Life Drawing is an impressive, award-winning, debut novel, and follows the lives of university students Maisie and Charlie over two decades.
For Maisie, modelling for life drawing classes is relaxing, providing an opportunity for her body to be seen without judgement. She is in control – merely an object to be realised in lines and shading. But when she recognises one of the artists as the boy she had met at an event during Orientation Week she struggles to maintain her usual equanimity.
Charlie, too, is thrown by this unexpected encounter and the sudden proprietary urge to place his hand in the small of Maisie’s back is something he has never experienced with a model before. This connection of artist and muse becomes more complicated when Charlie takes a room in a share house not knowing Maisie lives there.
Their friendship is strongly influenced by Maisie’s complex love/hate attitude to her body. The ‘likes’ she gets when a sexy photo is posted give her a sense of power, but there is an underlying trauma associated with other images that have been shared without her consent.
Body image issues resurface later and take a more serious turn when the physical impact of giving birth compounds the post-partum depression she experiences.
Lighezzolo remains firmly in control of this wide-ranging and thought-provoking tale – a contemporary love story that draws out the long-term psychological impact of decisions taken by a young woman, or made for her by others, in this digital age.
Reviewed by Peter Gray
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Lighezzolo has worked in Australian publishing for nearly a decade. Life Drawing won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer at the Queensland Literary Awards and is her first book. She lives in Meanjin/Brisbane.
Visit Emily Lighezzolo’s website here
Follow Emily Lighezzolo on Instagram here.
0 Comments