Isabel Fonseca
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Early life
Isabel Fonseca was born in New York in 1961 and is the youngest of four children born to Uruguayan sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca and American painter Elizabeth Kaplan. Her siblings include Caio Fonseca, a painter whose works hang in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of Art; Bruno Fonseca, a painter who died of AIDS in 1994; and Quina Fonseca, a designer of clothes, costumes, and hats. Her maternal grandfather was Jacob Kaplan, the former owner of Welch's grape juice. Fonseca grew up in a house on West 11th Street in New York that used to belong to Daniel Chester French, the sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial.
Fonseca attended Concord Academy and graduated magna cum laude from Barnard College in 1984. She then went on to study at Wadham College in Oxford. After her brother Bruno's death, she edited a large book of his paintings which included essays by Alan Jenkins, Karen Wilkins and a personal essay by her, Isabel Fonseca. Bruno Fonseca: The Secret Life of Painting was published by Abbeville Press and the Brooklyn Museum.
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Career
During her time at Wadham College, she began writing for The Times Literary Supplement, where she went on to become an assistant editor. She left the TLS to write Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, a story of the Roma which she researched while traveling alone through Eastern Europe for four years. She traveled with Gypsies from Bulgaria, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, the former Yugoslavia, Romania, and Albania. The title comes from a Gypsy proverb, "Bury me standing. I've been on my knees all my life." Bury Me Standing was originally published in 1995 by Alfred A Knopf and translated into 22 languages.
Fonseca has also written for The Times, The Guardian, The Economist, Harper’s Bazaar, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and The American Scholar, among other publications.
Between 2003 and 2006, she and her husband, Martin Amis, and two children, Fernanda and Clio, lived in Uruguay where she designed and built their house, in a small fishing village on a windy peninsula in the southern Atlantic. While in Uruguay, she wrote her first novel, Attachment published by Alfred A Knopf and Chatto and Windus in 2009.
Marriage to Martin Amis
Isabel Fonseca met novelist Martin Amis during a phone interview while she was working at The Times Literary Supplement. They began a relationship while Amis was still married to his first wife, Antonia Phillips, an American academic and the mother of his two sons. In 1993, Amis left Phillips for Fonseca, which led to much "finger-wagging" by the British press. The press painted Amis as a second-generation philanderer and Fonseca as a sultry American heiress (because of her being a trustee to the J. M. Kaplan fund). They had two daughters. In 2011, the Amises left London for Brooklyn. In May 2023, Martin Amis died at their house in Lake Worth, Florida.
Notable works
- Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (1995)
- Bruno Fonseca: The Secret Life of Painting (2000)
- Attachment (2009)