What You Make of Me

by Sophie Madeline Dess

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age; Family Life; Siblings; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In this mesmerizing debut from a bright new talent, two enigmatic and unforgettable siblings confront what – and who – they’re willing to sacrifice for their art

“Sophie Madeline Dess has conjured one of the most unique and heartbreaking family narratives in recent memory, and with her rendering of the dynamic between Ava and Demetri, she’s given us a sibling duo for the ages.” — Sam Lipsyte, New York Times bestselling author of The Ask and No One Left to Come Looking for You

On the eve of her first solo show, Ava is feeling defiant. The art gallery acolytes have insisted on writing “explanations” of her paintings for an accompanying catalog, but what do they know of her work? What do they know of her brother, Demetri, whose face echoes across every canvas?

After all, Ava and Demetri have only ever had each other. Abandoned first by their mother, who drowned in the Long Island Sound, and then again by their father, who couldn’t see beyond his grief, each sibling has always been the other’s most ardent supporter: Demetri encouraged Ava’s raw talent as a painter, while Ava pushed Demetri to pursue filmmaking. But as they make their way in New York, the codependency that once sustained them soon threatens to be their undoing. Betrayals mount, fueled by Ava’s reckless acts and her disdain for Demetri’s last-ditch efforts to make something of consequence, but what ultimately and irreversibly tips the scales won’t be found on canvas or film. Because now, at thirty-one, Demetri is dying.

As Ava reckons with the meaning of her portraits, what soon emerges from her intimate, offhanded, and mischievous meditations is a stunning and unsettling confession of secrets, epiphanies, rivalry, and infidelity. Vaulting between childhood and the days leading up to Demetri’s death, here is a searing portrait of two remarkable siblings reckoning with the limits of loyalty. Heralding the arrival of an impressive new talent, What You Make of Me lays bare the thin line between success and sacrifice.

Release date: February 25, 2025

Publisher: Penguin Press

Print pages: 288

Sample

In two weeks they'll be killing my brother and so I'm writing. I shouldn't be. My brother would agree with me. Writing is not my art.

I am a painter, though I don't expect you to have heard of me. If you saw me at a café you would not know me. You'd have no questions for me. Soft pop would be thumping and you'd be into it, and I'd only be another person sitting there plain-faced with blueberry eyes, my hair dyed some variation of oat or vanilla, shirt and pants bleeding together in one wheaty monochrome.

If I were to look at you as you stood there ordering, I'd wonder all the questions one asks when faced with a stranger, like who you sleep with, and how, and what you think of before bed, and what it would be like to press my nose into your scalp. The usual. But neither of us is at the café. I am here working, writing. My first solo show is coming up at a small gallery called Withheld. The Withheld people recently called me to say they were going to send their assistant up to my apartment to look at all my work, so that she might write some flap copy. Fine. But then I heard that this flap copy was supposed to describe exactly what my paintings "do" and what they "mean." These explanations were to be printed on a single sheet of paper. This sheet of paper-trifolded-would be called the "catalog." And this little catalog would be printed ten hundred times over and would sit stacked on a plastic tray at the front of the gallery, available to gallery-goers upon entry or exit.

For days they've been sending her to my door, the assistant. For days she's been knocking at noon and for days I have denied her entry. (Under any other circumstances I'd have allowed her in. She is chatty and structurally perfect. Her face in particular, because of its modernity and slight resemblance to a kitchen, has an industrial beauty. Vast cheeks. Boxy nose.) If she came in now she'd see me naked, perched here on my small metal stool. I've just opened the window. A gently polluted breeze is sifting off the sidewalk and I'm spreading my legs, letting the air come up cool through my crotch and hot out my mouth. I make it work like an organ sweep, a little urban exorcism. The only stimulants in this whole space are my paintings, placed like mistakes along my wall.

All the paintings are of my brother. You would not recognize him in them. In real life my brother has a straight line down his nose, caramel hair that waves upward, and eyes that are a very difficult blue, like there's black beneath them. In my paintings these details are obscured. You might mistake his cheek for an elephant husk. His mouth for a small vat of blood. His nose the cracked edge of a tile.

What I mean to say is, Withheld will not be trifolding me and my dying brother into that little catalog. I'll do it myself. All this time I've been sitting up here feeling dramatic, feeling nothing, thinking: That lucky boy gets to drop off and I'm stuck here clinging. Now, however, I'm starting to feel the holy series of convictions one must always feel when setting out on something new: This is the best idea I've ever had; this is the only idea I've ever had; this is the only idea anyone has ever had. I'm aware these convictions sound less exciting when written. That's always the way with language, an insufficient medium. I try not to use or consume it. It's not that I haven't read, it's that I'm an adolescent reader. I read too selfishly. I pick up books trying to figure out more about myself-as my brother, Demetri, has advised. The issue is that the reading turns me into other people whom I soon after abandon. And this reminds me that for the most part the self is only something that continually takes up, plays with, and then abandons other selves. I don't need to be reminded of this. And, anyway, words should be spoken, not written. Like how they used to do it-a return to the glory days of oral!

As I am now understanding-the worst thing about writing is that it takes time. Therefore writers must believe in old-fashioned things like focus. I have no faith in this. My faith is in the image, in instantaneity, in the ability to see and say it all at once.

In a sense Demetri's faith was also in the image. He worked in documentaries. His most recent piece, unfortunately, is a film (or documentary, even though it contains no official documents, it only wants to constitute a document in itself, which I refuse to concede that it does), a film about us, mostly about me, but not too much on this because it embarrasses me, and I will only say that when I found out he made it, at first I really thought: good. That's fine. At least it's off his chest. In fact I was surprised he got it done. Because often my brother was the victim (Is the victim? What's the tense for the dying?) of what he only semi-ironically called his spiritual quests. The specifics of these quests are irrelevant, just know he was one of those people whose life centered around moral questions like am I wrong, did I do wrong, how can I amend?
Demetri would sit naked in the East Tenth Street bathhouses and think about these questions. He'd sweat them out. He'd run to the bodega for a bag of Smartfood and a tub of mouthwash and come back empty-handed, the questions having distracted him. He believed that the only way to get at them was to privately and deliberately dedicate his life to them. His making the film-the documentary-was a way to come to some answers. Still, I found out he made it and thought: No one will care. No one will watch it. I forgave him. I went to his sickbed, looked into his sunken, radiating face and I said: "This is pretty good revenge for my having oppressed you, Demetri. And so I forgive you." But it's true I'm having a bit of trouble forgiving myself.
Nati and I were on the phone recently, and with her typical coldness she said I was the one who killed Demetri. "You're the reason he'll die." Not that you care about her yet, but I'd like you to know that that's the kind of person we're dealing with. Alas.

They'll really kill him now (though they like to say they're letting him go, releasing him-which is to say, restricting him from air and feed). It's happening in two weeks at 3:00 p.m. By some accounts-those of certain doctors or philosophers-he is already dead. He has what is called a depressed consciousness. A tumor is sitting squat on his meninges. And now his brain stem has turned inward, become a stubborn child with its arms crossed refusing to liaison properly between the spinal cord and cerebrum.

Still, as he dies his pride only seems to grow. I go to his little sickroom to visit him. He's arranged it so that the Replacements and Pharoah Sanders are playing through his speakers on rotation. He is lying in bed, silent. His face stares up at nothing and is dry, glowing. His smile-which I'm always reminded is not actually a smile, only an involuntary twitch of the zygomaticus minor-has been suggesting all these very bad jokes which are all really true. I wish I could think of one now. I'll have my own when I die. I know this because the nurse told me, with her scrub authority, that death is always attended by bad jokes and basic truths, unlike life where everyone's hilarious and lying all the time. She was serious.

Anyway, he is there, and soon the doctors will enter his room, and they will call me, and I will stay here, writing.

One last thought about writing. I'm thinking: If I were to tell you I was painting your portrait so that I'd capture everything you are and everything you've ever been-just by looking at you for hours at a time-you would be excited, you would be eager to see where I took it. But if I were to tell you I was writing the story of your life, using hard facts and descriptions, you might feel trapped. You might feel a more literal transcription of your life would have nothing to do with what is real to you. It would not capture the unknowable bits of you (the way a painting could). That's all I mean, that writing-with all its specifics-has a harder time with the real. This consistent loss of faith in reality becomes (for me) a problem that extends beyond language. For instance, my suspicion of my own life is deepest when I think I might be feeling something "real," like when I think I might be in love, or when I think I've at last succeeded, or even when I think I might've failed but in a rich way-any time when I know some deep sense of meaning should be tunneling into the soul somewhere, but is not. I lose faith. Anyway . . .

Demetri's film about us: I haven't seen it and don't plan to. I didn't ask him for details about it. I didn't ask if there were close-ups of my eyes or my teeth. If everyone was going to see the way they're gnarled into my gums and come out in this stacked and slanted kind of way. I didn't ask for a plot summary (of my own life!) or for structural details. I can guess at the outline. Demetri will start when we are children.

He was obsessed with youth, and with posterity. In fact before he really began dying he convinced me to donate a painting of mine to our high school. This was after I started making a bit of money. I'd sold a couple pieces at auction. I'd been written about and reviewed (I'd been called a "force" but it was still "unclear" if I was worth being reckoned with; I'd been called "powerful" but they didn't know if the watercolor of me being railed from behind was "liberative" for women or if it only "reaffirmed submission"). A donation at that point, three years ago, would be a small asset for the school district. "Donate them an old one, a good one," Demetri instructed me. He was so insistent, I came to understand, because he wanted the chance to go speak to the school-in Longhead, Long Island, a tiny town you don't know and don't want to-he wanted to go back there and lecture. By then that was what he did for me. He'd come up with things to say about my work, to flick it spinning into the world and give it direction. We wouldn't consult about what he wrote. He wouldn't ask me if he got my work "right" and I wouldn't ask him to be sure to include this or that. We never discussed whether his written copy or my actual art was what got me into certain shows, galleries, homes.

The school was happy to have him visit. They were excited about his return. There's even a recording of the talk he gave. I often find myself pulling up the video and watching him. The way he stands recklessly tall at the little podium. I watch his face twitch around before the young crowd settles. He does not know what to say to teenagers. He's prepared a speech, but at the last moment he has scrapped it. Now he stands there and clears his throat until it sores. He tells the room full of pubescents that in order to calm down he's going to imagine them naked. He blushes and rapidly takes this back. And then says it again. He asks how many of them have any grandparents left. He says he is there to discuss a trip to the Virgin Islands and then asks how many people have been to an island or know of a virgin. He cannot settle down.
"Ava and I were taken to a Virgin Island, once. It was our first flight," he finally begins. "I was nine. Ava was eight. On the plane we were sitting twenty rows away from our father. Because we were loud, in the way that tragedies can make you really rambunctious." He coughs. "On the plane"-he tilts forward, toward the mic-"I grew bored. I began taking hold of little threads of Ava's hair and gnashing them between my teeth," he tells them. "When she felt the tug she turned, saw a chunk of her hair in my mouth, my eyes wide. We both burst out. Ava had a way of shrieking when she laughed, she kind of threw her head back and bore all her teeth. Back then her canines were just coming in, breaking out through the pulp, which made her look ferocious. So we really just sat there and shrieked, smacked each other, leapt up in our seats." He explains to the children that I fell in love on this trip. "When the flight attendant came to quiet us, Ava told him she thought he was beautiful, and that he had beautiful eyes. She thought it was good form to let a person know." Here Demetri stalls. The light thins his body and for a moment he stands there shrinking.

In his speech Demetri skips over much of the vacation. He picks things up at the end. But the trip itself was an eternity.

We landed on the island and were shepherded into a van that would immediately take us to the hotel, as if to look or go elsewhere were criminal. In the van Demetri and my father sat across from me, arm to arm. The van went over a bump; everyone was for a moment lifted out of their seats, except for our father, who did not lift. I watched his profile-his nose a blade slicing through the blur of trees. Our father reminded us where we were and asked if we remembered anything about colonialism. Demetri did.

At the hotel our father spoke with the suited and sweating men behind the desk. Demetri and I left him. We stood out on the lobby's balcony and looked into the ocean. We'd been promised clear ocean water, but all we saw was black, with bursts of bright navy far out where the sun hit. "You're mad," Demetri said to me, "because the water's not see-through, and because you were in love with the flight attendant, and he didn't love you back."