For fourteen years, Clara Brodeur has cloaked herself in a cocoon of white lies and evasions in an effort to wipe out her own history. The simple life she has built with her husband and daughter in small-town Maine retains no hint of her notorious childhood in New York City, her mother’s meteoric rise to international fame as a photographer–or the controversial series of nude photos of herself that she believes destroyed her life and permanently unraveled her family. But when her sister telephones with news that their mother lies near death, ravaged by lung cancer, Clara’s careful façade crumbles. Suddenly, she is drawn back into her mother’s force field, grappling for ways to explain the truth of her past to her young daughter while simultaneously learning how to say goodbye to the mother she wants to hate.

An eloquent look at the strange shapes love takes when stretched to the breaking point, Black & White positions its unforgettable characters at the collision point of motherhood and artistic talent, and poses the questions: what can we ask our children to endure? And what can we demand of our parents?