a fable
The Gilder
A boy looks into a water trough and sees his own face.
“There you are,” he says.
It will take him forty-seven years to say it again.
Paperback, 148 pages, Golden Queen Press. Ebook and audiobook to come.
“I am spellbound. The story is a work of art, deeply moving, deeply cleansing, stripped to the center, a journey to naked truth and the deepest simplicity with all the dross of complexity sandpapered away.”
“I enjoyed it enormously, and found myself thinking about it well after I finished.”
Grant Wattie spent twenty years as a portrait photographer in New Zealand and Malaysia. He and his wife Christine have spent the years since as counsellors and relationship therapists. More about Grant
The book
Wil is eleven when a travelling painter teaches him that a smile can be sold.
He grows up to become a gilder, covering people in gold so the world will see them as they would rather be seen. The work makes him wealthy. While Wil perfects the faces of others, he slowly loses sight of his own.
His sister writes. His wife waits. His daughter learns exactly where she sits in her father’s ledger.
At the rail of a ship, a child asks him a question he cannot answer:
Who keeps yours?
A story of identity, belonging, and the selves we learn to perform, The Gilder is a fable about the face we are given, the one we learn to sell, and finding our way back to the first one.
Where to find it
The Gilder. A fable. Grant Wattie. 148 pages. Golden Queen Press, Havelock North, New Zealand. ISBN 978-1-0673213-0-7.
For reading groups
The Gilder is the story of Wil, a grower’s son turned away from a children’s game at six years old for being too big. He becomes the most celebrated portrait painter in an Empire that has taken down all its mirrors, selling a gift nobody should ever have sold, until a letter from home arrives one week too late. It is a fable about who you were before the world told you who to be.
Who are you when nobody is watching and nothing is being asked of you?
The printed book carries the ten arguments. The questions live here, free to read and free to print, so a reading group can bring them to the table.
Write to me
If the book meant something to you, I would be glad to hear it. You can write to me here.
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