“An electrifying debut…
…Dess harnesses her characters’ feelings of sorrow and dread as their bond unravels, and she skillfully untangles the complexities of their all-consuming relationship while offering keen insights into the pressures they face as artists, both from others and from within…
It’s a tour de force.”
— Starred Publisher’s Weekly Review
“[Sophie Madeline Dess’ writing is] daring, luscious, and occasionally sacrilegious (…) She possesses the rare talent to shift between styles and voices, challenging readers intellectually while sometimes making them blush—often accomplishing both at once…
Dess masterfully depicts crowded rooms with their inevitable politics of artistic gatherings (woe betide us), the unsettling experiences of desire, and the destabilizing yet consuming nature of creation itself.”
“There is no club more exclusive than that of brilliant, close-knit siblings … Ms. Dess shrewdly explores the intersections between intimacy and possession”
— The Wall Street Journal
“In the face of tragedy, Dess’s narrator memorably dramatizes the anxiety-inducing exigencies of the creative arts, and the need of artists to remain focussed on their craft.”
— The New Yorker
“Dess is a wonderful critic […and…] the exciting young author who wrote this novel.
[Dess demonstrates that] when you figure someone out, you dismiss them. It’s the people who never quite come into focus, who are always two steps away, that are really interesting.”
—The Los Angeles Review of Books
“An extraordinary debut novel. Readers [cannot] question the energy pulsing through What You Make of Me nor the undeniable talent that created it. This is a fierce and unapologetic debut from a writer to watch.”
— Shelf Awareness
“…A classic Dess coinage, at once refreshingly direct and utterly bizarre .... This knack for defamiliarizing some of the most familiar themes of literature (love and grief, obsession and revelation) makes her fiction feel truly new, and nowhere is her originality more alive than in her debut novel, What You Make of Me, out today.”
“Totally enchanted me … The writing in What You Make of Me sold me on the story: it is unmooring, odd, and thoroughly engaging. It’s evocative and surprising … Comms managers at galleries, take note!”
A “Most Anticipated Book of 2025” … “The dynamics in this book are unfiltered in the best way possible. Dess tackles art, creative drive, and drama with a fresh voice.”
“[A] soulful debut…A haunting… exploration of the weight of guilt’s millstone and the power of forgiveness.”
– Booklist
“Dess’s work is … striking and original. The book’s greatest commitment is to laughter … Indeed [there is] a gust of laughter in these pages … that of the author letting the door slam as she exits the scene.”
— RealClear Books
“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
“Speckled and wondrous and strange and fun, What You Make of Me reveals to us the transformative thoughts, of art, of love. A marvel of a novel.”
— Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances
“Sophie Madeline Dess may be the freshest debut in this year’s literature. What You Make of Me is a brilliant novel as well as a provocation to all great readers.”
— Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends
(Written at the request of the publisher… “What Inspired Your Book?”)
What You Make of Me has, at its center, a brother and sister. It was in large part inspired by the familial relationships I observed as a child. As the youngest of four children, I have long been intrigued by the dynamics between siblings outside of my own family – the resentments that form, the co-dependencies and the urges to separate. Add death, art, obsession into the mix and these dynamics are thrown into their highest relief, their fiercest intensity, their deepest reality.
I am also fascinated by artists, and Ava’s psyche certainly takes its obsessive quality from my close study of Magritte, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Munch, Van Gogh, Eva Hesse, Hannah Wilke, Leonora Carrington, Kara Walker, and countless others, from ancient sculptors to medieval and renaissance painters, to those artists who ushered in modernism, and abstraction, and pop, and the ultra-contemporary… I love artists, I love the way they think, the way they pull an entire culture forward (before culture is aware it is behind!). I love the ruthlessness, the willingness to sacrifice everything for craft, and even – or most of all – I love artists’ deep, irremediable blind spots.
Which reminds me of another question that inspired this book: What do we fail to see of ourselves? Ava, my wilful narrator, has many blind spots. She is stubborn, perhaps controlling. Perhaps commanding. She is focused. But – I venture to say – it is because of these qualities that she is also vitally alive to the world – she is deeply committed to detailing this world, and is deliberate in analyzing its beauty, the way it moves, its ugliness, its sublimity.
Lastly, if this novel were to be opened and shaken, every book I’ve ever read and every work of art I’ve ever seen would fall out. Every novel (I must give a special shout out to Thomas Bernhard and James Baldwin here), every philosophical text, every biography and work of art history – every painting, sculpture, artist studio I’ve visited – all of it would come out tumbling. I am sure this is true for every novel. I feel indebted to all the art before me, and must say that here.
Thank you for your interest in What You Make of Me. Ava and Demetri live deep within me, somewhere in the soul, where they are fighting, as they are laughing. I hope they come to live within you too.
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