EMILY LIGHEZZOLO Life Drawing. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Through the stories of Charlie and Maisie, artist and model, Emily Lighezzolo’s award-winning debut explores body image and its consequences.

The publicity for this book describes it as a ‘provocative novel about women’s bodies, sex, autonomy – and the power of the image’. Hard themes like body image, ‘art and gaze, desire and consent, muse and meaning’, as well as anxiety and depression, do underlie the story, but Charlie and Maisie are also likeable, quick-witted characters, and at times they can be very funny. Life Drawing charts their lives as they come to terms with the strong attraction between them, in spite of their very different wants and needs. Along the way, there is a lot of alcohol, sex and masturbation, especially in the first part of the book when they are both university students living in a share house where partying is the norm.

Charlie, who is in his second year of arts studies, has just moved from Townsville to Brisbane. We first meet him intent on drawing a nude model at the casual life-drawing group he has just joined at a local bar.

Charlie’s pencil curves inwards on the page to shape the life model’s breast. The strokes go back and forth, following the swell of skin there, darkening the shadows underneath, then stopping so he can circle the nipple. It is beautiful. She is beautiful. But he doesn’t want to think about the model’s breast sexually, just as asymmetry he is trying to capture on paper.

It is a shock when he suddenly recognises her as a girl he briefly met at a ‘speed-friending’ session organised during university O-Week:

It feels like an invasion of privacy that he has ever seen her fully clothed before. That another version of her exists outside of this bar… the knowledge, an outside context to the model, makes this class different.

She ceases to be a subject for life-drawing, and now he is embarrassed in case she recognises him.

When he leaves, she is at the bus stop, waiting to board the same bus as him, and he is forced into stumbling conversation with her. Charlie sees himself as ‘socially awkward … Words are hard’; he is conventionally prudent but not prudish. Maisie is amused at his confusion, but she has particular issues about her body and seeks self-evaluation in the way men enjoy it. Posing for life-drawing sessions is a way of distancing herself from sexual involvement, and she is good at it. When he asks if she models as a career or for pleasure, she considers this question, and then says that it pays well, but she also adds that she does it ‘mostly for self-pleasure’.

It is a surprise to both of them when Charlie, who has been looking for accommodation, unknowingly accepts a room in the share house where Maisie is already living. As days go on, there is clearly a strong attraction between them, but each, for their own reasons, hides it beneath a routine of jokey banter and hypothetical questions.

This distancing continues for most of the book, as Maisie pursues a life of gratification through her body and Charlie, who knows next to nothing about this, struggles to understand her determination to keep their relationship as ‘just friends’.

Maisie is used to being viewed as two-dimensional in most of her interactions outside modelling: ‘Shallow. Exposed. Naked.’ But she knows from her schooldays that all girls are ‘aware of their body’s influence’ and the power of that. Even as she later comes to see this as pandering to the male gaze and satisfying male appetites, she wonders ‘do we ever have personalities outside of someone else’s gaze?’ Being poor, and learning that there is money to be made by being naked on Instagram, she decides to become an Instagram porn star, and she sets up her own website, becomes ‘Maddie Mae’, and interacts with her followers. She is very successful.

Maisie’s only really loving relationship is with her mother Genevieve, who understands her and tells her she is ‘at war’ with her own body. Maisie knows this and has been seeing a psychologist.

‘Are you still seeing Ellen?’ Genevieve asks.

Maisie hasn’t made an appointment with her psychologist in months. ‘Sometimes.’

‘I thought she was really helping.’

‘She was. I mean, she is.’

‘Body image issues don’t need to define you.’

‘Can we not talk about this again.’ ….

Maisie pulls her cardigan over her swimmers and leaves her mother reading … she walks the length of the beach … The sand squelches between her toes, suctioning her to the earth, and she pauses, stills, as if she were modelling, trying to feel its physicalness. Trying to be at peace with its physicalness. She moves her body into a pose and wonders if she should capture the moment.

Charlie, meanwhile, gets on with his life, but even as he learns more about Maisie and is shocked by what he learns, he cannot deny the attraction between them. Their lives move through separation, new attachments and eventual reconnection. Charlie finds a new carefree love and gets engaged, but Maisie still haunts him and he has to deal with the emotional struggle and guilt when he meets her again.

So far so conventional for a romantic novel, but the patterns and upheavals both Charlie and Maisie negotiate are compellingly drawn from life. So, too, are the underlying issues Lighezzolo embeds in the story.

Body image becomes a critical issue for Maisie after the birth of her daughter. This and post-natal depression threaten to ruin her heath and her life. It also severely impacts her relationship with Charlie, who is struggling with his own readjustments to major changes. He has neglected his drawing for years but has kept the images he drew of Maisie in their carefree days – ‘A record of their love in his life drawings.’ Finally, he goes back to them:

His past lives aren’t just negative space, but leftover lines and half-finished smudges that have become irrelevant in the grand scheme of his portrait. The past is never hard to see in sketches, It’s always there.

He takes a half-finished sketch of Maisie lying across a lined page. He starts to shade a new shape over it.

In Life Drawing there are ‘hard themes’, as Lighezollo says in her Author’s Note: body image, eating disorders, self-harm and suicidal thoughts, and ‘perinatal anxiety and depression’ and the readjustment needed by both partners. In drawing the lives of Charlie and Maisie, Lighezzolo manages to suggest the smudges and unfinished lines of life that are all around us, but she does it with humour and compassion so that the reader empathises with her characters, understands some of the reasons for the issues they confront, and hopes for a happy ending. For a first book, this is a promising beginning, and it won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer at Queensland Literary Awards.

Emily Lighezzolo Life Drawing University of Queensland Press 2026 PB 352pp $34.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.