Messy Thrilling Life, by Sabrina Ward Harrison

I first read Sabrina Ward Harrison when I was in high school. I was drawn to her art and her words and the way she blended them together on the page in one thick, confusing, and messy book. I was a perfectionist who tried to straighten out the tangles in my life; Sabrina was an artist who let her tangles exist for everyone to see. It was love at first sight.

Ten years after picking up her first volume, Spilling Open, I have just read Messy Thrilling Life (published in 2004 by Villard Books) in one sitting. This is the kind of book that is much better read outside where there are no walls to confine you as you read, so I propped myself up in a lounge chair and soaked up each page of Sabrina’s book, a sort of art museum of her life in New York where she transplanted herself just prior to September 11, 2001.

In Messy Thrilling Life, Sabrina quotes American mythologist Joseph Campbell, who once wrote, “We must be willing to get rid of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” This is how I would sum up Sabrina’s art memoir of her time in New York. She ventured from California to the city, knowing New York was the city for serious artists, and wound up in a fast-paced environment where she admits she was “a woman who sometimes [forgot] about poetry and reading in the shade.”

While it is clear Sabrina has matured from one book to the next, the basic premise of her art remains the same: this is a woman who is willing to reveal the messiness of real life – both because there’s no way around it and because it is the only way to free herself (and others) from it.