Angela O’Keeffe, The Sitter

- Angela O'Keeffe has written an intriguing short novel that is both subtle and rich in meaning. Her prose is fluid and immensely readable, and I therefore read it twice. It was so good. 

- The fundamental premise is at first strange and slightly off-putting, but it doesn't take long to figure it out and hence get absorbed by the unfolding story. Hortense Cezanne, the wife of the famous French painter Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), who painted his wife's portrait  twenty-nine times, is talking to us about the author of a novel centred on Hortense herself. She refers to her as 'the writer'. She's in the same room as this writer, sitting next to her, and voicing her thoughts. 

- We're in Covid lockdown times in Sydney, Brisbane and Paris. Hortense is intrigued as she remembers the Spanish Flu in Europe a hundred or so years ago. 

- The writer has a daughter, Rebecca, and they are often in contact, personally and by email and phone. They have a lovely relationship. Although there are secrets. The writer adopts the pseudonym of 'Georgia O'Keeffe' to record the truths about her life and marriage, and Hortense's as well. Both women were effected by patriarchal values, amounting to abject sexism and abuse.  

- As Hortense admits at one point: Through it all my husband painted, and I kept house. Because of financial restraints we didn't always have paid help; I did the cooking, the cleaning and the washing of his workspace, his clothes, his paintbrushes; I wrote letters to his dealer to organise the sale of paintings; I was his assistant, his housekeeper, his secretary, his lover, his model and...his muse. We were not equals. He had the power to throw me out on my ear, the power to never give me another franc; at a certain point he changed his will and disinherited me, though by the end of his life he'd made sure that I would receive something. And yet. 

- Georgia had a baby as a young high school girl. She had sex with a boyfriend in the back seat of a car, and was sent by her Irish-Catholic parents to an institution run by nuns. The newborn was forcibly removed from her. Later in life she refused to have children with her husband. She chose divorce instead. ‘I want the baby I had.’ 

- Death is also a focus, including of children. And marriages. Our lives are filled with emblems of loss, and they continue to reverberate in us, and sometimes, after years, they can bring us undone. 

- O'Keeffe has written a beautiful and meaningful novel which I know I will read again.