Your Love Is Not Good

Longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness PrizeKirkus Reviews, "Best Fiction of 2023"An artist of color becomesobsessed with a white model in a novel with the glamor of Clarice Lispector andthe viscerality of Han Kang. Atan otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painterspots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterlywhite, the center of everyone's attention. Haunted into adulthood by her Koreanfather'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 wantsHanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, orsome confusion of all the above. Since she's an artist, she will use art to getcloser to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. Asfor Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a newsheet of paper. Whenthe paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist's first sold-outshow, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue theirwork, and her seduction. But, just when the painter is on the verge of her longsought-after breakthrough, a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in theart community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for theirimperialist and racist practices. Tornbetween her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possessHanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable anddisorienting, unwilling to cut looseany one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it anywonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bitexciting to think she could too? YourLove Is Not Goodstuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, betweendesire and art, and revels in the raining debris.