Sophie Madeline Dess is a writer and critic based in New York whose fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Drift, and more. She teaches at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design. What You Make of Me, her debut novel, is a haunting exploration of sibling devotion, artistic ambition, and the cost of success. As painter Ava prepares for her first solo show, she reflects on her tangled relationship with her brother, Demetri—a bond forged in loss but frayed by betrayal and regret as his life nears its end.
Sophie and I talked on the phone about the ways we treat books as personal artifacts, the difficulty of summarizing one’s own work, and how art, history, and beauty shape her creative vision.
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