Larissa Pham

Endlessly inventive, intimate, and provocative, this memoir-in-essays is a celebration of the strange and exquisite state of falling in love, whether with a painting or a person, that interweaves incisive commentary on modern life, feminism, art and sex with the author's own experiences of obsession, heartbreak, and past trauma. Like a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham's debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go. Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love--with a place, or a painting, or a person--and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss--from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde--Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself. Pop Song is also a book about distances, near and far. As she travels from Taos, New Mexico, to Shanghai, China and beyond, Pham meditates on the miles we are willing to cover to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed. Pop Song is a book about all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home. There is heartache in these pages, but Pham's electric ways of seeing create a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy that is triumphant in both its vulnerability and restlessness.

Adventures in Art & Intimacy

Pop Song

An unnamed narrator's life at Yale takes a dizzying turn when she meets a girl who looks just like her. Drawn into each other's social worlds, they spiral deeper and deeper into a house of mirrors made of each other.

Fantasian

A taut, electrifying debut about a woman forced to confront unsettling truths about herself, her past, and the life she rebuilt following a ruinous affair with her former mentor, from a “lit world phenom” (Harper’s Bazaar) “An exhilarating, exquisite book, full of an eerie intelligence and startling compassion . . . a pitch-perfect novel.”—Ayșegül Savaș, author of The Anthropologists A BEST BOOK OF THE SEASON: Bustle, Debutiful, Harper's Bazaar I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in line but as in arrow pulled back. Yet I don’t know which of us holds the bow, and which of us faces the arrow. Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, she’s seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers, and friends. But when the antagonist of her novel—her old painting professor—reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her that he’s read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his house, on a remote island off the coast of Maine, their encounter threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she’s imagined it. A pristine and provocative high-wire act toggling the fictions we construct for ourselves just to survive and the possibilities that lie beyond them, Discipline launches a spellbinding inquiry into the nature of art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.

A Novel

Discipline

A taut, electrifying debut about a woman forced to confront unsettling truths about herself, her past, and the life she rebuilt following a ruinous affair with her former mentor, from a “lit world phenom” (Harper’s Bazaar). I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in line but as in arrow pulled back. But I don’t know which of us holds the bow, and which of us faces the arrow. Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, Christine is seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers, and friends. But when the antagonist of her novel—her old painting professor—reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her he's read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his cabin, deep in the woods of Maine, what she encounters threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she's imagined it. A delicately explosive high-wire act about the fictions we construct for ourselves just to survive, Discipline is a terse triumph about art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.

"A warm and expansive portrait of a woman’s mind that feels at once singular and universal," this collection of essays interweaves commentary on modern life, feminism, art, and sex with the author's own experiences of obsession, heartbreak, and vulnerability (BuzzFeed). Like a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham's debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go. Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love—with a place, or a painting, or a person—and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss—from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde—Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself. Pop Song is also a book about distances, near and far. As she travels from Taos, New Mexico, to Shanghai, China and beyond, Pham meditates on the miles we are willing to cover to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed. Pop Song is a book about all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home. There is heartache in these pages, but Pham's electric ways of seeing create a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy that is triumphant in both its vulnerability and restlessness.

Larissa Pham

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