A provocative love story exploring body image, mental health and art

April 8, 2026 — 12:00pm

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FICTION
Life Drawing
Emily Lighezzolo
UQP, $34.99

Emily Lighezzolo’s debut novel is all about bodies and their perceptions, from within and from external sources. It’s about the giving and receiving of bodies, transactions that can be unequal and fraught.

Charlie and Maisie meet for the second time at a life drawing class at a Brisbane uni. She’s the model, he’s the artist trying to capture her as “lines, angles and shadows”. Later, they become housemates and their push-pull, attraction-repulsion relationship begins in earnest, a fragile connection sustained but one constantly tested and frayed.

Spanning roughly 20 years and broken up into three discrete parts (“The Breasts”, “The Vagina”, “The Waist”), the book follows the pair as they negotiate young adulthood into middle age. Lighezzolo’s intimate mise-en-scène snapshots allow the reader to be a witness – a voyeur even – to their lives. From feckless vulnerability to a hard-won getting of wisdom, the book is set in cockroach-infested share houses and sticky dive bars and booze-reeked parties, and later, within the encroaching walls of quiet domesticity. There’s a path to be navigated between youthful recklessness and freedom and adult compromise and stability.

Though Lighezzolo allows us to see the points of view of both Maisie and Charlie, it’s the former character, whose quixotic, impulsive, self-sabotaging tendencies render her more interesting. Fully aware of the contours of her beauty, Maisie actively courts the male gaze, seeking validation in the lustful reactions she receives from those who simply desire access to her body. She becomes actively involved in its commodification and sees her social value as a woman dependent on her ability to maintain sexual currency.

Concurrent with aspirations for physical perfection that borders on obsession is the maintaining of distance from those who want to get closer to her. Maisie likes to play with her body and her brain, but her heart is guarded. “You think that because you’ve seen me naked, that gives you the right to presume?” she retorts to Charlie’s overtures. Life Drawing is about expectations and disappointments.

As the years pass with the inevitable changes to skin once smooth and taut, we see her creeping anxiety and insecurity around notions of self-worth. The novel is not just about the tortured romance between the protagonists; it also addresses Maisie’s own love affair with her body and how perceptions of public approbation (or otherwise) affect her internal register. Through her, Life Drawing marks how women’s relationships with their bodies can influence attitudes to sex, pregnancy and motherhood.

In the first section, Maisie feels like a cipher, a site upon which others grapple to understand and failing that, to imprint their own interpretations of her behaviour, but the last two offer a more textured and deeper probe into her psyche.

Though Lighezzolo pays close attention to the emotional weather of her lead characters, the support cast of friends and family is also carried alongside Maisie and Charlie in the two decades that cover the book. Maisie’s mother in particular, provides a counterpoint to her daughter in terms of ageing and eventual self-image acceptance.

With themes of sexual politics, power and consent, as well as forays into the intricacies of friendships and mental health, Life Drawing gives Sally Rooney and – closer to home – Diana Reid vibes, and should appeal to those who enjoy contemporary fiction that literally and metaphorically exposes the fears and desires of women.

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