Pushing against the limits of possibility: R.O. KWON discusses EXHIBIT

Photo by Jesse Dittmar

R. O. Kwon is the author of the nationally bestselling novel The Incendiaries, which was named a best book of the year by more than forty publications and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award. With Garth Greenwell, Kwon coedited the bestselling Kink, a New York Times Notable Book.

Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, and MacDowell. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.

Her new book, Exhibit, is “an exhilarating, blazing-hot novel about a woman caught between her desires and her life.”

Interview by Nirica Srinivasan

In both Exhibit and your previous novel, The Incendiaries, you open with an epigraph from Clarice Lispector. Why did you choose to start both books with her? What does she mean to you as a writer?

Lispector, and a handful of other writers like Julio Cortázar and Anne Carson, are writers who I think of as “possibility-showing writers.” Part of what excites me about their work is how they seem to push up against the limits of what's possible in fiction. I just find that to be really exciting because I'm interested in pushing up against the limits of what I myself find to be possible. Lispector is just so wild! I feel as though you read a page, and you think, “What the fuck! Who thinks this way? What made this mind? This is just so fascinating.”

The protagonist of Exhibit, Jin, is a photographer. I know you’ve done a lot of research into photographers, performance artists, and dancers, especially ones who play with ideas or themes of the body, of queer bodies, of women's bodies, and of shame. I was wondering what your experience was looking at these images, and how it influenced how you wrote about bodies or these ideas generally.

I did do a lot of research—I love looking at photos, I love watching dance, but neither is a discipline in which I've studied very much. To write this book, I also did a lot of more hands-on research—I took very elementary ballet classes, I took photo classes, I took a choreography workshop. I really needed to write these characters with much more of a sense of what their bodies were up to, and what it might feel like to be in those bodies.

Whenever I feel that I don't know what to do next with a sentence or a scene, something that tends to help me is to try to forcibly eject myself into the body of a character, and to ask myself, are their jeans comfortable? Are they thirsty? What does their body want in this moment? Usually, it's multiple things. I find that to be true, because my experience of living seems to involve seething with desire of various kinds at all times.

Were there any specific photos or artists you were drawn to?

Ren Hang was a big one for me. His photos are so beautiful, his depictions of, in his case, Chinese bodies. Until I'd seen those pictures, I hadn't seen bodies that look like mine celebrated in quite that way. This is really grim, but after one of the many mass shootings in America, one that specifically targeted queer and trans people, I was physically shaking, as were so many people. At the same time, I was on deadline for this novel, which is a very queer, celebratory book. And I just remember I was shaking, I was so angry, I was so sad, and in that moment, I turned again to Ren Hang’s photos. It was such a balm to look at his work again and to remind myself that the only answer for me, with my work, is going to be to just get even queerer. His photos have really been a guiding light.

There’s a quality in your writing that I like, where you skirt the edges of a conversation or an event. We hear of conversations in reported speech, imagery takes precedence over description of the things that are happening. Why do you choose to keep the reader on the edge of these moments?

Recently, I was teaching a class on a fiction workshop, one that focused on reading Korean Literature, at Stanford. When I teach, there's an exercise I always have students do, that involves going out and, with permission, recording a conversation and then writing it down. I ask them what they notice when they record a conversation, and what they almost inevitably find is that people don't directly talk to each other, answering questions. It’s not this neat call-and-response.

In conversation, what people say glances past something—someone picks up one part of what somebody said, and then they lob it back. I think that in dialogue, I'm interested, to the extent possible, in reflecting conversation more the way it seems to happen when I listen to it. About having things sometimes happen off-stage—that seems more lifelike to me in some ways.

I think I'm very fascinated by what it feels like to be alive, and how to show that on the page in a way that feels as rich and truthful as possible. And while working with and inside the limitations of twenty-six letters of the alphabet, and only so many exclamation marks! Well, I threw in some Korean too, but still. There are so few tools to work with, and there's so much you can do with it.

In Exhibit, Jin says, at one point, “I used to think I'd begun life as a partial fish.” Fish recur throughout the novel—in stories and mythologies that they tell, in the food that they eat, in some of the description and imagery. I was wondering what drew you to that as a motif.

It wasn't quite on purpose, but at some point, I noticed that the fish and bird imagery was really building up. With my writing, especially with fiction, I tend to follow the characters, ask who they are and what they want, and then adjust accordingly. I don't quite feel as though I'm making up a book—I feel as though I'm excavating a book, and finding my way toward an ideal version of what the book wants to be.

But with all of that said, the book is very interested in, and I'm very interested in, what possibilities there are for change in a person. There are things that the characters, including the narrator Jin, want very much, that they can't change—they can't get rid of the need. There's the central conflict where Philip has realized he desperately wants a child and Jin absolutely doesn't want a child. What do you do when two people who love each other very much realize that they want things that are not quite compatible? This is a question on which there's no real compromise. You can't have half a child. And that's not to say that people can't change. So the book is interested in what can change. What are people able to change in themselves?

That’s further externalized in the myths [including the ones involving fish and birds]. In a lot of ways, in the existing Korean myths that Jin has heard, she can't quite find a home in those stories. In the Korean myths I learned, there's an overarching motif that has to do with girls and women not being valued. Jin and Lidija, as they're working together—and Jin's mother did this for her too, so Jin’s sort of continuing the tradition—they decide to remake the myths, to change these origin stories, and find a way to make a home inside these stories.

A lot of this book, and what you’ve written about this book, is about the idea of a kind of stereotypical Asian woman, or specifically a Korean woman. Jin is worried about proving a harmful stereotype right, in terms of docility or submissiveness.

In the other direction, she’s also very worried about the shame relating to queerness or kink that is not just on her but is on her as a representative of her community. Especially when you're even a little bit in the public eye, that becomes such a big thing, especially for people of color, and women of color. It's such an immense weight of responsibility on one person who is just living their life, to represent an entire people. This complication is central to Exhibit. I was wondering how you approached writing it and exploring it in the novel.

I was intensely aware while writing this, as is Jin with some of the work she does, of the ways in which Jin's sexuality can be misrepresented as dovetailing with really, really harmful stereotypes about Asian women and certainly East Asian women—that we can be submissive, that we're willing to be mistreated. In the US, there was a fear that was already there, and it really sharpened after the Atlanta spa shootings. I'd written a little about that, and I also ended up going on the radio and talking on podcasts about that terrible, terrible catastrophe. As a result, I think I heard from thousands of people about their experience of anti-Asian violence and racism. It was, and is, such an honor to be trusted with those griefs.

It's true that I became increasingly alarmed about how I was writing about sexuality and kink in Exhibit, and the ways in which it can be seen as aligning with these ridiculous ideas about Asian women. That anxiety still hasn't really left. But something I keep also thinking about is that not naming what I feel called to name, turning away from that naming, brings its own kind of harm. Silence is also a kind of death. In the past, books have saved my life, in part by showing me I'm not as desperately alone as I thought. I hope to be able to give some of this fellowship to others.

One of my favorite things while reading Exhibit was the moment when I realized that it takes place in the same world as The Incendiaries—one of Jin’s photography subjects is of the characters and events from The Incendiaries. Was it fun to thread your novels together? Why did you decide to do that?

It wasn't entirely on purpose, but when it did happen, I was so excited! In the same way that I don't quite feel as though I'm making up a book, I almost believe that the book pre-exists me in an ideal form, and that it is my job to find my way toward it. I read somewhere that the ancient Greeks used to believe that images pre-exist their appearance in the world, and I thought, “Wait, that's how I feel about books!” I almost feel as though the world of a book exists. Maybe it's just that you put so much into imagining a world that it becomes at least as real as the world that you might inhabit with your own body. It just started to feel natural—because if they were in a version of our world in which those abortion clinic bombings happened as they happen in The Incendiaries, that would be a relatively major, noted event in the history of America. As anyone who looks into time travel knows, any change like that will change what follows. I thought, if there was this abortion clinic bombing, then we're already in a different world than the one that I inhabit.

I think this might be part of a trilogy or quartet of books that will share some central preoccupations, and some of the characters will keep making cameos in the other books. I think Jin’s photos are going to reappear in the next book, they might play a role.

That's exactly how I felt when I was reading it, that this event would have been massive in this world, so it makes so much sense that it would kind of reverberate into Jin's preoccupations!

In Exhibit, and I think this is also true of The Incendiaries, structurally, there’s a sort of inevitability about where the book is going. There's a sense of the characters looking back from the ending of the novel. In Exhibit, Jin is often addressing Philip directly, and at times she says, “I believed I was holding you tight.” And as a reader, you know where the story has to go, because she's saying that with regret. What draws you to write that kind of story?

I know this isn't a question that bothers everybody, but it tends to bother me in the making of a book, and then it becomes a question that I need to explore in the making of the book—this fundamental question of: Why does this book exist? Who's telling it? Why does it exist? Why does this story exist in the world? With Exhibit, I felt as though it's Jin trying to make sense of what happened. I don't think I'm giving too much away if I say that in some meaningful ways, she is hurting Philip. This is someone she loves very much, and she's trying to make sense of the decisions that she made, the choices that lead her to the final page of the book. I don't know if I'll always do that, but so far, it's felt necessary to the telling of each book. I guess we'll see with the next one!

There are two moments I thought were interesting in Jin and Lidija’s relationship. One is where Jin says, “Slight tug of disquiet, sidling past. Did it urge caution? If so, I ignored it.” And then later, she says, “She did push. I had trouble refusing Lidija.” I feel like in a lot of books with queer characters, the queer relationship can sometimes be painted as this emancipatory, perfect relationship in comparison to the other often heteronormative relationship. You don’t romanticize or paint these relationships in very black and white terms. I wondered if that was intentional.

That's resonating with me—I can think of stories where the queer relationship gets idealized, especially if it's someone's first queer relationship. But you know, in the end, people are going to be people. People are going to make mistakes; people are going to hurt each other. People are going to love each other and try to care for each other, but people are going to be people!

There's a writer who was a professor of mine for a little bit, Charles Baxter, who used to talk about the importance of time in fiction. In our lives, we tend to be so intensely aware of the hours in a day—“I’ve got to finish this by 4pm, and then I have to do XYZ, and then I'm getting dinner with a friend at 8pm.” Time bounds our lives so much. Sometimes in fiction, that sense of time can be looser. I was thinking a lot about the ways in which Lidija, since she's injured, has all this time. It's the first time she's been severely injured, and she's never had this much time in her life. Ballerinas often start getting really serious about ballet so young, practically when they're four—so her entire life, really, she's had a sort of priest devotion to the art. Now she's injured, but she's getting better. That means that, not long from now, she's not going to have as much time. That gives her time with Jin a bounded quality, after which something will have to change in some way or another. I found having that known imaginative limit on their time was really useful in terms of seeing how they were with each other, and in making sense of the intensity of their relationship as well.

There’s a moment in Exhibit where Jin meets a child drawing on the sidewalk and thinks about encouraging her to take up space. It reminded me a lot of a moment in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House where the protagonist sees a young girl and wants to encourage her to fight for what she wants, which is a little cup with painted stars on it, that she calls her “cup of stars.” Was that intentional or just a coincidence?

I haven't read that in so long, I need to go revisit! That particular scene actually came from when I was walking down the street at some point, and there was a little girl who had drawn this elaborate—I don't even know what to call it, it was a masterpiece! As I approached this child, we talked a little bit, and she said, “Okay, well, you can just step on it.” And I thought, “Don’t tell me to step on it!” I understand that she was being polite, and her parents or a caretaker had probably said, “You can't just hog the sidewalk.” But especially because she was a little girl…I have a niece, and every bit of ferocity I see, there's a part of me that thinks, every time, “Good. You're going to need it. The world will try so hard to take it all out of you, and you're going to need it. I'm so glad that you have your weapons already.” I don’t want to be overly essentialist about gender—the world tries to take things away from everyone! But it is also true that as a girl, as a woman, as someone in a body that presents as a woman or a girl, in general, the world is more willing to try to push you around.

I really admire that your book deals with so many things—there’s the strand about Jin not wanting to be a parent, there’s the exploration of desire, queerness, Korean-American identity, but I feel like none of it overwhelms the book. It felt very real and doesn’t fall into the trap of drawing binaries or being essentialist, like you said.

I have my political beliefs and I’m very vocal about my political beliefs. I write about it a lot in nonfiction, but fiction really does feel to me as though it’s alive. I have to follow the book, and I can’t really impose my beliefs and what I would like to have happen on the book. There are times when that means that the characters really surprise me. There was a key moment of violence in The Incendiaries where I thought, “What! This is what you’re going to do? Oh my god!” But I tried so hard to write it any other way, and it just kept feeling untrue to who that character was. There were plenty of moments like that with Exhibit, too, where I realized, “Well, this is what they’re going to do.”

One of my mentors in college or in grad school, Michael Cunningham, said something I think about a lot, which was “We must love our characters as God does, and not more.” I love that. I take that to mean, I love my characters, and I’m going to follow them. I’m going to watch them, and I’ll record things that they had to say, but I’m not going to move them around like little chess pieces.

Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.