Linda St. John

Linda St. John is an acclaimed artist and author of the memoir, Even Dogs Go Home to Die. She is the proprietor of D. L. Cerney, a gallery and shop in the East Village of Manhattan.

As an artist, Linda St. John's work has appeared in galleries and museums across the country. She has been a featured artist in The New Yorker, Ms., Art in America, and Time Out New York.

“I did my first painting like how I wrote my book, out of the corner of my eye,” St. John told the New York Times when her memoir was published in 2001. “It's all the same theme, which is I'm trapped into being a 12-year-old.'”

The memoir tells the story of her childhood in southern Illinois, where she, her brother, and two sisters were raised by an abusive alcoholic father and a self-absorbed mother. She writes: “You can’t even have your own favorite color around Alice. She’s too insecure to let you like royal blue or emerald green. She just can’t let it rest and accept that you don’t like pastels…. Once she got so upset. She screamed and hollered like a maniac, ‘What’s wrong with peach…or mint or beige…women should wear soft delicate colors…men like colors like that on women…feminine colors…like this,” she said. She stood up. I looked at my sister…all 200 pounds of her in pale yellow. I said, ‘I see what you mean.’ Then I put on my scarlet red sweater and went outside.”

Linda St. John graduated from law school in 1982 and passed the Georgia bar. She planned to move to Atlanta when she and her husband came to New York to visit a friend, and decided to stay there.