Painted Faces by LH Cosway: Book Club Diary

Book discussed: Painted Faces by LH Cosway

Book club Zoom meeting: 27 Jan 2024

The first book club gathering of 2025 considered Painted Faces, self-published in 2013 by LH Cosway. Neither book nor author were familiar to the club participants but the story offered the intriguing premise of a love affair between a drag queen and a straight woman in early 2010s Dublin. Apparently LH Cosway has an online following for her books which are largely heterosexual romances with a supposedly edgy twist. But all of that tantalising background turned out to be far more interesting than the reality of Painted Faces.

In the end only two of us actually managed to plough all the way through the 300 (very) odd pages of Ms. Cosway’s turgid novel. And the verdict was damning. Where to begin? First there is the fundamental lack of believability in the main plot-line: handsome straight kinky guy with an exotic twist – he makes his living as a drag queen!! – instantly falls for the quirky dumpy fat girl rather than her ostensibly more glamorous competitors. Then there is the weak characterisation. There is an attempt to create a back-story for the main male character but he is very superficially drawn and his motivations are never clear or credible. The narrator herself, is fundamentally dislikable and irritating: this could be an interesting device. It could be; but it isn’t. The central romance, which forms almost all of the significant plot, is the most basic of clichés barely tarted up by making one of the protagonists a drag queen. The only thing harder than believing the story arc of the central couple is caring about it.

Along with the dubious plot and sketchy characters, the writing is often clumsy and over-wrought, distracting from, rather than helping the story. Cosway has an impressive literary academic background so this is clearly down to the absence of editing and a desire to promote word count over any aspect of writing style. The annoyance factor is ramped up by the many fundamental departures from reality in the basic scenario of the story. That a female impersonator, working a few nights a week on-stage in Dublin, could earn enough solely from this to support a luxury lifestyle and hire a full-time assistant (to fly around in business class) is not just unrealistic, it’s plainly preposterous. This is the largest, but by no means the most outlandish, implausibility about the lives of these inhabitants of a mythical central Dublin, which, incidentally enjoys free and easy parking! Adding in frequent infantile discourses by the narrator on a variety of irrelevant topics – ‘90s music, food, uninformed political commentary etc. – seems almost deliberately provocative to the beleaguered reader. What’s not to hate?

Well, sadly, these are not even the worst aspects of the book. Two things make this not just a poor novel, but an unworthy one and somehow thus even less interesting. First is the clearly abusive nature of the relationship of the central romance. The narrator accepts what are, by any reasonable measure, uninvited physical assaults by the object of her affections and appears to derive masochistic pleasure from them. I suspect this may be part of Cosway’s metier and what her fans expect – a kind of 12 and a half shades of grey vibe. But it is noteworthy and disturbing that the notion of consent is never mentioned by the narrator nor raised by her with her lover. Her passive voiceless surrender of basic autonomy makes her not sympathetic but somehow even less likeable.

The other stain on this book is its treatment of queer issues and characters. There is no explicit negativity but a story that uses the explicitly queer trope of drag as a central element has a responsibility to deal more truthfully with the milieu that it chooses. Instead we have crass and clumsy cultural appropriation. A fundamentally unreal version of our world is described where queer characters are one dimensional and incidental, not even substantially enough drawn to be stereotypical. It is a hen party crashing a gay bar: the gays are merely props and entertainment even in their own hard-won self-created spaces.

So, no love at all for this book from our club. Sometimes it is necessary to step outside the lines to see where the boundaries are. I guess. And we have several undeniably exciting reads in store for the coming months.