lost in the hustle.
on perfection, hustle culture, and what I've been reading lately.
Writing news:
I was interviewed by a local newspaper, Hi-Desert Star, talking about Select Screen – read the whole feature here.
Select Screen is coming out May 5th! Consider pre-ordering it directly from my publisher or on Bookshop.org.
In my twenties, I partook in photography as a hobby, I still do, but at one point I was a camera-wearing novitiate, devoted to personal style and street photography. Once, I brought my camera on a hike as a favor to a women’s hiking group I was a part of. I took group shots in front of El Cap in Yosemite and captured the joy of finding a swimming hole on a particularly hot day. However, after a few small web features, more and more people started pushing me to do it for money, as a side hustle. One of the hiking group members asked me to photograph a surprise engagement and I refused, but they pushed, offered me money, I still said I wasn’t comfortable. Later, a friend (also in the hiking group) asked me why I didn’t do it. They were flabbergasted and insisted “you could make more money!” But I was teaching at the time and I really wanted to keep my artistic pursuits separate from my professional life. Now, I work in digital marketing, and things are more entwined – I write for my day job and as an artistic pursuit. It’s harder to disentangle them, though I do try.
Still, I wonder if my lack of capitalistic killer instinct, my rejection of hustle culture is an ongoing issue I struggle with in promoting my own books. I feel uncomfortable ‘selling myself,’ or saying how great the writing is – even if I personally do think it’s funny.
Lizzo performed on SNL over the weekend and wore a shirt that read “Tariffied” – later, on Threads, I saw someone opine her lack of getting the shirt online and available to purchase immediately after the show, implying she was in some way ‘dropping the ball.’ Everything needs to be a hustle, people no longer value making a statement for art’s sake, without the ability to mimetically recreate it indefinitely online (see also: the AI doll boxes all over the internet right now, some artists initially drew theirs, but so many others said ‘me too!’ and pressed ‘copy’ in ChatGPT). For my part, I hope Lizzo made that shirt with iron on letters intending to make a statement rather than a sale.
The desire to emulate is deeply ingrained in human culture. There will always be an undercurrent of aspiration to an unattainable goal of what we personally define as perfection. I read two books recently that play on this theme: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico and Apartment Women by Gu Byeong-mo. Both novels offer a different concept of what perfection can be – in Apartment Women, it captures a group of Korean mothers aspiring to be the perfect mom and wife; in Perfection, the act is more subtle as two graphic design freelancers work at portraying the perfect artsy millennial expat persona.
Perfection follows Anna and Tom’s existential malaise as they navigate the carefully curated life they’ve created for themselves as expat digital nomads who’ve brought their freelance design skills and their sensibilities to Berlin.
“Anna and Tom were creative professionals, a term even they found vague and jarring. Their exact titles varied depending on the job, but they were always in English, even in their native language: web developer, graphic designer, online brand strategist. What they created were differences.”
Much of the novel explores the push and pull of reality and maintaining an image. They may work for days on end, emerging only to eat and shower, only to have the contract pulled out from under them and a subsequent loss of income. They buffett these blows by spending the nights in Berlin’s bars and underground clubs, by making other expat friends, by carefully curating their apartment so that you can almost imagine the layout in Dwell or Kinfolk.
“Sunlight floods the room from the bay window, reflects off the wide, honey-colored floorboards, and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud. Its stems brush the back of a Scandinavian armchair, an open magazine left face down on the seat. The red of that magazine cover, the plant’s brilliant green, the petrol blue of the upholstery, and the pale ochre floor stand out against the white walls, their chalky tone picked up again in the pale rug that just creeps into the frame.”
Personally, I am a sucker for evocative descriptions of place – particularly living spaces – which is reflected even in my own writing (Foundations is entirely about a house), and Perfection has this particular type of description in spades. It works incredibly well to illustrate a certain type of person, one who envies the original Eames chairs in their friends' overpriced lofts and longs to recreate that vibe in their own space, settling instead for a knock off from the thrift store.
Like many millennials, Anna and Tom spend too much time on social media, follow the cultural and political trends, attempt to find jobs that provide the vague concept of fulfillment, and have a content relationship – yet they still feel in some way that they have failed. The future feels fuzzy and ill-defined and they no longer know their place in it.
In Apartment Women, there’s a very different overlay of perfection being pursued by the mothers who have agreed to live with their families in a government owned apartment block on the outskirts of Seoul to attempt to counteract the diminishing Korean birth rate by having more babies. The novel follows the stories of four women within the apartment units and how they navigate the complexities of close-contact domestic life.
Danhui is bossy and steamrolls the other women into her version of perfection: cooking organic food and creating a strict chore rotation chart that many of the women find oppressive, but, in an effort to appear cooperative, ultimately agree too. Gyowon appears to be a meek woman, but it turns out she may have been online bullied in her attempts to show off her thrift and capacity as a mom on social media. Yojin is the only woman who works outside the home and her narrative centers around the uncomfortable position of being both the breadwinner and the object of unwanted male attention from another husband in the apartments. Hyonae is desperately trying to cling to her freedom and maintain her life as an artist who paints illustrations for children’s books, despite her husband’s disapproval and Danhui’s not so subtle tsk-tsking. They all carry with them a secret reason for needing government subsidized housing and a certain shame about it which colors the interactions with their neighbors.
As in Perfection, Apartment Women illustrates the complexity of maintaining societal expectations and appearance, though it often belies what’s underneath one’s true experience. Both novels also explore the struggle of art infringing on other aspects of your life, or blending it into a job, then losing yourself in the concept. Hyonae “couldn’t sketch or paint anything as she watched her skills and desires, inseparable as they were from the daily grind, yellow and hardened like forgotten two-day-old rice.” Similarly, Anna and Tom question their own abilities and usefulness at various points, making both hustle culture and existential malaise feel inevitable.
I do feel that both novels reach a more hopeful, although still realistic, conclusion. And I am pleased the Perfection has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International prize – it’s certainly one a narrative where it’s hard not to catch a quick glimpse of yourself.
I just finished reading Audition by Katie Kitamura and my mind is still reeling, then I picked up All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley about the experiences of a MET museum guard. I feel like I am finally hitting my book stride again after some time away from regular reading and it feels nice.