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ellemaddy 's review for:

Luster by Raven Leilani
4.0

This felt like a fever dream, a stream of consciousness, raw, beautiful and ugly all at the same time.


"It's that there are grey, anonymous hours like this. Hours when I am desperate, when I am ravenous, when I know how a star becomes a void."

"I mean, with one half degree of difference, everything I want could be mine. I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. It is almost. The difference between being there when it happens and stepping out just in time to see it on the news. Still, I can't help feeling that in the closest arm of the multiverse, there is a version of me that is fatter and happier, smiling in my own studio, paint behind my ears. But whenever I have tried to paint in the last two years, I have felt paralysed."

"I couldn't tell if I liked being alone, or if I only endured it because I knew I had no choice."

"So I've tried to reproduce an inscrutable thing. I've made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I'm gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here."