You cannot be contained

You met the book How To Paint A Dead Man when you were at a tender age — young enough to say yes with the enthusiasm that overlooks caution, old enough to follow through on your commitments to yourself. In the two years before this meeting, you had been reading an average of a book a week and it was whimsy or chance that directed you to the next read. Books had been an important part of your childhood — you read a lot, and as the eldest daughter, you set the tone. Your two sisters had a different relationships with books — your middle sister slept in a circle of books and your youngest nibbled at the spines of every Happy Families book in the house. A set of red children’s encyclopedias sometimes came out at the dinner table.

Even after all the books you’d read, How To Paint A Dead Man was the source of many first time reading experiences for you. It was the first time you’d engaged with a literary prize as it was being judged, and it was the first of the 2009 longlist that you read. It was the first time you’d set a reading schedule, aiming to read the list before the winner was announced. It was the first time you’d come across second person prose, the enticing presence of ‘you’ throughout the sections titled ‘the mirror crisis’. And, on finishing, it was the first time you softened about your Mum’s infidelity many years before — her cheating became more than just a betrayal of the family, its significance extended beyond you. You finally saw your Mum with compassion, as a person; you were aware of her wounds.