Your Love Is Not Good
Longlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness PrizeKirkus Reviews, "Best Fiction of 2023"
An artist of color becomes
obsessed with a white model in a novel with the glamor of Clarice Lispector and
the viscerality of Han Kang. At
an otherwise forgettable party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter
spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly
white, the center of everyone's attention. Haunted into adulthood by her Korean
father'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 wants
Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or
some confusion of all the above. Since she's an artist, she will use art to get
closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model. As
for Hanne, what does she want? Her whiteness seems sometimes as cruel as a new
sheet of paper. When
the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist's first sold-out
show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their
work, and her seduction. But, just when the painter is on the verge of her long
sought-after breakthrough,
a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds in the
art community, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their
imperialist and racist practices. Torn
between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess
Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and
disorienting, unwilling to cut loose
any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all. Is it any
wonder so many artists self-destruct so spectacularly? Is it perhaps just a bit
exciting to think she could too? Your
Love Is Not Good
stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between
desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.
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musician who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in
LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of the essay 'Sick Woman Theory', originally
published in 2016, which has now been translated into ten languages. Hedva is
also the author of the novel On Hell, which was one of Dennis Cooper's
favourite books of 2018, and the nonfiction collection Minerva
the Miscarriage of the Brain. Their albums are The Sun and the Moon
and Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House.
"Hedva is consistently
savvy and surprising." --Publishers Weekly "A gripping, tightly plotted novel characterized by a
trenchant exploration of race, queer desire, and power dynamics in the art
world" --Reed McConnell, Frieze
"Impassioned, wry,
compassionate, and hell-raising, this novel illuminates its frangible but
resilient world the way a painter uses color on canvas to illuminate the focal
point of her vision--building layer after layer of meaning until the image appears
as if it has always been there for us to see. A
resplendent and fearless book. Must read." --Kirkus starred review
emotional and artistic bildungsroman ... filled with apt perceptions and accurate
barbs." --ArtReview
"A thin permeable line between love and hate, pain and
pleasure, self-love, self-flagellation, and total narcissism. Hedva's
characters show us the complexities of being (in)human(e) beings and push our
faces into the mud, an antagonism inflicted unto ourselves as we bully,
bruise, blur, and break our way into the waking world. Hedva's willingness to
parse apart 'love' from 'goodness' is the honesty we're all here and have been
waiting for." --Legacy Russell "This precise page-turner of a tale about bad or
nonexistent mothers, race, and the erotics of painting masterfully pins the art
world to the buckram of its specimen tray, pointed sentence after sentence.
Here everyone loses gorgeously, definitively--and lucky readers learn a lot
about the game." --Lucy Ives
"Your Love Is Not Good is a whirlwind, and a mural,
and a mirror--Hedva's prose is incisive and empathetic, wholly comedic and
deeply poignant. This story about the life of our ideas, the trajectory of our
dreams, and the burden of our loves is wildly moving and entirely original.
Hedva deftly juggles questions of ambition and debt with what we owe others,
and what we owe ourselves, resulting in a novel that's both honest and
enrapturing. Your Love Is Not Good is a genuine blast." --Bryan
Washington
"It's more than all this, but here is something
about labor, the capitalist inseams in Identity, as expressed in an
international art market that careens its participants--or is it the art?--towards
suicide. For those needing--by hook or by crook, by rope, knife, mirror, or by
truck--to leave something, or the art world, or the debt-collision of whatever
they're doing, or even the internet for the next 24 goddamned hours, Your
Love Is Not Good is very worth your beautiful time." --Caren
Beilin
"Your Love
Is Not Good is a dazzling tale of claustrophobia and neglect. Swinging
deftly between savage realism, scathing social satire, and brutal erotic haze,
Johanna Hedva moves from agony to alchemy in this meticulously layered portrait
of intimate corruption. Bursting into the broken places between shame and
self-creation, trauma and accountability, righteousness and complicity, Your
Love Is Not Good cracks open the art world to exorcise the pain of
belonging." --Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore "Electric, pornographic, mischievous, and deeply funny. Your
Love is Not Good is a parable of the artist who in search of beauty
encounters something far more intoxicating: ruin. Burn your diaries, kill your
darlings, and go toast your real friends-- this is the summer beach read you'll
be talking about for the rest of the year." --Lara
Mimosa Montes "By turns funny, brutal, and
(surprisingly) tender, Your Love is Not Good is a major
achievement. Hedva's prose--which is gusty and taut--conveys a
thrumming, kaleidoscopically constructed narrative structure to
produce for the reader an experience of something incredibly intimate,
something profuse, raw, erotic and challenging. Your Love is Not Good contains
revelations (both vibrating and appalling) about artists and practice, and
about contemporary art worlds. An instant classic/must-read/ important addition
to the (woefully scanty) genre of books by artists about art-life. A very
moving read." --Harry Dodge Praise for Johanna Hedva
"It's fucking brilliant. I'm in love. If there have to be novels, On Hell is what they should do." --Anne Boyer
"Purchase or thrash: 'genius.' Relocate an 'Ancient Greek text' to 'contemporary Los Angeles.' Does a geographical cure excrete ghosts, 'visions of strange bodies poised and moving, ' or does it produce a 'deep, reverberating sound?' Johanna Hedva's Minerva begins in this place and we go there, which is to say a reader does. Or might: float/trust this process of alchemical, pelvic, infinite, sub-maternal, and ceramic change." --Bhanu Kapil
"Reverberations of this book outlast everything else in our ears, 'what felt like a skinned, feral cat breaching from my chest.' Definitely Minerva, goddess of genius and poems! Celestial messenger Johanna Hedva gives up gold after the cult following of their book On Hell. A (god)dess-sized reconstruction of the world we only thought we knew! Welcome home, poets!" --CAConrad
"At some point while reading On Hell, I had the sensation that my heart had pushed through my chest, my brain had pushed through my skull, and my guts had pushed through my abdomen, and that I was, in solidarity with Hedva's writing, wearing my insides on the outside of my body. Only writing this nakedly vulnerable could be this intensely embodied, and only writing this intensely embodied could be this insurrectionary." --Brandon Shimoda
