Reviewed by Wendy Lipke
With the title of this book, Life Drawing, sharing the cover with the back view of a naked woman, one might assume that this book is about that aspect of art. However, this debut novel by Emily Lighezzolo is at heart a love story.
Set in Brisbane with the main characters university students occupying a share house, this is a story of two of those students who are drawn together then drift apart only to be reconnected at a later time.
The author reveals that the idea for the book originated in a life drawing session where the model was a young woman. Through the author’s story of these young people, she also explores the love story between a woman and her body. The promotional material for the book states that this is a provocative novel about women’s bodies, sex, autonomy and the power of the image.
The idea of life drawing threads its way throughout the story. Charlie attends a life drawing class where he first sees Maisie. He is an art student at university in Brisbane having moved away from his complicated family in Townsville.
Maisie is the only child of a single mum. She is part-way through a never-ending arts degree, looking for validation while simultaneously pushing away anyone who wants to get too close. She is the model in the life drawing class.
Maisie is the focus around which the other characters orbit. She is driven by body image and, although happy to display her body, is sickened by being viewed as an object. She yearns for love but does not allow others to come too close. Her conversational exchanges have always left her more excited than any caress or kiss could. Some believe that she uses relationships to find a sense of self.
The contrast between those students with parental backing and those trying to cope on their own is highlighted. Maisie and Charlie find themselves both in the same share house. Their love journey will not be an easy one. Through the game of hypotheticals that they play, the reader learns about their values and beliefs. At first, they appear to have nothing in common.
This novel is divided into three parts titled for different parts of the female body that attract the most attention. The storyline swings back and forth between the protagonists revealing their thoughts and concerns. The story reveals the use of modern technology and the author uses 21st Century language which does not cringe at revealing very personal information. I enjoyed the way the author leads into some of the information she wishes to impart – ‘He takes the bottle and spins it, spinning away the years, back to when he had been an anxious teenager…’(253). The description of a woman in labour with her body an accordion playing out the notes of labour pain, stretching and crunching with the contractions, is a lovely one that only an artistic male at the time would think of.
This is a modern story involving the dynamics between the share house occupants, their parties and their discussions around subjects such as political correctness, the state of sexism, the downsides of capitalism, the toxicity of college life but also about more personal issues like how the female body can be sexual without being under the male gaze.
This is also a sad story, that love which can be so encompassing can at the same time produce so much pain.
Emily Lighezzolo has worked in Australian publishing for nearly a decade. Her novel, Life Drawing, won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer at the Queensland Literary Awards.
This novel, Life Drawing, supports Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s words, that we all have three lives, the public one everyone knows, the private one, which often only our partner knows, and the secret one that even they can never know (156).
Life Drawing
(2026)
by Emily Lighezzolo
University of Queensland Press
ISBN: 978-0-7022-7098-7
$34.99; 352pp