The Meaning of Daughter, the debut novel by Alexia Nader, follows three generations of women navigating ambition, motherhood, and constraint, as each attempts to define herself through art, love, and autonomy within the expectations placed on her. As their choices reverberate across decades and geographies, the novel examines how desire, resentment, and inherited dreams fracture and reshape a family.
The Meaning of Daughter will be published on September 15, 2026, by University of Iowa Press and is available for preorder now.
Nader is originally from Miami and currently lives in San Francisco.
Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of The Meaning of Daughter, designed by Kathleen Lynch, along with a Q&A with Nader about its creation.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
My novel follows the lives of three women in a Lebanese-Haitian-American family. Two of the women are visual artists and one sells art. Visual art is so important in this novel, so much so that I couldn’t imagine an image on the cover while I was writing. Maybe the stakes felt too high for me at that point!
In the course of writing this novel, I looked at so much art, especially Haitian art, but there was one artist whose work was especially inspirational. Luce Turnier was a mid-20th century modernist painter and collage artist. She was born in Haiti and lived in Paris for a lot of her life. She sketched and painted women in varying states of rest and restlessness. Her lines, her sense of color, and her subjects’ expressions make me return to her work again and again. I have one of her sketches of a woman who appears to be resting after a long day of work. The sketch was in my family’s art collection for years and was given to me by my father. It hangs in my bedroom, and whenever I pass by it I always wonder what the woman is thinking and dreaming. So when I got to the point where the manuscript was largely finished and with a publisher and I could face contemplating what would fit on the cover, I immediately thought of her work.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
I sent the team a vision board with examples of covers I liked and thought might reflect the tone of the book, and with examples of visual art that could be appropriate. The Luce Turnier painting that ended up on the cover, Portrait of a Woman (1949), was one of these examples. I explained to the team how important Luce Turnier’s work was to the book, and everyone really loved the image, especially once we saw how it was incorporated into the overall cover design.
The main challenges were getting permission to use the artwork and obtaining an image of the artwork that was good enough to really do justice to the complexities of the painting. Once we had all agreed on this cover, I tracked down the rights holders of Luce Turnier’s estate. I got in touch with Luce Turnier’s daughters, introduced myself, explained how their mother’s work was in conversation with the novel, and sent them an excerpt to read. They were enthusiastic about my project and granted us permission to use the image. Then, with the help of my family (many of whom are Haitian art dealers), I investigated who might have a high-resolution image of the painting. The art advisor and collector Gardy St. Fleur was kind enough to give us an excellent image. I love that with the high-quality image, you can see Luce Turnier’s brushwork as well as the unique textures of the painting that have formed over time.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
When I saw the cover for the first time, I felt both big and small. I felt proud that the cover could be an integral part of the ekphrastic project of my novel. My novel explores not only the difficulties of making art for women artists but also of creating artistic traditions and legacies with women at the center. I felt that I could add my small part to the legacy of Luce Turnier, who is by no means a forgotten artist, but who is perhaps not as renowned as she should be in my opinion. At the same time, I felt humbled that my novel was now enveloped by the image of such a master artist.
How does the cover work to convey what the book is all about?
The Meaning of Daughter explores the desire to look fiercely both at others and at the self. This desire threads through the migration story of the family at the novel’s center, who over the course of several decades, moves from Lebanon to Haiti to the United States. The novel is partially about how this desire can create artistic ambition that is often at odds with the expectations of what women are supposed to want and the decisions they are supposed to make, especially around motherhood. It is also about how this desire relates to a yearning to belong and to create a sense of personal and familial history after the fractures of self and family that often accompany migration. I believe you can see this desire in the expression of the woman in the portrait and in the boldness of Luce Turnier’s lines.