What You Make of Me

January 1, 2025
In this provocative debut novel, a woman reflects on her relationship with her brother as he's dying of brain cancer. After their mother took her own life by walking into Long Island Sound and their father unravels from grief, Ava and Demetri, only a year apart in age, practically raise themselves. Demetri, a precocious kid, heads off to Harvard, and Ava, a talented painter, tags along, sleeping under his bed. Ava believes their identities are so entwined that she falls apart when Demetri starts dating: "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." Ava's solution is to insert herself into all of Demetri's relationships, convincing his love interests to slip out of their clothes and pose for nude portraits. Her greatest victory (and shame) is when she finds herself actually falling in love with one of these women. Desiring the same woman, it turns out, drives them apart. Ava is a thoroughly unsympathetic narrator, which is not itself a problem. Writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, Emma Cline, and Elizabeth Strout have created memorably difficult female protagonists. And yet, through absurdity and humor, the slow revelation of pathos, or searing social critique, their novels both wink at readers and nudge them to stop being so judgmental. It's hard to know how we're supposed to understand Dess' novel, which satirizes the contemporary art world--Ava's first major sale is a series of paintings literally produced as she's having sex with men--and perhaps Ava, too, though her narcissism starts to feel thin and sad. Right before Demetri dies and he's barely conscious, Ava shows him a portrait of their shared lover, seeking his approval one last time. It's a painful scene to read. A novel that can't decide how seriously we should take its psychologically damaged characters.

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Starred review from December 9, 2024
A brother and sister’s artistic rivalry intensifies when they fall for the same woman in Dess’s electrifying debut. In the novel’s framing device, Ava Stern’s older brother, Demetri, is near death from a tumor. Ava, a painter, writes about their life together while the 31-year-old documentary filmmaker lays unresponsive in home hospice care. She begins with their childhood on Long Island, where they were raised by an aloof father after their mother died by suicide when they were eight and seven. Both children show artistic promise, but their teachers favor the serious-minded Demetri, while Ava, deemed “oversexed” by school officials, acts impulsively in an effort to fit into her brother’s world. In one instance, she paints a nude portrait of a girl Demetri desires but is too anxious to approach. After Ava drops out of high school, they move to Boston so Demetri can attend Harvard, then to New York City, where they alternately support and undermine each over the course of their 20s. Their dynamic is unsettled when they meet Nati, an Italian gallerist who commissions Ava’s work and starts dating Demetri. After Ava begins an affair with Nati, she grows anxious about jeopardizing her bond with Demetri, especially as his health deteriorates and they clash over his idea to make a film about her. Dess harnesses her characters’ feelings of sorrow and dread as their bond unravels, and she skillfully untangles the complexities of their all-consuming relationship while offering keen insights into the pressures they face as artists, both from others and from within. It’s a tour de force. Agent Susan Golomb, Writers House.

January 1, 2025
Siblings Demetri and Ava Stern are a unit. It's not just their meager year of difference in ages that binds them together. The pain of their mother's suicide also shapes their young adult lives. As Dess' soulful debut opens, Demetri is dying of brain cancer at just 31. Ava takes stock as she revisits their twenties. She narrates the journey of her burgeoning artistic career and describes the deeply interwoven siblings' lives. They had just begun to make money and learn the contours of the world. Complicating matters is an up-and-coming Italian art professional, Nati, who claims space in both their hearts. Their fledgling successes--Ava's art recognitions, Demetri's undergraduate studies at Harvard--are constantly ground down by the pressure of past tragedy. Their father, too, has succumbed to its aftermath, enveloped in guilt and delusion. The strain of such a dark legacy shadows the edges of the siblings' codependent relationship until time simply runs out to make amends. A haunting if sometimes bleak exploration of the weight of guilt's millstone and the power of forgiveness.

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