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What You Make of Me: A Novel - Hardcover

Dess, Sophie Madeline

 
9780593830826: What You Make of Me: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593830822 ISBN 13: 9780593830826
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A brilliant and mesmerizing debut about a brother and sister haunted by their past, who must face what – and who –  they’re willing to sacrifice for their art

“Sophie Madeline Dess has conjured one of the most unique and heartbreaking family narratives in recent memory, and with her rendering of the dynamic between Ava and Demetri, she’s given us a sibling duo for the ages.” — Sam Lipsyte, New York Times bestselling author of The Ask and No One Left to Come Looking for You

Demetri and his sister, Ava. Ava and her brother, Demetri. As fiercely competitive as they are co-dependent, the two have long been locked in an emotionally charged relationship. Ava, defiant and impassioned, grew up in the shadow of soft, charming, and intellectual Demetri. But after a sudden and devastating event, it is Demetri who finds himself emotionally ruined, whereas Ava has no time nor patience for grief. As they grow up, following one another from city to city, the siblings are set on their own parallel paths as artists, thinkers, and lovers. Ava throws herself into her obsession with her art, which gradually leads to fame and financial stability – as well as extreme existential insecurity. But Demetri flounders in his own work, unable to escape the wake of tragedy; until, that is, he decides to make Ava his subject.

When Nati, an Italian gallery owner, arrives in New York, Demetri and Ava orbit her, possessed by their own priorities. But when they both fall for her, Nati refuses to play their game. Once again, and perhaps for the last time, the brother and sister must face what they most want from each other, and what they’re unwilling to give.

Intense, provocative, and emotionally acute, this brilliant debut from Sophie Madeline Dess exposes the darkest edges of love and obsession, and lays bare what it means to sacrifice another's life for your art.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sophie Madeline Dess is a writer and critic living in New York, New York. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Drift and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where she was awarded a creative writing teaching fellowship, and is currently an adjunct professor at Parsons School of Design. What You Make of Me is her debut novel.

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In two weeks they'll be killing my brother and so I'm writing. I shouldn't be. My brother would agree with me. Writing is not my art.

I am a painter, though I don't expect you to have heard of me. If you saw me at a café you would not know me. You'd have no questions for me. Soft pop would be thumping and you'd be into it, and I'd only be another person sitting there plain-faced with blueberry eyes, my hair dyed some variation of oat or vanilla, shirt and pants bleeding together in one wheaty monochrome.

If I were to look at you as you stood there ordering, I'd wonder all the questions one asks when faced with a stranger, like who you sleep with, and how, and what you think of before bed, and what it would be like to press my nose into your scalp. The usual. But neither of us is at the café. I am here working, writing. My first solo show is coming up at a small gallery called Withheld. The Withheld people recently called me to say they were going to send their assistant up to my apartment to look at all my work, so that she might write some flap copy. Fine. But then I heard that this flap copy was supposed to describe exactly what my paintings "do" and what they "mean." These explanations were to be printed on a single sheet of paper. This sheet of paper-trifolded-would be called the "catalog." And this little catalog would be printed ten hundred times over and would sit stacked on a plastic tray at the front of the gallery, available to gallery-goers upon entry or exit.

For days they've been sending her to my door, the assistant. For days she's been knocking at noon and for days I have denied her entry. (Under any other circumstances I'd have allowed her in. She is chatty and structurally perfect. Her face in particular, because of its modernity and slight resemblance to a kitchen, has an industrial beauty. Vast cheeks. Boxy nose.) If she came in now she'd see me naked, perched here on my small metal stool. I've just opened the window. A gently polluted breeze is sifting off the sidewalk and I'm spreading my legs, letting the air come up cool through my crotch and hot out my mouth. I make it work like an organ sweep, a little urban exorcism. The only stimulants in this whole space are my paintings, placed like mistakes along my wall.

All the paintings are of my brother. You would not recognize him in them. In real life my brother has a straight line down his nose, caramel hair that waves upward, and eyes that are a very difficult blue, like there's black beneath them. In my paintings these details are obscured. You might mistake his cheek for an elephant husk. His mouth for a small vat of blood. His nose the cracked edge of a tile.

What I mean to say is, Withheld will not be trifolding me and my dying brother into that little catalog. I'll do it myself. All this time I've been sitting up here feeling dramatic, feeling nothing, thinking: That lucky boy gets to drop off and I'm stuck here clinging. Now, however, I'm starting to feel the holy series of convictions one must always feel when setting out on something new: This is the best idea I've ever had; this is the only idea I've ever had; this is the only idea anyone has ever had. I'm aware these convictions sound less exciting when written. That's always the way with language, an insufficient medium. I try not to use or consume it. It's not that I haven't read, it's that I'm an adolescent reader. I read too selfishly. I pick up books trying to figure out more about myself-as my brother, Demetri, has advised. The issue is that the reading turns me into other people whom I soon after abandon. And this reminds me that for the most part the self is only something that continually takes up, plays with, and then abandons other selves. I don't need to be reminded of this. And, anyway, words should be spoken, not written. Like how they used to do it-a return to the glory days of oral!

As I am now understanding-the worst thing about writing is that it takes time. Therefore writers must believe in old-fashioned things like focus. I have no faith in this. My faith is in the image, in instantaneity, in the ability to see and say it all at once.

In a sense Demetri's faith was also in the image. He worked in documentaries. His most recent piece, unfortunately, is a film (or documentary, even though it contains no official documents, it only wants to constitute a document in itself, which I refuse to concede that it does), a film about us, mostly about me, but not too much on this because it embarrasses me, and I will only say that when I found out he made it, at first I really thought: good. That's fine. At least it's off his chest. In fact I was surprised he got it done. Because often my brother was the victim (Is the victim? What's the tense for the dying?) of what he only semi-ironically called his spiritual quests. The specifics of these quests are irrelevant, just know he was one of those people whose life centered around moral questions like am I wrong, did I do wrong, how can I amend?
Demetri would sit naked in the East Tenth Street bathhouses and think about these questions. He'd sweat them out. He'd run to the bodega for a bag of Smartfood and a tub of mouthwash and come back empty-handed, the questions having distracted him. He believed that the only way to get at them was to privately and deliberately dedicate his life to them. His making the film-the documentary-was a way to come to some answers. Still, I found out he made it and thought: No one will care. No one will watch it. I forgave him. I went to his sickbed, looked into his sunken, radiating face and I said: "This is pretty good revenge for my having oppressed you, Demetri. And so I forgive you." But it's true I'm having a bit of trouble forgiving myself.
Nati and I were on the phone recently, and with her typical coldness she said I was the one who killed Demetri. "You're the reason he'll die." Not that you care about her yet, but I'd like you to know that that's the kind of person we're dealing with. Alas.

They'll really kill him now (though they like to say they're letting him go, releasing him-which is to say, restricting him from air and feed). It's happening in two weeks at 3:00 p.m. By some accounts-those of certain doctors or philosophers-he is already dead. He has what is called a depressed consciousness. A tumor is sitting squat on his meninges. And now his brain stem has turned inward, become a stubborn child with its arms crossed refusing to liaison properly between the spinal cord and cerebrum.

Still, as he dies his pride only seems to grow. I go to his little sickroom to visit him. He's arranged it so that the Replacements and Pharoah Sanders are playing through his speakers on rotation. He is lying in bed, silent. His face stares up at nothing and is dry, glowing. His smile-which I'm always reminded is not actually a smile, only an involuntary twitch of the zygomaticus minor-has been suggesting all these very bad jokes which are all really true. I wish I could think of one now. I'll have my own when I die. I know this because the nurse told me, with her scrub authority, that death is always attended by bad jokes and basic truths, unlike life where everyone's hilarious and lying all the time. She was serious.

Anyway, he is there, and soon the doctors will enter his room, and they will call me, and I will stay here, writing.

One last thought about writing. I'm thinking: If I were to tell you I was painting your portrait so that I'd capture everything you are and everything you've ever been-just by looking at you for hours at a time-you would be excited, you would be eager to see where I took it. But if I were to tell you I was writing the story of your life, using hard facts and descriptions, you might feel trapped. You might feel a more literal transcription of your life would have...

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Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593830822
ISBN 13 
9780593830826
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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