Friedberg's mother's garden is more ominous, darker, weighed down with sorrow, a constant metronome-movement between life and death, being and nothingness. But still, it is from her mother's garden that Friedberg proceeds, takes sustenance, and continues. So if her mother was not a poet, she was for Friedberg the starting point from which life, art, poetry could proceed. Or not.

Friedberg's chalky, ghost-like figures hover like Giacometti's stubborn yet fragile presences. A notable difference is that in the sculptor's work, the standing male figures have arms; only the women are armless. For Friedberg, no old-fashioned and endemic sexism enables one figure and inhibits another. But no one goes anywhere in Friedberg's paintings. All are stuck with, and in, their histories and their memories. Giacometti describes such fixedness too, "That waiter at (the restaurant) Lipp's who became motionless, leaning over me, mouth open, with no relation to the preceding moment or the next, his mouth open, his eyes fixed in absolute immobility."³ A bit further on the artist speaks of "immeasurable chasms of emptiness."⁴ In both Giacometti and Friedberg we find eery immobility, dense with memory and sadness.