Books by Jim Read

When a painter struggles to sell his work, with his career waning, he chooses to paint nudes. Jim Read's THE MOLLYBUSH NUDE grasps at ideas we all ask ourselves: how did life get this way?Bill Burnon, a sixty-three-year-old landscape painter, and Marion Barkley, a fifty-nine-year-old diner owner are separated by six hundred kilometres of highway. Nevertheless, they are as close as the wind on a spider's web. Bill and Marion have loved each other passionately since they were seventeen and thirteen, but only in a limited measure: always a summer, a modest stretch of some months, shorter or longer depending on their unfailing ability to irritate the heck out of each other.When Bill's gallery manager suggests painting nudes to give his career a much-needed boost, he goes with it. He plans to paint a series of nudes. Deeply, Bill wants to paint Marion, but when he approaches her about the notion, she rebuffs him -- her rejection forces him to find another model.Turmoil and jealousy haunt their love when Bill selects Libby for his paintings. She's younger. She's mysterious. She's troubled. A friendship develops between Bill and Libby as Bill wrestles with his new artistic endeavour. What happens next, nobody in Mollybush could've expected.

Moving, sometimes funny and often dramatic, the pieces are written by some of the key activists in the mental health survivors' movement, as well as by people best known as writers and poets and others who, for a period of time, have been caught up with mental distress and have something original to say.