Brooks Whitaker, better known as Kitty, and she is indisputably the star of “One Woman Show.” We are meant to read her life story as if we were walking through an exhibition at a museum like the Met, gazing at a set of related decorative objects laid out in chronological order in a series of vitrines.
