Your Love is Not Good

by Johanna Hedva

An artist of color becomes
obsessed with a white model in a novel with the glamor of Clarice Lispector and
the viscerality of Han Kang.

















At
an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter
spots a woman who instantly controls the gorgeous and distant and utterly
white, the center of everyone’s attention. Haunted into adulthood by her Korean
father’s abandonment of his family, as well as the specter of her beguiling,
abusive white mother, the painter finds herself caught in a perfect trap. She wants
Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or
some confusion of all the above. Since she’s an artist, she will use art to get
closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. As
for Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a new
sheet of paper.

When
the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist’s first sold-out
show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their
work, and her seduction. But, just when the painter is on the verge of her long
sought-after breakthrough,
a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the
art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their
imperialist and racist practices.

Torn
between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess
Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and
disorienting, unwilling to cut loose
any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it any
wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit
exciting to think she could too?

Your
Love Is Not Good
stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between
desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.

Genres: Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Contemporary, Romance, Literary Fiction, Lesbian

339 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 23, 2023

About the author

Johanna Hedva (yo-haw-nuh head-vuh) is a Korean-American writer, artist, musician, and astrologer, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva’s practice cooks magic, necromancy, and divination together with mystical states of fury and ecstasy. There is always the body — its radical permeability, dependency, and consociation — but the task is how to eclipse it, how to nebulize it, and how to cope when this inevitably fails. Ultimately, Hedva’s work, no matter the genre, is different kinds of writing, whether it’s words on a page, screaming in a room, or dragging a hand through water.

Hedva is the author of the novel On Hell (2018), which was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018. Their next book, Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, essays, and performances that documents a decade of work from 2010-2020, will be published by Sming Sming and Wolfman in September 2020. Their first solo exhibition, God Is an Asphyxiating Black Sauce, is open 20 June - 3 August 2020 at Klosterruine Berlin. Their work has been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Performance Space New York, the LA Architecture and Design Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon. Hedva has written about the political and mystical capacities of Nine Inch Nails, Sunn O))), and Lightning Bolt; the legacy of Susan Sontag; Ancient Greek tragedies; and the revolutionary potential of illness. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016 in Mask, has been translated into six languages, and their practice and activism toward accessibility, as outlined in their Disability Access Rider, has been influential across a wide range of fields.

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Johanna Hedva describes their novel as a kind of experiment revolving around a character who, at least in theory, reflects key aspects of Hedva’s own identity: “Korean father, white mother, born and raised in Los Angeles, very white-passing, poor as dirt, queer as fuck, into kink, went to art school, wanted to be somebody.” But Hedva sets their character on a different path, making this a variation on a ‘What If?’ story, Hedva who’s also an artist, activist, essayist and musician is someone who’s deliberately shunned the mainstream, tying their work to their personal values and politics. Hedva’s creation is the opposite, someone who’s seeking to forge an identity founded on potential wealth and fame. Hedva’s narrator realises she’s queer early on but soon establishes a pattern of self-immolation which manifests through a series of doomed obsessions primarily centred on straight, white girls. A pattern which may or may not stem from her traumatic relationship with her white, artist, mother Marina. Impressed by the women she encounters who seem able to command attention simply by entering a room, the narrator learns to dissemble, projecting an aura of confidence she doesn’t actually possess. She quickly gains a foothold in the mainstream artworld, despite choosing the genre of figurative painting - which tends to go in and out of fashion at an alarming pace.

Hedva’s painter/narrator is fascinated by "whiteness", its links to power and desirability, the very connections that have left her feeling marginalised, initially relegated to group shows featuring artists of colour like Iris Wells. Wells has chosen to operate outside of the system, refusing to sign up with a gallerist, or produce art that can be mounted on a wall and sold off to rich collectors or as decoration for upscale, hotel lobbies. The upside of making figurative paintings is that the narrator’s work appeals to the very consumers, Wells shuns. The narrator’s latest collection opens to acclaim in America and is scheduled for a solo exhibition in a coveted, Berlin gallery space. The paintings are inspired by the narrator’s latest passion, the enigmatic Hanne whose "whiteness" is almost dazzling. It looks as if the painter is finally going to get the money and attention she craves. But the relationship with Hanne is increasingly fraught, and then just days before the German show’s due to open, Wells issues a manifesto calling on artists of colour to boycott and withdraw from the galleries and patrons who have made their money exploiting people of colour.

Hedva’s satirical depiction of the commercial artworld, builds on work like Bourdieu’s, in its examination of connections between forms of cultural capital and relentless commodification, not solely of art but also of the artist. Hedva’s narrative underlines the ways in which marginalised identities have themselves become sought-after property, making certain artists and artworks that much more marketable. The narrator’s experiences also build on the oddly-enduring myth of self-destructive, hypersensitivity that clings to mainstream perceptions of the artistic persona – although I wasn’t always clear if Hedva’s narrative was totally undermining this idea or partly buying into it. Overall, it’s an intelligent, inventive read but sometimes it felt like a contradictory one, I was particularly uncertain about the ways in which the maternal and creativity were being aligned with the artistic, creative process and with the narrator’s specific brand of generational trauma. As the plot progresses, Hedva’s narrator starts to unravel, as do the people close to her, and the art terms that head each section which at first seemed so clear, so well defined, also cease to hold their meanings. Hedva’s discussion of race and "whiteness" often comes across as timely and convincing but the decision to juxtapose that with "Blackness" as experienced by Wells, and other characters, seemed quite awkwardly contrived, and at times a little too reliant on uncomfortable stereotypes. I assume this awkwardness was intentional, part of the ongoing satire, but for me it didn’t quite work as a strategy.

Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher And Other Stories for an ARC

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize US & Canada

I stumbled away. I imagined what we must look like, two women locked together, one shrieking, beseeching, one flailing, refusing, mother and daughter, enemies, strangers, artist and muse. I started to run up the stairs, not looking back. My face burned from the mark she'd made on it.

The voice yelled after me, "I can see your love is not good! Your love is not good!"

Johanna Hedva’s Your Love is Not Good is published by the independent press And Other Stories "an independent, not-for-profit publisher of innovative contemporary writing from around the world."

The author, also an artist, and musician, was previously best known to me for their White Review hagiography of Nine Inch Nails. The 30-something first person narrator of the novel ostensibly shares many characteristics with the author but Hedva has described the work as “anti-auto-fiction”:

It was a thought experiment where I began with the question, what if I start with a character who on paper, at the DMV, would have all of my same identity demographics: Korean father, white mother, born and raised in Los Angeles, very white-passing, poor as dirt, queer as fuck, into kink, went to art school, wanted to be somebody. But then, at every juncture where she has to make a choice, I wanted her to make the one that I disagreed with, ethically and politically, the one I did not do. I’ve been saying it’s an attempt at “anti-auto-fiction.”
...
Novels are very good at showing this distance between the interiority of a character and how that is read externally in the world, and that distance is political for some people. How I feel I am on the inside is not necessarily how I'm read on the outside with my body, my skin color, my race, and my gender. I’m someone who doesn't look like what I am. I look like a white, cis, abled woman, and what I am is a Korean-American, disabled, genderqueer person. I wanted that political distance to get juicy and messy and wet in my book.

The narrator of the novel, ladened with student debt and in a rather troubled relationship with whiteness, is just making her commercial breakthrough when a fellow artist calls for a boycott of the mainstream, rich, white dominated art scene, particularly by minority artists, under the rallying cry of the Emergency We (Hedva acknowledges the inspiration of The Tear Gas Biennial movement).

The making of meaning, which is to say, the unmaking of meaning, becomes ever more perfunctory. The aristocratic land- and life-owning white corporations-as-men consume our work, our art, our bodies, our intellectual property, our means of production, our land, our planet, our hope, and our death, and we do not rebel against this gross exploitation but rather serve him up our labor on a white tablecloth. We are happy to be his court fools. We post and like the dates and times for the rally against gentrification, then we congratu-late ourselves when curators and gallerists gather us to their bosoms and offer us shows in neighborhoods where the blood runs in the street. We make work about the blood that runs in the street. We say it is meant to "provoke discussion." We say it is meant to "challenge viewers to think." We say we are critiquing the norms of domination, but we gather cultural capital to our bosoms and keep it close. We call it our identity, our birthright. We claim it is our wealth, wealth we are owed and which we deserve. By doing this, we perpetuate the only law those in power understand: the law of ownership, the law of who owns who, which is to say, what owns what.

Another character remarks that he is fed-up that he's gone from being ignored due to his race to being celebrated only because of his race:

Somehow, they missed the fact that, back when they paid for galleries and museums full of white men, there was still just as much race in the room as there is when I’m included. A room full of white artists is an exhibition about whiteness, even if none of the whites can see it.

The novel's narrative style has some clever, unsettling tics which emphasise the fragmentation of the narrator's identity: the heading of each chapter begins with a painting technique and its definition, but as the novel progresses the defintions and techniques become misaligned; and at various points in the narration, brief details of an artist who died from suicide appear as a non-sequitur.

A review in Frieze which better captures the novel: https://www.frieze.com/article/johann...

The publisher

And Other Stories were the pioneers of the subscription model in the UK, and have had a US presence for more than 10 years, from which this book was commissioned:

And Other Stories publishes mainly contemporary writing, including many translations. We select carefully and hope you will agree that the books are good, make you think and able to last the test of time. We aim to push people’s reading limits and help them discover authors of adventurous and inspiring writing. And we want to open up publishing so that from the outside it doesn’t look like some posh freemasonry. For example, as we said in this piece in The Guardian, we think more of the English publishing industry should move out of London, Oxford and their environs. In 2017 we moved our main office out of the South-East to Sheffield and found such a warm welcome.

And Other Stories is readers, editors, writers, translators and subscribers. While our books are distributed widely through bookshops, it’s our subscribers’ support that makes the books happen. We now have about 1,000 active subscribers in over 40 countries, receiving up to 6 books a year.

[Aron · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another boring book about insipid, privileged people written by a pretty decent US writer. It seems young US writers are so caught up in their blinkered ideology while being anesthetized by their wealth and privilege, that they have lost sight of reality.

If you can afford to get yourself into a quarter million dollars of debt, and live between Berlin and Los Angeles (as does the main character, and it seems the author themself) you are privileged, no matter how you “identify”. Sure you aren’t the 1% characters, each of whom you disdainfully call “white” girls (are you sure you”re not misgendering them, missy), but you’re better off than 99% of the rest of humanity. Hence your so-called “artistic suffering” comes off petty and whiney, best not put on paper, because it makes you sound pretentious.

I want the couple hours I invested in this book back, so recommending you don’t waste your time. If you want to read a really great, semi-autobiographical first novel about becoming a young person becoming a transgressive artist, read Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

[Hannah · Rating 1 out of 5]

in a slump recently where i keep reading books I've heard are meant to be really amazing and revelatory about love and the dynamics therein. This one was pitched as similar to Clarice Lispector which is a load of bs designed to trick people with otherwise good taste into buying books by luring them i with the false promise of something beyond mediocrity. After reading three quarters of this book I had a meltdown and questioning whether I was just too depressed to enjoy books.
Spoiler alert: I tried something else and realized, no, this one was just Bad.

I liked this book at first because the main character and i had so much in common (bisexual, mixed race girl goes to art school and falls in love with the wrong people) but it fell short quite quickly.
Something that bothers me a lot about fiction about the art world is when the author makes up works of art and artists to talk about and all their work sucks (i think the author had intended them to be good, but they were boring and cliché at best). Furthermore, each chapter begins with a term from art history and its definition which set the precedent for the clunky, heavy-handed metaphors between making art and falling in love that populated this book. These little introductions managed to infuriate me even after I started skipping them.

I'm excited to read things I like more than this in the new year, which hopefully, won't be too difficult.

[Lucy · Rating 2 out of 5]

The unnamed main character gradually shifts from a pathetic lump with major self worth issues into what she thinks might be confidence but is actually self-centred petty-tyrant behaviour, going from obsessing over how perfect her lovers are to deliberately ignoring the boundaries of her partners, putting them in serious physical danger, and sexually assaulting one of them. She never sees another person as a human being with their own struggles and history -- not her boss, her friends, her lovers, her family, her fellow artists, nor beggars on the street -- they are totally unimportant to her, apart from when she can see reflections of herself in them, and only then.

Occasionally, the book had a good moment but was largely not memorable. The world outside the character's bubble is hazy and poorly defined. Nobody has much of a life outside of her. Even her own personality is shallow and contradictory (and not in a deliberate move by the author). To top it off, there were a couple of borderline transphobic remarks that were very infrequent but pretty annoying.

Yet another vapid novel about an aimless young woman who spends too much of someone else's money and ruminates incessantly on how hard it is to be an aimless young woman spending someone else's money. OK, girlfriend, have fun with that.

[Zoee.Net84]

maybe this was a 3.5 or a 2 or the holy 4? idk reading it made me feel bad. but i don’t think the writing was poor, i think the contents was harsh. contemporary fiction is at such a unique place right now and i think it’s hard for authors to find balance in complete destitution. just reminded me to stick to genre fiction and non fiction

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

What!! This was a queer fever dream that I couldn’t put down. So compulsive and strange in the best way. The commentary on whiteness and art was great, it reminded me of what “Yellowface” promised but didn’t deliver. As someone who is queer, half Asian and half white, from southern CA, spent a heartbroken summer in Berlin, and went to school in Santa Cruz… I felt so aligned with the (unnamed) main character and shared so many sentiments with them, despite their many flaws. I loved the commentary and exploration of race, including whiteness and the mixed race experience, guilt and shame, sexuality, power, and motherhood. I loved the descent into madness and how the writing progressively changed. I can’t wait to read more from Hedva.

Books this reminded me of: Big Swiss, Yellowface, Candide, The Bell Jar

Shoutout to my public library for having this book!

[Iris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Epically beautiful, smart, and cool. I loved being in the head of a successful yet still struggling artist, surrounded by an industry of people that want something from her, and artist peers that try to control her actions. There's a entrancing rebellious spirit to this book.

The commentary is powerful too. Money and power inducing anxiety--- labor and identity in the beautiful/messy creation of art. And what to do with your own identity when others want control over it.

Then there's the queer erotic pulse of world-consuming-muses, but also hits this obsessive, neurotic, (and queer) pull to that which you can't have (straight girls).

In the publicity the book was compared to Han Kang and Clarice Lispector, so I expected a lot from it, but I found that the prose was entirely intoxicating. The story flowed, as the fragments of her life as an artist pieced themselves together. Her own tale wisely incased in writing about the lives of the people around her and the family that abandoned each other.

[geo · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.8 i have read too many lit fics that are intentionally disjointed, erratic, hazy, etc. to demonstrate the narrator’s mounting instability/unreliability and am a bit tired of how predictable this specific genre of unpredictability is. obviously that is a commentary on my own reading habits more than the book itself, and there was definitely great moments within the story, but overall it was not a standout for me

[Raquel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A raw, queer, sometimes darkly funny, sometimes strikingly painful story about a biracial Korean American artist who becomes infatuated with a pretty white girl. She takes this girl as her muse and creates the best and most commercially successful art of her life. She's flying high.

So of course everything falls apart for her from there. And it makes for good novels to watch a protagonist fall apart; how will they put themselves back together again?

Her muse represents whiteness and all that it unlocks and presents and gives to one, its privileges and assumptions. Of course she wants it. She can't divest from it when a Black performance artist calls for a gallery boycott to highlight inequity; therein lies the catalyst for her slow destructive descent. (This book also describes the art world so well. Performance art is so fucking absurd.)

Interspersed throughout are snippets about the ways in which other artists killed themselves; this made me think the book might end in a different way. It didn't. I actually didn't much care for the ending; it felt odd and the character of Joan was discordant with her past iteration. The jacket copy also reveals a spoiler that I think would have been better to not know going in. So for this, I knocked it down to 3 stars. But I do love a book with Sapphics acting a mess.

I really enjoyed the voice and will seek out more of Hedva's writing. And there's something comforting in knowing that we queers have a penchant for becoming enamored with straight white girls who turn on us and discard us when we are suddenly "difficult" huh. Maybe it's not us; it's them.

[H]

i wanted something bitter and sexually explicit and this fit the bill. novels about visual artists are interesting to me—can’t escape the physicality of the work they do, it’s a built-in tactility. i was enjoying this a lot up until our narrator went to berlin. the deterioration was less interesting to me. but i liked the tangling of art terms, and i liked the scene in the basement with the man who was not named jonah. comma splices abound!

read in a single day, to prove to myself that i could.

[Shaelin Bishop · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

[sue ying · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cousins book club: December edition

Where to begin! This was our December book club pick.

I would say that the 2 stars is not an indication of the writing, but rather that I found the character confusing, grating, unrelatable.

I think because she was so mentally unwell, there were some parts of the book that had me questioning whether what she was writing was reality or a delusion on her part - Ie the basement scene. I genuinely thought she was going into a depression corner of her mind but it was in fact an actual cellar lololol

I most of all didn’t enjoy this book so much because I could not understand her obsession with hanne. What really was so special about her? What was she trying to chase? To become? How were her mommy issues playing apart in it? It was all too jarring and intellectual for me to understand!!

Merit of this book are plenty though -
1. The sporadic inclusion of how artists committed suicide - nice touch, realise through our discussions that is was added every time she went through something difficult

2. The art definitions - I personally didn’t find them a running theme in the book but my cousins did!

3. The intertwining with the authors real life - I learned this book theme is called autofiction?? Autobiography x fiction where you don’t know what’s what?

All in all, wouldn’t reread. Too unrelatable to me. However, a wonderful book to open up to discussions about personal life and childhood.

[james !! · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is 100% up there as one of my favourite books i’ve read! a large part of that is down to the writing style which completely engrossed me. it’s wild, vivid imagery not only felt entrancing at times but also fit perfectly within the overall context of the story (that being centred around an artist) that made it seamlessly transition from the very real-life imagery (the actual artwork being created) to the more psychological & impactful imagery used to demonstrate the books themes! the themes the book does explore are handled incredibly well imo and all in a way that gives the book an incredible flow! race, identity and guilt are arguably the main 3 that can be seen constantly throughout, and each topic is dissected and dispersed at points which make them feel most impactful! can’t praise it enough, this was so good!

[Nancy Dawkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely could not put this down. Gripping and addictive.

I wanted to give it 5 stars but there were a few smalls parts that I think weren’t edited perfectly and I had to reread to understand, which pulled me out of the flow that was glorious through most of it.

[Gaby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I would give this 4.5 ⭐️ this might be one of the strangest books I’ve ever read. The contents are pretty harsh most of the time and the main character and pretty much anyone else in this book was easy to dislike. So you might be like okay but why this high rating?

The writing style is just so interesting. At first it read more as someone’s intense memoir and gradually that shifted a little. The main character’s obsessions are unhealthy. The book is dark & weird and a lot of the time I was questioning what was actually happening, because you’re sort of in the main characters head while she goes through some sort of psychosis (I think??). So I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading this if you don’t like dark stories, but for me in the end it was worth it because all topics intertwine beautifully.

And also! The chapter name’s and descriptions we’re cool imo :)

I’ll leave you with the first chapter because I think this was a good opening:

“Love stories lose their middles after a while, the stuff in between the edges and turns. The beginning remains, as does the end, like the damage that lingers, those remain vivid. There are some pivot points that stick, small breakages, honesties that sting, blurted cruelties that can retain their clarity, distorted in the moment but looking, upon later reflection, like the dramatic keystone holding the whole thing up, warnings that should have been heeded, red flags, symptoms, and then there are the contingencies that skid. Beyond those, the days that accumulate, the sex that happens and happens or doesn't happen, the comforts and modest raptures, the small decisions collaboratively made about what to eat, what to watch, where to go-that is a vast, imprecise flatness.”

[cassia · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is not gonna be for everyone but it was certainly for me, like in an eerily and specifically targeted way. it gave me everything i wanted in my next read: morally gray and tortured characters, beautiful prose and threads that emerge over the course of the novel (the dogs??? i need to go back and think about that one), the ability to pull from me scoffs and gasps and goosebumps. i hated a lot of what happened in this book but it made for a more complex reading experience. at times the commentary felt a bit on the nose, or stereotypical, in a way that made me feel unclear whether it was intentional. i do think it was a successful emotional portrait of a person grappling with the dark things that bring them to rock bottom.

i felt like the narrator was my mirror, who is a queer mixed korean/white figurative painter. the explorations of their whiteness were fascinating, even though it was cringey to read, because so many mixed authors/people don’t interrogate their whiteness with the same rigor as their poc sides (again — why this felt so personally relevant to me). as an artist young in their career with questions around what success means as an artist, it was very refreshing to be reminded that entrance into the high art world is not necessarily something i want.

[Laurie Keech · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this a lot, I’ve never read a book set in the ‘art world’ and appreciated the scenes of social life, the creative process and the art market just as much as Hedva’s exploration and critique of the industry itself.
Ive read some pretty harsh reviews on here, and I do think this book isn’t particularly original, but I get the feeling this was written more as a personal meditation, expunging something or reflecting on it, rather than being written as “literature” primarily to be consumed by others. From time to time I like reading like this, peeping into someone’s world in a text which is primarily for and about themselves. I will miss this protagonist! I also think that while the quality of writing was neither good nor bad in general, Hedva had a really nice and fresh use of simile. Would reccomend to others!

[Sam Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most intriguing, inventive, and transgressive books I’ve read in recent memory. The story and Hedva’s incredibly unique form had me on the edge of my seat with each chapter and yet nowhere did this novel ever feel trite or predictable. Hedva had me enthralled and enchanted until the very last sentence, and every sentence prior to that as well (there is legit no lulls in this book).

More weird but high-quality writing about art and ethics and race and capitalism and heritage and trauma please. More of this please.

Subversive and surreal. I will be reading this again.

[ronan · Rating 3 out of 5]

interesting! there’s a lot packed into this book- i really enjoyed the visceral imagery and symbolism but i’ll admit i’m not a fan of this style of writing.
the art gays with mummy issues would eat this one up tho

[Amie Kirby (she, her) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weird and wonderful, crude in a way I feel Ottessa Moshfegh tries to be lol. Loved the final act - dizzying. Feel like I have a good appreciation having listened to Hedva talk about the book at an author's talk before I read it. People in the comments talking about Hedva being privileged / insipid are hilariously misguided

[Maya · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got halfway, hoping that I would connect with something, that some substance would emerge, but that didn’t happen. I had high hopes for this — based on the premise, Bryan Washington’s recommendation on the front cover, and the first line — but I was disappointed. This book frustrated me: I have been swindled one too many times by these ‘woman on the verge’ novels that are constantly circulating. I can’t parse out exactly in which ways Hedva’s attempt feels derivative of all the others, but to me, it does. There is something hollow at the core of these stories, something metallic and removed. The writer feels distant, like they have nothing on the line (although I can’t imagine this is in fact the case for any writer). We keep lapping up these mediocre novels pretending to be radical, suffering through descriptions of our anonymous female protagonists sticking their hands in hot streams of piss or prancing around covered in flour. Show me the woman who behaves like this. It’s not to say I’m opposed to the common impulse behind these books, which I believe is a feminist one: to lift the veil from literary depictions of female desire, to flip them over and bring the sometimes grotesque underbelly of the erotic under a harsh glare. And it’s not to say that there is nothing bold in this, if you’re the first or one of the first to write it. This particular lens, however, is distorted from overuse. Pop literary fiction is flooded with these overwrought women; I’ve personally waded through A Certain Hunger by Chelsea Summers, Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, All Fours by Miranda July, Bunny by Mona Awad, Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval, and of course the Otessa Moshfegh works that kicked this all off (although these I find to be worthier). We’ve had cannibals and rabbit killers, a lot of rotten fruit, the list goes on and only gets weirder. When will it be enough? These novels forget emotion, they don’t even gesture at sincerity, and only attempt to extend the grotesqueness of the last. Let’s at least stop pretending there’s anything of literary acclaim in this.

[Glen Helfand · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ego is a mother. And both are reasons that make artists. Mother, ego. But what about love? Or the lack thereof. Your love (her love) is never enough. Mother is witchy and controlling, her studio full of magical and inappropriate smells. Or inappropriate, isolating actions. Mother made a complicated daughter, and they haven't spoken for decades. The art world can also be a bad mother, the opposite of nurturing. Daughter, our narrator, is a good painter, perhaps better than her mother, but full of intersectional uncertainty and self-destructive attachments. She's obsessed-*obsessed*-- with a woman who is first identified as a twin, but eventually gets a name. She is ultimately a mean muse, which makes the artist pass along the cruelty to a next generation. It's hard to know what the artist sees in this cipher of a muse, who is blank and disinterested. It's hard to even picture what she looks like. For those who know the specter of contemporary art, its contours are vivid here. But so is the unlikability of its denizens in downtown LA and Berlin. These are lands of mutable attachments, sticking and unhooking, but full of yearning. You want to be there, but constantly question what you're getting out of it.

[Allison Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

“It was not a garment he usually wore in public. I'd sometimes seen dried smears of white at the wrists of the sleeves, where Yves had wiped his nose or his tears. It made me feel close to him in a way that felt painful and protective, Yves in his knobby, smelly sweater that had collected his DNA, the hours he'd spent in it, the hours he'd already used up of his life, doing nothing in particular, washing dishes, sitting at home, falling asleep in the afternoon on the couch, being alone in the wintertime.”


I’m not quite sure what to think of this novel or how to describe it, but it certainly gripped me. The writing is both captivating and unsettling. At many points the reader must wade through intense descriptions of suffering and discomfort of varying degrees. The plot dips into surrealism at times, narrating the protagonist’s dreams and migraine-fueled stretches of delirium. I found the timeline a bit difficult to follow, especially in the first half, but I didn’t mind feeling a little lost in it. For better or worse, I was pulled into this dark, bizarre world of artists and muses and mothers. I won’t forget this one quickly.

[el · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delicious. !!!

[Hanne Puype · Rating 5 out of 5]

4,5

Your love is not good is a complicated book. Some people love it, others not so much. I am definitely in the former group. If you like Ottessa Moshfegh, then you’ll definitely like this book as well!

The main character is a Korean-American artist and grew up in a complicated family. Her mother was a painter herself but wasn’t there for her daughter. The main character struggles with being mixed and doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere. Additionally, she strives to be a good artist and wants to be recognised by the art world. Different muses inspire her and guide her work. Then she meets Hanne, a white woman, leading to her downfall.

I liked to be immersed in the art world. There is art trivia occasionally and in the beginning of every chapter there are definitions of art words, mostly about painting.

The book is dark and some scenes make you uncomfortable. It’s beautifully written and touches upon race, friendship, love, loneliness... I can’t help but wonder if some of the book is autofiction.

[r]

"I thought of how teeth get chipped doing what they were made to do, how eyes get tired from seeing, how knees and backs become pained from bending and walking and sitting and standing, how lungs constrict when they breathe too fast, how nipples crack from being sucked on, how hearts exhaust themselves from their simple, innocent task of beating. There is a fundamental paradox to life, I've always felt infested with it, the fact that life feelings most itself, most incorrigibly awake, when it's closest, right up and pushing against the skin of death, this is where I've lived, recidivous, falling back and again and back some more into it, perhaps it's only that I've tried to make a kind of meaning out of this relapse, this lacuna, and it's not about dying, this is the puzzle, but about how to live."

[Evelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

In an interview on YouTube the author said she wanted to make anti-autofiction, a tragedy in which the main character made all the decisions she would never make.

There is some weird stuff going on in this book, and some elements that could have been worked out better. Thoughts on whitewashing art institutions was interesting, but some dialogues were difficult to follow bc a lot of things went unsaid. Mediocre characters and kink as a way of empowerment does not work for me.

3,5 stars. One reviewer wrote “I do love a book about Sapphics acting a mess” and that was exactly the reason why I chose this book. Some wlw yearning but all in all bit disappointing.

[Zoe]

was giving up on this in my head, then thought of claudia rankine, lyric specifically, metaphor & incommensurability & anti-parallelism & its relationship to race, LOOKING and art, and it unlocked the book, the way hedva writes about duality, twinless twins, whiteness and the black hole hovering behind her head, the dark lockable room found in her studio was my favorite, when she locks it but hanne escapes, i can't quite fit it together, it's really good, it unravels

[RFI · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lots of interesting concepts explored and thought provoking one liners. But it felt like the narrative was forced around the one liners. Slightly abrupt ending that I didn’t see coming.

I enjoyed seeing how the art definitions played out in the story and didn’t realise that they were later repeated and definitions changed.