The Life and Death of Sophie Stark by Anna North, book review

A delightfully dark portrait of a woman on the edge

Anna North's The Life and Death of Sophie Stark is a captivating portrait of the artist as a young woman. It's a story that examines the notion of artistic legacy and meditates on the ethics involved in film-making and storytelling, as we follow Sophie Stark from her beginnings as a fledgling documentary maker to iconoclastic director.

This plot line may be somewhat familiar, but just like Sophie herself, there's nothing ordinary about the way North recounts her titular protagonist's life. Sophie may be a master storyteller when it comes to her films, but that of her own life is told by six people close to her – a lover, her husband, her brother, a critic who follows her career, a producer she screws over, and the subject of her first work. The many-hued result is that of moments of clarity of perception, the kind that can only come from the observation of an outsider, casting illuminating spotlights on a woman who ultimately remains enigmatic and elusive to the end.

Everything about North's anti-heroine defies expectation, from her androgynous exterior, through the virtuosity of her eye, to her uncompromising belief in her art. From her very first work, Daniel – a documentary about a fellow student at the liberal-arts college in Iowa where she first picks up a movie camera whom Sophie is creepily obsessed with – through to her perplexing and posthumous last, Sophie demonstrates a unique gift for telling her subjects' stories, and for making films that are "more like life than life itself".

This talent, however, comes at a cost. She unapologetically appropriates the lives of her subjects in the name of her art, and has no qualms about exploiting secrets and manipulating confessions even if it's at the expense of her most meaningful relationships. "I knew I could either make it happy or I could make it good," she admits after turning her husband's painful memories of his mother's death not into the feel-good story she's led him to believe she was making, but something much darker.

It seems like both the most banal but also the most important of observations to make, but rarely do we see the woman genius depicted in all her ferocious glory like this. Men, yes – those whose talent has afforded them a lifetime of free passes when it comes to how they've treated the women in their lives – but their female counterparts are rare. Sophie is a woman who's actually become the fabled "art monster" described by the protagonist of Jenny Offill's brilliant novel Dept. of Speculation, and she's every bit as commanding, if not more so, than her male predecessors.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £8.99. Order for £8.54 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030