(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
It’s all too easy to have someone create your life story for you.
None of us set out to do that, of course; we dream and plan and hope based on the very firm idea that we are the masters of our destiny but somehow we can find ourselves less in control than we would like, buffeted by life events well and truly out of our control.
In the case of this reviewer that was the sometimes less-than-good people of the church where my dad was the minister who felt they had the right to determine what I did and when – apparently they could do as they please and their family too but the pastor’s kids were supposed to be squeaky clean and blemish free; no pressure, then – and the school bullies who forced me to fold myself into the smallest shape possible to avoid being an active target for them (it didn’t work; like trying to appease a dictator, all it did was make them attack me all the more).
In the case of early thirties Dolphin, the much put-upon protagonist if Picture Imperfect by Jacqueline Wilson, her life has been sent off course quite a few years earlier by their bipolar, narcissistic mother Marigold who loved (and loves) her and her sister Star, no doubt, but not enough to counter some very unhealthy tendencies which saw the two girls not only effectively raise themselves but end up responsible for their mother too.
Was she mentally ill, this missing mother? If some mental disorders could be hereditary then did all the Westward womenfolk slot inside each other like identical Russian dolls: my grandmother, my mother … me?
Dolphin’s haphazard approach to parenting was partly personality but partly her unwillingness to stay on her medication, her adherence to her medicinal regime often governed by which unhealthy man she was in a relationship with and how much they cared about her ahead of themselves (spoiler alert – they usually didn’t).
The net result is that an adult Dolphin, working as a tattoo artist and living in a small top floor studio apartment – it may sound unprepossessing but she has decorated it in magical colours and with design flourishes that echo the relatively safe places of her erratic childhood – spends a considerable amount of her time rescuing her mother from a range of problematic situations including the one that pretty much opens the novel when she has to race across town to collect her mother from the airport.
The problem here is that her mother is off her medication again thanks to an uncaring loser boyfriend who only focuses on his next high, and is convinced she has a ticket to fly to Edinburgh to visit her other daughter Star, a highly successful doctor whose first born son Marigold has never seen.
Unfortunately Marigold doesn’t have a ticket to fly to Scotland, and Star is none too keen to have her there, using the distance and non-disclosure of where she lives exactly, and so Marigold ends up making a noisy, disruptive fuss in the early hours of the morning which it falls to a beleaguered Dolphin aka Dol to sort out.
Star is find of pointing out to Dol that she has some agency and can simply refuse to look after her mother, and that she can leave her to her own devices, but the truth is that Dol can bear to do that, feeling a need to protect her mother, whom she loves despite everything, from herself.
Dol’s life then is partly circumscribed by her unwillingness to exercise the limited amount of agency she does have, but mostly by a sense that she can look after her mother in a way that never really happened in reverse (and if it did, only in small, sporadic ways that never lasted long).
But as Picture Imperfect progresses in a beautifully balanced mix of emotionally intense and brightly optimistic possibility – more of the former than the latter at first but the balance tips in favour of the latter as Dol’s world starts to open up – she also finds herself hemmed by two man, landscaper Lee who seems lovely at first but may not be all that he first appears, and former TV star Joel who is charmingly charismatic but too full of his own greatness to really offer anything lastingly meaningful.
Both men, especially Lee who has a four-year-old who bonds closely with Dol, offer the chance of a new way forward but as events move on, it becomes clear that neither can play an active role in Dol’s life without her once again sacrificing a significant amount of agency in her own life.
I’d have stayed for the after-party, but I saw Joel and Maya were in the corner of the drawing room having a row so I steered clear. I had one small glass of Prosecco with Linda and then went home to lee, though I would rather have gone straight to my own room to start sketching potential designs while I was all fired up.
And this is where Picture Imperfect truly comes alive.
It is a love letter essentially to the power of striking out on your own; not socially because we all need to feel that we are a part of a village and sure enough Dol begins to find a new group of friends and a renewed relationship with Star coalesce into a nurturing “found family”, but in terms of charting her own way forward to that is hostage to another’s person control or whims or issues.
Picture Imperfect is brutally honest about tough life can be when your loved one has a mental illness and how it define who you are and what you become in life, but as well as being respectful of Marigold and her condition, it offers up a real seizeable sense that you can take back control of your life and take it somewhere truly wonderful, even after years of other people calling the shots.
What happens to Dol as she slowly comes alive is a real joy to read because her progress is hard won and heavily cognisant of the fact that you don’t simply decide to exercise agency and march off into a promisingly rich and wonderful sunset.
This sort of change takes time and some pain and backward steps but Picture Imperfect makes it inspiringly and comfortingly clear that it can happen, and when it does your world will open up and all those things you thought you couldn’t do, are suddenly your reality and you are all the richer for it.