Yesterday was the official publication day for my book, The Art of Looking Back: A painter, an obsession, and reclaiming the gaze. The public use room at the Sechelt Library was full of well-wishers, Charlotte Gray gave a sweet introduction, Talewind Books had a table full of books, past and recent and this one, fresh off the press. Jane Davidson tucked a keepsake into the books she sold and after the reading, the questions, and during the cake —
— I signed copies, some of them to old and dear friends, and some of them to people I know a little, and some of them to people I’d only just met.
I’m still getting to know the book as an object separate from my self. It was a difficult one to write. I revisited old experiences, read letters written to me by the painter Jack Wilkinson over a 19 year period, read my journals, tried to piece together a narrative of what Freud called “a disturbance of memory”. I have no regrets about writing it, though I confess I had some help with coming to terms with my own vulnerability during the period when I was anticipating publication and wondering if I’d done the right thing.
But yesterday, and a few days earlier, Wednesday, when I read from the book at the Gibsons Library in a beautiful room looking out to the harbour, I felt a sense of completion. I did the hard work, often writing into the small hours of the night, and then the revising, finding the right publisher (Eve Rickert and Hazel Boydell at Thornapple Press are stellar), the editing (with Andrea Zanin), and copy-editing (with Heather van der Hoop), a bit of design consultation with Jeff Werner, and even trying to answer some intricate proof-reading questions from Alison Whyte on my tiny phone screen in a temporary apartment in Vila Nova de Foz Coa in Portugal. I remember receiving the first iteration of the proposed cover last August and having to take a moment to catch my breath. I don’t know what I expected or hoped for but this cover, designed by Jessica Sullivan and Naomi MacDougall at DSGN Dept., took my breath away.
There are a few more events in the next few weeks. Visit here to learn more. I’ve posted links to reviews and a podcast so you can share my excitement at how the book is being received.
Mostly, though? I feel gratitude. I was a young woman who became involved in something that she was not prepared for and which continued to haunt her for years. And then I wrote about it. I looked back at the art, particularly the portrait of myself at 23 hanging in the stairwell of our home, I read those letters, full of love and pressure and anguish and even threats, I sat at my desk looking out at the green woods in daylight and the darkness at night, and I listened to an old story, learned to have a conversation with that young woman, and the result is a book I am proud to have written.
From the other side of this gulf of years, I look back to ask questions I never knew were mine to ask. Did I simulate an art object, a naked woman holding a gauzy shawl over her head, a model, an enduring object of desire? Take the questions into the present tense in the time that is always now. Do I have power in this transaction? Can I say no? Can I ask that you (he) show me the images based on me? What will happen to them, where will they go? The questions that refuse the present tense. What I knew and didn’t know. Didn’t ask, fixed in time by his gaze.
