To say I am not a visual person is an understatement that could induce vertigo. My mind doesn’t draw things, I don’t remember faces, I can’t really see things when I try and imagine them. Instead I remember associative details and puzzle pieces — the sound of a voice, the events of a day, the places things happen. A couple of months ago I read a revelatory piece about the discovery that some people (perhaps many) simply do not have a mind’s eye. It felt so obvious, so familiar. It was like coming home.

All this is an extremely roundabout and it’s-nearly-11-and-I’ve-awake-since-5amish way of saying that I wasn’t the most sympathetic audience when I picked up Dana Goodyear’s “A Ghost in the Family” in the New Yorker.

It’s about an unusual love triangle in the art world.

From one angle it’s the story of Barry McGee, a leading artist of the Mission School in San Francisco, and two women he has loved. But from almost every other angle it’s about those women, and the way they relate to each other in life — and in death. First Margaret Kilgallen, who married McGee in 1999, and then Claire Rojas, a young artist who kind of, sort of, not quite but maybe replaced Kilgallen when she died of cancer in 2001, just weeks after having a baby. Essentially it’s about how you grow when you’re in the shadow of somebody else.

McGee knew he couldn’t raise a child alone, nor could he live with a crowd of well-meaning family and friends. “I needed help,” he told me. “I needed to feel good again. I needed it fast. It was really scary.” Rojas was funny and fierce and steady. That winter, on the way back to San Francisco from New York, McGee stumbled around Chicago in a blizzard, with a cooler full of breast milk and a baby strapped to his chest, trying to find her student apartment. In the spring, he enlisted her to come to Milan, where he was installing a show at the Prada Foundation. Her roommate warned her to be careful, but Rojas would not be deterred. Scattered as McGee was, he represented a kind of freedom. “He was showing me the world,” she told me.

It’s that special kind of New Yorker profile — the sort of one that you look at and think, “maybe this story on vegetables is not for me” but you start reading, and then suddenly it sneaks up on you, and you realize you’ve read 5,000 words on broccoli. It doesn’t really tackle some of the big questions, and it doesn’t really go anywhere, although the people make some sort of progress. It just draws you a picture of lives lived, and makes its way from the start to the end.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly for me, I read the whole thing without ever really wanting to see the art of anybody involved.

But I think it might just be the same for anyone else, too.