For our latest Book Club edition, we’re exploring Life Drawing, a bold and intimate debut that traces the shifting boundaries between intimacy and observation, art and ownership, and love and selfhood.
Emily Lighezzolo’s award-winning first novel begins with a life-drawing class: Maisie is the model, Charlie is the artist, and a charged encounter sets both of their lives on a course that stretches across two decades. What follows is not a conventional romance, but something more elusive and deeply human, shaped by longing, perception, estrangement and the ways our sense of self is formed in relation to others.
With clarity and emotional intelligence, Life Drawing explores the female body as image, idea, and lived experience, examining desire and consent through questions of visibility, power, and what may be lost, offered, or reclaimed. Both tender and provocative, it is a love story alert to imbalance, and a portrait of becoming that stays with the reader well beyond the final page.
Synopsis:
Maisie and Charlie meet as undergraduates at a life-drawing class, where she’s the model and he’s the artist. Their immediate connection carries them through the years as friendship, attraction and distance move in and out of one another. Life Drawing explores the unstable dynamic between being muse and maker, and the fine line where intimacy gives way to control and desire collides with autonomy.
At its centre is Maisie’s relationship with her body. Lighezzolo builds a thoughtful and unflinching novel about art, sex, power and the narratives shaped around women’s bodies. The novel defies neat conclusions, lingering in the tension between others’ perceptions of us and our own inner truths.
About Emily Lighezzolo: 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.
