Sophie Madeline Dess’ debut novel, What You Make of Me, explores a fraught and complex sibling dynamic. Ava, a talented painter, and her brother, the sharp but mercurial Demetri, are forced to raise each other after their mother takes her own life and their father unravels. The two develop a dependency on each other, Ava follows Demetri to college and can’t seem to separate herself artistically or emotionally from her sibling. At the outset of the novel the reader understands that Demetri is dying of a terminal brain cancer, and what follows is Ava tracing his final years as she struggles to come to terms with his eventual passing.
Ava is a complicated narrator, she has a dry sense of humor, with fairly unsympathetic tendencies towards cruelty and cynicism. She’s unable to develop relationships outside of her brother, treating people as expendable. A key dramatic beat of the novel is when Ava is unable to cope with Demtri dating, and seduces the object of his desire herself. She thinks, “It never occurred to me…that Demetri would be attracted to someone without me. Because different desires would make us what we were not—namely, two separate people.” Her obsession with her brother causes her to cross boundaries that are unusual for siblings, her desires are simply ownership of everything that could be his, there can be no boundaries between them.
The novel is also punctuated by footnotes with textual references to Ava’s paintings, all of which are representations of her brother at different moments. The paintings are unique representations in all sorts of mediums, and I found this element to be one of the most unique and rich components of the novel. Demetri is also strongly ingrained in Ava’s life as an artist, he does write-ups of her exhibitions and helps her make sales as her profile grows, and her paintings of him are a crucial piece of how we come to understand their relationship to each other.
In an interview with BOMB magazine, Dess explains, “I wanted to get at the idea of ownership and exposure. John Richardson called Lucian Freud’s early portraits of various muses ‘more real than the real thing.’ Can this ever be true? Can a painter’s portrait of a person be more like the person than themself? If it’s true, who is willing to give a painter such complete control? Ava, my painter-narrator, takes that control even if it’s not granted.” Ava’s art transcends the idea of representing, and crosses into the territory of authority.
Overall, Dess’ novel is a fascinating exploration of an intricate family dynamic, and how relationships can be fractured by the desire to consume or merge with the other. While some elements of the novel didn’t entirely come together for me, this is a unique and inventive take on the complicated narrator, and a satirical take on the art world and its social dynamics.