A compulsively readable and electrifying debut about an ambitious young female artist who accidentally photographs a boy falling to his death–an image that could jumpstart her career, but would also devastate her most intimate friendship. Lu Rile is a relentlessly focused young photographer struggling to make ends meet. Working three jobs, responsible for her aging father, and worrying that the … worrying that the crumbling warehouse she lives in is being sold to developers, she is at a point of desperation. One day, in the background of a self-portrait, Lu accidentally captures on film a boy falling past her window to his death. The photograph turns out to be startlingly gorgeous, the best work of art she’s ever made. It’s an image that could change her life…if she lets it.
But the decision to show the photograph is not easy. The boy is her neighbors’ son, and the tragedy brings all the building’s residents together. It especially unites Lu with his beautiful grieving mother, Kate. As the two forge an intense bond based on sympathy, loneliness, and budding attraction, Lu feels increasingly unsettled and guilty, torn between equally fierce desires: to use the photograph to advance her career, and to protect a woman she has come to love.
Set in early 90s Brooklyn on the brink of gentrification, Self-Portrait with Boy is a provocative commentary about the emotional dues that must be paid on the road to success, a powerful exploration of the complex terrain of female friendship, and a brilliant debut from novelist Rachel Lyon.more
Self-Portrait With Boy captures the furious beauty of a vanished New York, an irresistible whirlwind of passion, violence, love, struggle, and above all else, art. Rachel Lyon paints an unforgettable portrait of a true art monster—a young woman hellbent on pursuing greatness, no matter the cost.
Rachel Lyon navigates a spectrum of loyalty and betrayal like a tightrope-walker, with all of the attendant suspense. A life-changing moral choice powers this atmospheric novel which shows what can happen when you do what scares you most.
Art is rooted in experience, and artists plumb their lives for their art. I think of F. Scott Fitzgerald and how he appropriated Zelda’s letters and diaries and story for his work, or Thomas Wolfe whose first novel Look Homeward, Angel caused a ruckus in his hometown that was so thinly veiled in the book. And I think of Elizabeth Strout’s recent novel My Name is Lucy Barton whose character is told she must be ruthless in her art. Artists are faced with telling the truth or protecting others.
On the first page of Self Portrait With Boy, we are told the main character, photographer Lu Rile, is described as “ruthless,” single minded. Lu, looking back on what happened twenty years previous, talks about the trauma behind the work that catapulted her into the limelight.
The novel begins with Lu admitting that at age twenty-six “there were so many people I had not yet become.” I loved that line because it reflects how I have seen my life since I was a teenager: life as a continual process of growth and change, so that we become different people as we age.
Lu was a squatter in an old factory inhabited by artists. She worked several low paying jobs and barely scraped by. She felt like an outsider, a girl who grew up poor and does not understand the world of the well-off and well-known artists around her.
Because she can not afford anything else, Lu became her own model and every day takes a self portrait. One day, she set the timer on her camera and jumped, naked, in front of the large windows in her unheated apartment. When she developed the film she discovered that in the background she has captured the fatal fall of a child.
The child’s parents became alienated in their grief, the successful artist father moving out while the mother, Kate, leaned on Lu for support. It had been years since Lu had been close to anyone. She is unable to tell Kate about the photograph.
Weird occurrences made Lu believe the boy was haunting her and she became desperate to get rid of the photograph. Lu’s father needed money for surgery, and she was pressured to join the others in the building in hiring a lawyer. Lu knew her photo was an amazing work and she struggled between reaching for success and the love she felt for Kate and her admiration for Steve.
Rachel Lyon’s writing is amazing. I loved how she used sights, sounds, and aromas to make Lu’s world real. This is her debut novel.