It’s hard to know how to classify a book like this. A retrospective, part memoir, something of poetry, a statement on what it is to be a woman and look back at your life. It’s a work that could really only come from an artist like Theresa Kishkan. I picked up this book because Kishkan lives here on the Sunshine Coast and I know a little of her poetry. I was intrigued by the concept of this book. In it, Kishkan examines a relationship she had with a painter when she was in her early 20s.
Relationship isn’t quite the right word to use though. Theresa is at the very beginning of her adulthood, living in Victoria, planning the next grand adventures of her life.. She meets a painter, a man named Jack Wilkinson, at a party. Afterward he writes her a letter, says he must meet her. She goes to his house to meet him, she is interested by him and flattered by his attention. He is much older – her father’s age – married, with children. They spend some time together and Wilkinson inundates her with drawings, writings, letters. He is obsessed with her and Theresa doesn’t know how to react to this attention.
Wilkinson draws and paints her more than once and becomes a figure that comes in and out of her life for many years after, even after she marries and has children. He gifts her a painting of herself that hangs in her home. Throughout the book, Theresa studies this painting in her own home, examining this younger version of herself, questioning what happened to her years before.
This is a very introspective book. It’s light on action or drama but Kishkan excels at evoking a deep sense of discomfort throughout. Wilkinson isn’t dangerous but his reactions to Theresa are inappropriate and continuously boundary-pushing. Kishkan, looking back years later, can see the situation with a clarity that she couldn’t possibly have had at the time, even as she still feels confused by what it all meant.
I imagine there are readers who may wonder why Theresa goes along with so much. Why she allows this older, married man to monopolize her, why she doesn’t simply brush him off and carry on with her life? But I found her very easy to sympathize with. While I’ve never been in such a situation, I could understand the flattery that such attention might make a young woman feel. I could understand the confusion, the uncertainty about whether or not that boundary had been crossed. Sometimes in your youth you don’t know that someone older (a “real” grownup”) is being inappropriate until you one day reach that age and get to see that memory from the other side. This is something Kishkan really captures. The perspective of a woman with more years looking back at her own self, trying to see the picture – the painting – more clearly.
Karissa Reads Books 