Emily Lighezzolo’s debut novel LIFE DRAWING (UQP 2026) explores the female body from a multitude of perspectives: the physical changes of puberty, childbirth, menopause and aging; how females consider their own bodies over time; the male gaze and how it affects women’s feelings of self-identity; whether bodies are on show or hidden, and whether this changes how people relate to the personality of the person; and how a woman’s body might be ‘seen, touched, loved, hated, commodified and reclaimed’ over a lifetime.
The author achieves this multifaceted viewpoint through the lens of a body as art, whether photographed, sketched, painted or simply adored through the eyes of another. LIFE DRAWING raises so many interesting questions about our relationship with our own bodies, the assumptions we make about others because of their bodies, and how those feelings shift over the years.
At its heart, this novel is a contemporary love story. Maisie works as a life-drawing model and first meets Charlie when he participates in one of her drawing classes. He’s an artist and sees her as just that – a body he is keen to sketch. But afterwards they coincidentally connect through a share house and soon share mutual friends and a lifelong game of Hypothetical that they share as a sort of love language. ‘Hypothetically, would you want to live forever but invisible, or a short life seen?’
Their words and promises, their dreams and ambitions, their fears and mistakes, their joys and longings reverberate throughout the years as they each poke at the tender places of the other, knowing each other so well (perhaps even sometimes too well) that they develop a mutual co-dependency or need or want or yearning that at times neither is equipped to deal with.
Over two decades, they navigate their complex feelings for one another throughout friendship, intimacy, estrangement and family.
Lighezzolo’s portrait of the female body is unflinching, courageous, curious, questioning, vivid and pulls no punches. She doesn’t skirt around issues of exploitation, consent, pornography, intimacy, aging or artistic impression but rather uses each of these themes to examine what lies (often deeply hidden) in the minds of women about their own bodies, and in other people about the lives and bodies of women both specifically and in general.
Both Maisie and Charlie are viscerally opened up so we can see inside their chests to their beating hearts, to see what really makes them tick. She confronts uncomfortable thoughts, unconventional opinions and controversial views about physicality, the corporeal body, sex, gender, intimacy, friendships, relationships and the darkest aspects of where our minds go when faced with trauma, whether that be an eating disorder, postnatal depression, sexual abuse, depression, anxiety or suicide.
But despite these weighty themes, Lighezzolo retains moments of grace, tenderness, warmth, kindness, forgiveness, loyalty and self-love that are glorious reclamations of the female self. A heart wrenching but ultimately redemptive story, beautifully captured.