Somewhere inside the walls of her San Francisco chateau, author Danielle Steel is smilingโor is simply beside herself. He soon uncovers a century-old tale of sugar magnate Adolph Spreckels and his years-younger wife, Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, for whom he purchased what is now known as the Spreckels Mansion. Perched atop the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, the structure serves as something of a monolith to the originalโand quite literalโsugar daddy and his beloved. In a delightful twist of fate, Fader, ever the exhaustive researcher, is led to the current owner and occupant of the French Classical mansion: Danielle Steel, best known for spinning saccharine love stories for romance readers.
Now weeks into a still shapeless project, and knee deep in an unlikely tapestry of archives that weave together the lives of Adolph, Alma, and Steel, Fader is left with one gnawing question: what to make of this? Or better yet, what to make about this? Its centerpiece, a society portrait that features Fader posed alongside a much younger lover, affirms the spirit of his work: an exercise in reimagining queerness in unexpected spaces, and an ode to the many prisms through which identity is formed and observed.
I was living in New Orleans and I was part of a group of artists that run a gallery there called Antenna Collective. In that process I was like, okay, we have somebody over there that's doing the history of sugar plantations in the Southeast, we have this person over here that's working on the slave tradeโall of these things were already happening in the show. And I've been making a piece that is leaving Los Angeles and is going to San Francisco about the history of queer hate crimes, so I felt like I needed something to lighten my way through this.
And then in the most unlikely of turns, this leads you to the romance novelist Danielle Steelโฆ. I was reading a lot about this big, gorgeous house that Alma built in San Francisco. How is that possible?! So it became this dual obsession with these two women who seem to overlap in this house, but also overlap in all these other ways. How did you land on this whimsical style of self-portraiture?
I was obsessively researching Alma and Danielle and in that process I found myself with way too much information. But I discovered that Danielle Steel had written over books on a typewriter, and I decided I should write her a letter.
