Going on Book Tour in Fiction and Then in Real Life

When I was twenty-two, I came across Larissa Pham’s Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy in a bookstore in Oregon and could not put it down. Perhaps it was because the narrator was approximately the age I was and drew her experiences out in artistic fragments, phone calls, and reflections that gave shape to the feeling of being lost. Pham’s voice was instantly familiar and granular. There was a level of control and precision in the writing that felt masterful. She could point out a speck of color then lift the reader out of the room and, further down the page, relate a brushstroke or a heart-shaped bruise from 1980 to female self-mortification in the digital age. 

After finishing Pop Song, I craved more of her epiphanies. Fortunately, she had a monthly column at the Paris Review Daily called “Devil in the Details” which was chock-full of them. Her art criticism and commentary were brilliant—in the sense of being erudite, precise, and also illuminating, uplifting, vibrant. No surprise then that Pham’s recently published debut novel, Discipline, likewise revolves around aesthetics, love, nostalgia, and ways of looking at these things simultaneously until they blend into each other and you finish the last page wondering if, after all this time, they were all, always, the same word. 

In Discipline, a young novelist named Christine goes on book tour across the country and soon encounters eccentric strangers, precocious students, a few people from her past, and an aging painting professor. Each stop brings back another version of herself. Each stop feels auspiciously haunted in Pham’s evocative and minimal, yet exacting, prose. The second half follows Christine to an island in Maine and becomes a reckoning and excavation of a particular month in her life that completely altered her personal and professional trajectory. The novel dives into metafictional questions asking not only: What is the purpose of art? But also: What is the purpose of the past—or, more accurately, of returning to it? Pham collects bar conversations, scenes in museums, and iconic moments from art history and, in a literary magic trick, weaves them into a tapestry held together by a single, fine thread. Her protagonist, however, might just threaten to tear the whole opus apart. 

From Portland, Maine, Pham spoke with me over Zoom about the uncanny doubling of life and art, her transition from memoir to fiction, complex relationships with painting and people, the melodrama of quotation marks, and more. 

Kyla D. Walker: As a novelist on book tour for a book about a novelist on book tour, how has that experience been? Does it feel a bit uncanny? 

Larissa Pham: There has been a funny kind of resonance because I didn’t get to tour for my first book, Pop Song. It came out in 2021—still pretty deep within the pandemic. I was really sad that I didn’t get to tour, and so a lot of the scenes in Discipline where Christine is on tour were completely imagined. It’s interesting to realize that I was kind of right. There are ways that I feel now where I’m like, I was just guessing that someone might feel this way, but actually it does feel this way. There have been a few moments of doubling.

A specific example is in the first chapter: Christine is talking into a mic and there’s a lot of lag on it. It kind of throws her off. In one of the first readings that I did for this book, I also was using a mic that had a ton of lag. It was distracting, and I was actually reading the line where Christine was talking about the lag. It was very meta. Life imitates art.

KW: I’ve often heard writers say their second book feels like a reaction to their first. Although Discipline is fiction and Pop Song is a memoir-in-essays, did you feel crossover in terms of approach, or a craving for an entirely new experience of writing? 

LP: I think I would be lying if I didn’t say that at least part of Discipline was a response to having published a very intimate look at my own life through Pop Song. It is such a tender book—and one where I write about other people—whereas with Discipline, nothing that happens to Christine happened to me in the same way. It made me ask: “What is our responsibility when writing things about other people?” That question grew and grew. I became interested in expanding it into the scenario that Christine finds herself in—she’s written something that is true to herself but not to this other person. It’s really exaggerated… and it’s life… but it’s not life. I became interested in the consequences of publishing.

Both of my books are in first person, and the other thing that I was interested in doing with Discipline was trying a different kind of voice. I wanted Christine to feel a little bit held back, restrained, cooler. She’s a very different person than me, so I was interested in writing a narrator who is withholding from the reader. 

KW: Did this foray into fiction feel more liberating, or was it intimidating to not have the structure of reality to lean back on?

LP: Liberating. Yes. I love it. I love how free fiction is because it’s not like you can’t use life—you definitely can. But you have so much more freedom with it.

KW: Let’s talk about the title a little bit, there’s a clear double meaning with “discipline.” Did you know that that was going to be the title when you started, or did it come later? And what do you think about it now? 

LP: It was not the first title of the book. Originally, the frame of the project and the title was “10 American Paintings” since it was going to be made up of meditations on 10 American paintings—which is why there are five American paintings. Pretty soon I realized that was not the structure for the book, so the second title became “Tracks.” I was thinking about the way a hunter follows the tracks of an animal. It was a little creepy and a bit too oblique for the book. I arrived at Discipline after writing the chapter where Christine and Francis are hanging out. There’s that line where Christine says: I’m not like you, I lack discipline. And something about that line opened up the possibility for the title of the book. 

KW: Going back to that idea of tracks and this almost ominous presence of subjectless emails and mysterious phone calls, there seem to be some psychological thriller elements within the novel. Were there aspects of craft that you felt helped tap into this more, like figuring out the right pace of the plot and how much information to reveal? 

LP: I don’t read a ton of capital T thrillers, but I do love a really well-plotted book. Two books that I had in mind while I was writing were The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li, which is marvelously plotted. I was thinking about her pacing and the turning points in that book. And then I was thinking about The Round House by Louise Erdrich, which is just incredible. The way that she builds tension is amazing because the point of telling is actually not present tense. The narrator is reflecting on something that happened when he was young, but the way that Erdrich is writing makes it like he doesn’t know what he’s thinking, he doesn’t know what he’s going to do next. I was interested in building suspense and tension through little details like those phone calls and emails and moments of instability, but also on a decision-making level, having Christine either do things without explaining why she’s doing them or do things because she doesn’t fully understand why she is doing them. Having her be a little bit mysterious to herself was interesting to me. 

KW: So much of the novel is centered around Christine’s memory, this return to past selves, almost like there are ghost layers of herself, coats of a painting. Was that the aim from the beginning—to have this return and reckoning? 

I wrote the book chronologically, so I started at chapter one and ended at chapter eight. I wanted to structure it in increasing closeness, as in the first person she meets is a stranger, then an acquaintance, then an ex, then her former best friend, and then we get to Richard, who’s maybe the closest and most complex relationship. I’m interested in texts where you get to know someone better over the course of the book. I think that’s what happens with Christine, but it wasn’t 100% deliberate. 

KW: That’s fascinating, I definitely see that progression. 

In general, how do you think motion serves Christine throughout Discipline? She’s moving through the country physically, then there’s psychological motion, and on an even smaller scale, we see her moving through museums quite often, walking through exhibits or galleries with characters in flashbacks. Was there something you were focused on portraying through movement? 

LP: Yes, I thought it was important that Christine can’t go home. I wanted to set up a scenario where she couldn’t turn back. She needed to be constantly moving forward. Part of this movement is self-determined, right? She’s scheduled her book tour, but then obviously she gets derailed and ends up in Maine. That’s where she doesn’t move at all. She’s spending weeks on this island with this guy. But it felt important to at least start her off running from something. Like, she can’t put the genie back in the bottle if it comes out. People have read her novel. She’s got a subletter in her apartment. She can’t go home. 

KW: In the middle of the book, Christine and Francis have a really fascinating discussion about the pointlessness of art. Through the writing of this novel, have you come to any conclusions, or perhaps a different perspective on this than your characters? 

LP: I feel differently about art than my characters do. For Frances, it’s very utilitarian. She’s like, I know if I make these paintings, they’ll sell, and if they sell, then I keep getting to make more paintings—so this is what I’m doing with my life. And then for Christine, I don’t think she necessarily realizes how important her text might be outside of herself. It’s such an individual story of catharsis for her. I don’t think she’s even thinking about her audience in a way that I, as her writer, have been forced to consider the role of art in the world. Now that I’m talking to readers, I think Christine is underselling art a little bit. For my part, I fall somewhere in the range between thinking art has unbelievable power and also thinking that we can’t decide what that power is. If you go into making a project and you’re like, this is going to change the world, you might be setting yourself up for failure because you don’t actually know how people are going to respond to what you make. But if you make something that is true and beautiful and interesting and exciting to you, then I think the chances are very high that other people will find it interesting and true and beautiful. 

KW: Throughout the book, dialogue exists without quotation marks. I’m always curious about stylistic choices by the writer. Did that decision feel specific to this story, and were there implications that you were trying to make by not including quotation marks?

But also, I read this novella, Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. The narrator is a young woman who is not really able to express herself. Her father is abusive, and there are lots of moments in the book where she says something, and you think the whole line is dialogue. Then you get to the end of the sentence and realize she hasn’t said that last part out loud. So she’s expressing herself, and then you hear her thoughts that no one else does. I was really interested in that slipperiness. I was interested in not having a clear separation between speech and narration. I like the instability of it, and I like that Christine is our vessel for the whole story, so you have to assume she’s reporting the truth. 

KW: Right, exactly. There’s a quote near the end that I really love where Christine says: “The moment where it changed, where the writing went from a process of trying to understand what had happened to me to a process or creating something new occurred not during the first draft or even the second, but the third. It was when I started to think of it as a book in earnest, to sculpt it, pull a form out from my life’s shapeless contours.” So gorgeous, that idea of going from experience to art. Did this feel true in the writing of Discipline? 

LP: I have to say, that’s all Christine. I was really interested in having Christine and Richard talk to each other. That was the moment I was writing towards the whole time: getting them to the island and having them hash it out. 

Christine started out as an unnamed narrator. There was a moment about 20 pages in, where I was like, I need to give this woman a name—she needs to be her own person. So I think maybe that was that moment of separation where I was like, this is going to be a project, it’s going to be something. I will say that I have felt what Christine experiences, usually when writing an essay or something where you’re like, first draft: get your thoughts out; second draft: you make it nice; third draft: you start refining and making it into an essay, rather than this pile of guts on the page. 

KW: My last question is about the cover. As someone who writes a lot about art and has so many great essays on aesthetics, what is the cover of your novel portraying, and how does it perhaps add to the story? 

LP: I love this cover. I think it’s really well done. I didn’t think I wanted a face when I sent over my vision board. In the book, Christine thinks her own cover has too many colors, and so I’m not surprised that my cover is black and white. There’s a moodiness to it. I like that the face draws you in—you see her and you wonder: Is she floating? Is she sinking? Is she swimming? Is she drowning? And then, of course, her face also looks like an island. If you look at photos of islands in Maine, they look like that. There are these little humped dark shapes on the horizon, and then there’s all this water in front. It’s an illusion cover.