At the Rumpus, Jo Hamya shares the writing process behind her debut novel, Three Rooms, and how she reluctantly deals with reader assumptions about her narrator as a stand-in for herself. “A lot of people think it’s autofiction, and that I’m the narrator,” Hamya says. “The hardest thing about writing the book was that at regular intervals I’d stop and be like, what if people think this is me? […] As I was writing, I kept thinking about how I don’t like this narrator at all. I understand why people feel sympathy for her, but she’s not my idea of a great person—she’s necessarily ineffectual and vague, because otherwise the book would wrap up neatly with her getting her life together. She’s a composite of the worst tweets I could find, and as I was putting her into various situations or environments that I’d been in my life, and having her act differently, I kept thinking how it would be awful if someone thought this was me, but it does seem to be happening [laughs]. I suppose that’s unavoidable. You can’t control what your readers think. I’ll just have to deal with it.”
Jo Hamya Is Not Her Narrator
HBD EB!
Happy first birthday to Emily Books! The Observer ran a little recap of the book club-slash-store’s lascivious first anniversary party, where Kate Zambreno and Tamara Faith Berger both read from their recent novels. Here’s the Million’s interview with Zambreno, and here’s a #LitBeat from one of Berger’s previous readings from her steamy wonder of a novel, Maidenhead.
Insult to Insult
“Who was Bret Easton Ellis describing when he tweeted: ‘The best example of a contemporary male writer lusting for a kind of awful greatness that he simply wasn’t able to achieve’?” The Guardian has a delicious quiz of literary putdowns. And speaking of fighting, let’s talk about books about violence.
Join David Bowie’s Book Club
David Bowie was quite the avid reader. In his honor, his son, Duncan Jones, has launched an online book club that will focus on books Bowie enjoyed. The first book is Hawksmoor and the discussion is on February 1st. Will you be participating?
Fiction by Wes Anderson
Before making films, Wes Anderson used to write fiction. His university literary journal Analecta posts a short story he wrote as an undergraduate in 1989. Did he make the right career choice? (via The Paris Review Daily)
No Fake Readers
“An appreciation of readers as diverse individuals with different tastes should be a basic tenet of criticism. Instead, it’s common for critics to imagine that their aesthetic preferences are the reflections of “readers” or a special class of readers—“serious readers,” “imaginative readers,” “brave readers,” or some other ill-defined category—whose views truly matter.” Lincoln Michel explains why “there’s no such thing as a fake reader” in an essay for Electric Literature.
The Sorrows of Lot
At The Rumpus, Kate Angus argues that salt, far from being simply a pillar of the spice trade, is in fact “the physical manifestation of the basic triad of our lives: love, work, and grief.”