In Johanna Hedva’s most recent novel, Your Love Is Not Good (And Other Stories, May 23), the lead is a queer Korean American painter whose grasp of boundaries, self, reality, and ethics is fuzzy—she locks her muse in a Vantablack basement and drives off to an art opening. She leads us through the oppressive heat of Los Angeles and “steely” Berlin as the novel traces her gradual dissolution and the racist systems and family dynamics that got her there.

Hedva, who, like their protagonist, is an artist with a white mother and Korean father, uses color to depict the mental states of the narrator, who is probing ideas of whiteness. White can be described as a “stygian fog,” the color of a skull, the byproduct of a yeast infection. At the same time, the narrator is in love with her muse and model, who has “gleaming white skin.” The author also explores the making of art and a predatory art world filled with chutes and ladders (but mostly chutes). Amid layered prose and wry one-liners (“Thank God he was a service top, which is what all cis men should be”), definitions of art terms appear and grow more abstract and inaccurate. In a starred review, Kirkus called the novel “a resplendent and fearless book. Must read.” We asked Hedva some questions via email; the exchange has been edited for length and clarity.

Your book burrows into challenging topics like identity and race, capitalism and exploitation, child abuse and sexual assault; but it’s also compassionate, caustic, funny, and clever as hell. What was it like to write? 

I wanted to write about things that make me the most ethically uncomfortable, and I wanted to write a first-person narrator whom I disagree with politically. The reason is because I think this is what fiction is very good at—getting into all that gunk. Often I think of something Deborah Levy said, that “fiction is a wonderful home for the reach of the mind,” and as she said it, she reached her hand into the air and closed her fingers into a fist. When I see this image, I think of fisting. In fisting, it’s good to wear gloves. If you’re going to reach into the mind, the ass of inquiry, the gaping genital of speculation, it’s good to have some kind of prophylactic protection. As much as it is the reach itself, fiction is also the glove.

In Adam Smyer’s You Can Keep That to Yourself: A Comprehensive List of What Not To Say to Black People, for Well-Intentioned People of Pallor, he writes, “You use light-and-dark/black-and-white imagery to signify good and evil while you are talking to me, a black person….Some bowl-cut translucent psycho commits a horror, and the first thing you call him is ‘dark.’ Keep us out of your fuckery.” The novel so successfully explores the fuckery of Whiteness. How did you fold so much of the attraction, repulsion, and general history of the nature of Whiteness into such a rich story?

I love that Smyer quote. I thought quite a lot about how whiteness and Blackness are leveraged as metaphor and symbol, how something that is visual can slip into meaning something deeper, rooted, ontological.

This slipperiness is profound for me because I am someone who doesn’t look like what I am. I look like a white abled cis woman, but what I am is a Korean American, disabled, genderqueer person. Which means that I’ve never felt like I belong anywhere—I always feel like a sort of spy—and this means that passing-ness is a primary condition of my life. Specifically, being so white-passing has always made me feel disowned by my own skin, like I am something I shouldn’t be, and yet it’s given me enormous benefits and privileges. Being enculturated as white—even by the Asian side of my family, for whom assimilation into whiteness was the mandate—is something I’ve been trying to untangle for decades. The novel felt like a supple form to really crack open and get messy with the ick of all this.

I was ready to abandon Your Love Is Not Good after the second dog dies. It was only because I was preparing for this Q&A that I kept going. (So glad I did!) Why kill off the canines?!

Two of the dog scenes are taken from my real life, and they were some of the most significant, life-changing experiences I’ve had. But I felt that they were too melodramatic to ever work in nonfiction.

I think of that scene in Season 1, Episode 5 of Atlanta, where Darius shoots a dog target at a shooting range and everyone gets outraged at him for not shooting a human target. There’s something about killing a dog that feels like the worst deranged evil, perhaps because we’ve bred them to be so obsequious to us. We’ve engineered them to be these perfect bottoms who follow our orders, so to be cruel to them feels unbearable. I wanted my book to get into this sticky, grimy dynamic of dominance and submission, the relationship between cruelty and pity, why there are parts of us that need to be obeyed and worshiped.

The protagonist, exploited and commodified by the art world and beyond, must make a no-win decision to become complicit in that same system or continue to face financial precarity; it’s a turning point. Why give the character that dilemma? Was it something you faced?

This book is my experiment in something I was thinking about as “anti-autofiction.” I started with a character who, on paper, in terms of how she’d fill out a form at the DMV, has the same identity demographics as me: white mother, Korean father, born and raised in LA, poor as hell, queer as fuck, kinkkinkkink, went to art school, wanted to “be somebody.” But every time this character makes a choice, I wanted her to do the thing I disagreed with politically, that I thought was ethically wrong, that I did not, would not, do. So, no, I’ve never faced such a dilemma because the choices I made led me very intentionally away from it.

With this book, I wanted to feel into the muck of how—if at all—our intentions affect the consequences of our choices, and I wanted to see what sort of life someone like me could have had if they made different choices than the ones I did.

I wanted to write a tragedy based on the definition that a tragedy is where you watch a character make the wrong choice because there is no other choice. My narrator makes the wrong choice over and over and over again, and hopefully the reader can feel a pathos in the fact that she does this either because she does not have the equipment to make the “right” choice, or, even worse, she thinks these choices are the right ones.

What’s next?

My new solo exhibition opens in October 2023 at JOAN LA. The next book, How To Tell When We Will Die: Essays on Sickness, Fate, and Doom, comes out in fall 2024. And I’m working on the next record, which is “succubus folk songs” and “hag blues” and a lot of yowling about orifices.

Karen Schechner is the president of Kirkus Indie.