“IN MY EXPERIENCE painters are far less conventional than writers,” says Rachel Cusk in her 2014 novel Outline. Writers, hesitant about filling their novels with authorial doubles, have a tendency to put their self-inserts in smocks. These painter protagonists are a mistake. Using painting to talk about writing does a disservice to both art forms. Painters and writers don’t think the same, don’t act the same. They certainly don’t write the same. Compare an excellent but conventional painter novel like Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (1988), based on her own childhood but with Atwood recast as a budding painter, to the strange novels painters actually write—Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side (1908), Salvador Dalí’s Hidden Faces (1944), Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (1972), Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974). Novels like Atwood’s are rich with insight into painting, but their painter characterizations fall flat. Writers tend to assume painters think like them, but they don’t. Sophie Madeline Dess, an accomplished art critic before she pivoted to fiction, knows this. In What You Make of Me (2025), she has written not only a very good novel about painting but also a believable painter’s novel.
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