One Thing I Know is Pati Hill's third novel, first published in 1962, when she was forty-one and had just given birth to her first and only child. It is the last novel she wrote before claiming to "quit writing in favor of housekeeping". Written in the purest tradition of American coming-of-age stories, One Thing I Know follows a sixteen-year-old girl, Francesca Hollins, as she discovers an unexpected taste for autonomy. The bravado of her affirmation cannot mask the seriousness of her conviction: "One thing I know, I will never be in love again."
PATI HILL (1921, Ashland, Kentucky–2014, Sens, France) left behind a literary and artistic output spanning roughly 60 years. After a short but successful career as a model, between 1953 and 1962 she published short stories and five books, many of which were initially excerpted in the Paris Review and met with critical acclaim. Hill published One Thing I Know in 1962 following the birth of her only child, a daughter. She was then forty-one years old and would later claim to have decided at that time to “quit writing in favor of housekeeping.” Although she published no work during the thirteen years that followed, Hill continued to write and in the early 1970s began her first experiments with the photocopier. Untrained as an artist, she started using the device as a tool to explore the relationship between image and text. In 1974, Hill published a collection of poems with the unambiguous title Slave Days, in which her first mature artworks appear: xerographs of household objects that seem to float in indistinct space.
Hill continued to employ the machine for 40 years, creating a considerable body of work comprising thousands of photocopies and texts, as well as drawings, etchings, and artist’s books, which she exhibited in France and the United States. Three years after her death in 2014, her complete archive was transferred to Arcadia University, Glenside, Pennsylvania, where a survey of the first decade of her xerographs and books was presented in 2016.
Long ignored, the work of Pati Hill now enjoys new critical interest. In the spring of 2020, her first posthumous exhibition in Europe was presented by the Kunstverein München and traveled to the Kunsthalle Zürich coincident with a trilogy of shows organized by Baptiste Pinteaux in 2020 and 2021 at the galleries Air de Paris and Treize in Paris and at Ampersand in Lisbon. Examples from her series Common Objects (1977–79) were acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 2019 and by the Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2021.
The cover of this edition of “One Thing I Know”, based on the original dust jacket of the first 1962 hardcover edition, faithfully reproduces the title in Pati Hill’s own handwriting.
