Author Talk: Bird Girl with Duston Spear in Conversation with Judith E. Stein

Soho in the ’70s: Where Fact Meets Fiction

Duston Spear reveals the real people behind the fictional characters in her debut novel, Bird Girl, in conversation with art historian Judith E. Stein, who frames them within the turbulent, groundbreaking art world of 1970s Soho.

 Set between present-day Western Massachusetts and the 1970s Soho art world, Bird Girl explores authorship, visibility, and the long afterlife of a formative artistic act. When a viral podcast reframes a decades-old incident involving a young artist and her lover, a reclusive painter is thrust into public view and must decide whether to reclaim her narrative.

Rebekah Hunnicutt, a reclusive painter living in Western Massachusetts, has spent decades creating a secret body of work—seven monumental canvases inscribed by hand with the full text of Moby-Dick. When a popular podcast, Trichophilia on Trial, revisits a formative episode from her youth in the 1970s Soho art world—when she was persuaded to cut off her waist-length braid for her boyfriend’s artwork—Rebekah is thrust into an unwanted spotlight.

As the podcast reframes the past and elevates the man’s career, Rebekah must confront the question of authorship—of her work, her body, and her story. Bird Girl is a portrait of an artist interrupted, and a meditation on how myth can eclipse a woman’s creative life.