{"id":31091,"date":"2025-07-29T05:28:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T05:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/31091\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T05:28:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T05:28:08","slug":"my-mom-painted-the-cover-of-my-mother-daughter-novel-exclusive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/31091\/","title":{"rendered":"My Mom Painted the Cover of My Mother-Daughter Novel (Exclusive)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes the universe has a way of bringing everything full circle. When I wrote my novel, Love Forms<\/a>, published by Hogarth this July, I never imagined that the journey to producing the cover would mirror the very story I’d written: a tale of mothers and daughters, separation and reunion, and the unexpected ways we find each other again.\n<\/p>\n

Love Forms<\/a> tells the story of a mother searching for the daughter she gave up for adoption 40 years earlier. Set partly in the Caribbean, the lush, tropical landscape is central to the story and to the characters’ lives. The protagonist, a woman named Dawn Bishop, is from a wealthy white family: their money hasn’t come from colonial days, but from their hardscrabble beginnings running a company that makes and exports tropical fruit juices. \u201cYou only have to take one look at this place,\u201d Dawn’s grandfather remarks, in the novel, \u201cto see fruit on every tree, fruit littered all over the ground.\u201d\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

The cover of ‘Love Forms’ by Claire Adam.<\/p>\n

Hogarth<\/p>\n

Dawn has had an idyllic childhood, growing up on the tropical island of Trinidad in the 1970s, but when she falls pregnant unexpectedly by a tourist visiting for the annual Carnival, her parents send her away to nearby Venezuela, on mainland South America, to have the baby in secret. She stays there with nuns, and gives the baby \u2014 a daughter \u2014 up for adoption. Dawn moves to England, and there she marries and has other children, but over the course of the subsequent decades, she continues to be haunted by her choice, and to think of her long-lost daughter.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

When it came time to design the cover, my publisher and I felt that something hinting at the tropical setting of the novel could work well, but we wanted something fresher than just a beautiful beachy sunset. We were drawn to the idea of incorporating imagery of fruit \u2013 it seemed like a natural fit, given the family’s juice business. But finding the right image proved surprisingly challenging.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

The answer, as it turned out, was hiding in plain sight.\n<\/p>\n

My mother trained as a doctor many years ago, but like many women of her generation \u2014 and like Dawn, in the novel \u2014 she had to give up her medical career once she had children. For as long as I can remember, my mother has made art \u2014 drawings in charcoal, pencil, pastels and paintings in watercolor, oil and gouache. Our home in Trinidad was filled with her pictures: hanging on every wall, stored in boxes in her studio in the basement and in every cupboard throughout the house. I’d grown up surrounded by her art, but like many children, I’d taken it for granted, seeing it as simply part of the landscape of our family life. Through writing Dawn\u2019s story in Love Forms, I had come to better appreciate my mother\u2019s sacrifices, and her artistic gift.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

During one of my regular WhatsApp calls with my mother, I mentioned my frustration with the cover search. “What we need is something like that painting you did, the one with the portugals,\u201d I said to her. Portugals are a type of citrus fruit, similar to a satsuma or clementine. She knew exactly the one I meant \u2014 a still-life oil painting she’d done many years before when we were still living in Trinidad. There was a simplicity and quiet dignity to it that I remembered well, and\u00a0 the color palette spoke to the vibrancy of the Caribbean, as well as the sense of Dawn’s fading memories of home.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

Mary and Claire Adam.<\/p>\n

courtesy of Claire Adam<\/p>\n

That same evening, my mother emailed me a low-res photo of the painting from her database, and I sent it straight on to my editor. \u201cIt’s just food for thought,\u201d I wrote \u2014 I didn’t want to be pushy, or difficult.\n<\/p>\n

But the response was immediate. \u201cThis is it!\u201d she wrote back. \u201cIt’s perfect!\u201d\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

My mother and I were both delighted that the publisher wanted to use the painting on the cover. There was one slight hitch, however: the canvas wasn’t in her studio where she’d thought it would be.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

She turned her studio upside down looking for the painting \u2014 she was sure she still had the original \u2014 and when she said it must be in her house somewhere, I drove over, and the two of us hunted high and low. We pulled boxes out from under the beds, sifted through numerous cupboards, and pulled canvases out from behind the sofas. We finally found it, at about 2 a.m. on the third day of searching, in a plastic box on a high shelf in the broom cupboard. My mother is now 84, and she hadn’t been able to reach the high shelf on her own, but she pointed at it with her walking stick, and I climbed onto a chair and brought the box down. There it was, at last.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

Mary Adam’s painting.<\/p>\n

courtesy of Claire Adam<\/p>\n

Now, when readers hold a copy of\u00a0Love Forms in their hands, they’re holding a mother-daughter creation that tells a story about mothers and daughters. We’re two very different artists who haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, but have found a surprising way to connect through our art. The painting on the cover serves as a perfect metaphor for the themes of the book: that what appears fragmented is still part of a whole; that love, like fruit, ripens in its own time.\n<\/p>\n

My mother’s painting had been hidden at the back of a cupboard, just as the love between mothers and daughters is often hidden. Through all the complications and misunderstandings, the love endures. Quietly, patiently, it waits to be rediscovered.\n<\/p>\n

Never miss a story \u2014 sign up for\u00a0PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter<\/a>\u00a0to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer , from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

Love Forms<\/a> by Claire Adam is on sale July 29 and available now for preorder, wherever books are sold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sometimes the universe has a way of bringing everything full circle. When I wrote my novel, Love Forms,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-31091","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}