LG018Ad Lib by Thomasin Sleigh
The
camerawoman zooms in on the photo, the lens of
the camera lingering on the image. After a moment,
the camerawoman reaches out
and touches it and Kyla copies her, tracing the
outline of her mother’s face
and the straight line of her raised arm.
‘She will be in our thoughts always,’ whispers the camerawoman.
‘She will be in our thoughts always,’ whispers the camerawoman.
When celebrity
singer Carmen Crane passes
away, her only daughter inherits a reality TV show.
As Kyla Crane adjusts to
this new scrutiny, strange things start to happen:
the house is rearranged overnight,
unknown characters appear, the show’s narrative
loses its way, and the camera
crew begin to echo events. When fragments of her
mother’s past surface, Kyla is
compelled to scroll through the footage and come to
her own conclusions about life in the public eye and
her ambiguous inheritance.
Ad
Lib is Thomasin
Sleigh’s debut novel. The novel
expands on her previous writing about art through
its focus on images and
visual culture. She regularly contributes to Lumiรจre Reader, and has written about art for
many publications and galleries in Australasia.
