Discipline by Larissa Pham is a mental seascape, almost a Moby-Dick of the mind that operates associatively around the challenges of art—formally, critically, and personally. It follows a young woman on a book tour for her debut novel, a revenge thriller about a young woman murdering her sexually abusive art school professor. Where the novel-within-a-novel presents itself as violent, nearly unhinged, the mind that wrote it is painstakingly ordered, curious about but uninvested in the people around her, holding everyone at a remove until her former art school professor reaches out over email to write,
That’s not how I remember it.
Contending with trauma, the meaning of art, and the relationships these things birth and ruin, Discipline is a pristine novel that had me, upon finishing it, immediately restarting it. Pham and I sat in a Brooklyn cafe that was entirely too loud—the clattering voices actually ruining the recording—while we talked about the craft of fiction versus nonfiction, metafictional trickery, and the books everyone else was gossiping about. The latter has been edited out. Sorry to Rachel and Ben.
Kyle Francis Williams: So you hate nonfiction now?
Larissa Pham: I don’t hate nonfiction, but I constitutionally needed to get away from it. When I look at Pop Song now, it looks like a product of its time. It was 2020, we were all cooped up inside. And there was this weird literary critical moment that really litigated what people wrote online, and judged writing really personally. It felt really constraining to publish nonfiction in that climate. I did it, I was excited about it, but I did have this feeling, even then, that the truth is so confining. Fiction lets me step outside of that.
You don’t want to write in that mode anymore.
If something in my life happens that pushes me that way, I will return to it. But I haven’t so far had a strong desire to return to the personal essay. For a while I was kicking around a book idea called Practicing, about religious practice and domestic life. It would have been a long meditation on things I wish I were better at, practicing and failing, but it never quite cohered. Nothing in my life is pushing me back to that form, though.
But you’re still interested in writing critical work.
I would like to write, like, one good essay a year. That seems nice. I just don’t have anything to say about myself right now. My life is fine!
What is fiction giving you that nonfiction doesn’t?
Fiction has this incredible ability to orchestrate. I often think in terms of tension, of creating relationships and then applying tension to them. I find that really satisfying, like you’re a maestro conducting the story. Fiction allows you to do that in a way nonfiction can’t accomplish, because in nonfiction, so much is owed to the truth of what happened and how it felt. In nonfiction, you’re moving backward in the text; in fiction, you’re making your way forward.
Discipline isn’t your first foray into fiction. You wrote an erotic novella in 2016, Fantasian, which I can’t really find online except for a lot of money.
Right. In 2016 I was transitioning from working at a sex store in Park Slope to working at an organization in Manhattan called the New York City Anti-Violence Project. Fantasian came about because I had reviewed a previous novella in that series, for Full Stop actually. I really enjoyed the publishing project, Badlands; I thought it was very cool and political, using erotica in a very specific way and subverting what it is we think an erotic novel can do. At the time I was also writing a sex column for Nerve, R.I.P. I was writing sexy stuff! Badlands reached out to me and it made me want to rework this old manuscript to fit their brief, which was six chapters with six sex scenes.
I had a lot of fun with that project. It was fun to enter the literary world in a very playful way. I would love to reissue Fantasian, it would be so fun.
So how do we get from there to Pop Song?
So, while at the Anti-Violence Project, I moved into this mode of mostly writing criticism. In part because I realized my parents were following my career with, like, a lot of dismay. They didn’t really understand what I was doing and I wanted to write things that they could read.
Not six sex scenes.
Exactly. I couldn’t even tell them that book existed. But I was excited about reviews. I started writing for The Nation around that time, and I started a column for Paris Review about art history. I wrote a fun hitpiece on A Little Life, which is still one of my favorite pieces of criticism I’ve ever done. I wrote this and became absolutely addicted to criticism. I was addicted to the high of being right.
Criticism makes you a better writer. It forces you to read closely. That’s something I love about it. At the same time, I became really tired of the restrictions of online publishing, especially in terms of wordcount. I couldn’t get as in-depth as I would have liked, or as revealing as I would have liked. I became very interested in the trust of a full-length book, and what that trust could allow the writer. By the middle of a book I’d like to assume that the reader is there with me because they want to be.
I didn’t know at the time what it felt like to write something that was ten thousand words, but I wanted to. I found out it feels like learning to run long distance. It’s a different muscle. You’re thinking in terms of thousands of words rather than paragraphs.
It sounds like a natural evolution of what you’d been doing up to that point.
The feedback I got was important for that as well. It felt really easy and, like, right, to be approached by different people and places who saw what I was doing and wanted me to do more of it.
Your interest in visual art feels especially consistent. Do you paint?
I do. Yeah. Okay. So—Discipline is not a work of autofiction.
I wouldn’t do that to you. If anything, I think it’s very funny that that interpretation has been thrown onto you because the first chapter of Discipline seems to draw a really specific argument against reading it as autofiction, in a way that’s very fun.
I had a lot of fun doing that. It was like doing donuts in a field.
I bet. There’s some metanarrative pyrotechnics you’re pulling off in this book that are so fun for me as a reader.
I love that shit. I love the questions that it brings up. What does it mean to make something? What does it mean to construct something and call it a story, or to call it art?
But. Yes. I studied painting in college. I studied art history, which was my way of understanding and writing about culture.
Do you feel like studying art criticism is where you get your critical instincts?
Yes, but at this point I’ve probably read more literary criticism than art criticism. Which maybe makes me a bad art critic. But the technical tools of art history are so valuable to me. Who is making this? How is it made? What are the materials? Who is financing this? It’s a way of examining the surface and the construction of a work rather than or in addition to what the work contains. That’s the lens I bring into all my criticism.
Do you still paint?
Not at the moment. It’s just expensive and messy. It’s hard for me to maintain an art practice that exists in the same space as everything else—like washing your brushes at the same sink where you wash dishes and fill your tea kettle.
But so you write this longform book of criticism and by the time it comes out you’re like, I don’t want to do this anymore.
A little. But also, I put a lot of my life into that book. It’s not everything, of course, but in a way it feels like I said all I had to say. In the critical response to the book, which was so generous, some people picked up on this aspect of the book that was me being very upset with language. In Pop Song, I’m frustrated with language, because it can’t encompass life. It’s frustrating to try to make words describe something that is not made of words. Life is not made of words! My friend, the poet Courtney Bush, says that it’s like trying to mop with a tennis ball. Why would you mop with a tennis ball when you could play tennis? Of course, there are a lot of skillful nonfiction writers who write as though they’re playing tennis, who have a very skillful and operatic sense of the work. But for me, I struggled within the prism of nonfiction, and fiction felt very exciting and liberating.
Did the decision to pursue the MFA come from that?
Yes. I think the novel had always been my white whale. At that point in my career I felt that, if I didn’t learn to write a novel, if I didn’t make a concerted effort to learn how a novel works, then I never would. And that’s a hard thing to learn on your own. A lot of people have written novels without MFAs, obviously. But what really attracted me to the MFA was this feeling of having time, time to read, time to breathe, time to expand. I really needed that. And time to read books that didn’t come out in the last year. I wanted space to read other things that I wouldn’t have been likely to pick up in my free time.
Does the spark for Discipline happen at some point in your MFA?
It does. But it starts with a different project, one I’ve alluded to in interviews before, this long historical novel in the third person that I ended up finding really limiting. Maybe third person is one of the most limiting forms, in a way. Or maybe not. Maybe I just don’t know how to do it. But in my last semester I felt a powerful desire to write in first person again. Third person felt like driving something clunky and slow, where first person feels like driving something with a lot of power that can go really fast and be very flexible.
Discipline really starts there, with Christine’s consciousness, with her voice. It is also a kind of synthesis of everything I’d learned about writing and letting myself have a lot of fun with it.
That’s interesting to me because the experience of reading the book feels very intentionally slow, quiet, methodical. And I’m curious, especially in the light of doing donuts in a field, where that meticulousness came from. Is it part of Christine? Is it something you edit down to? Do you edit up or down?
I tend to be a lean writer. There’s not a lot of fluff, and if there is I cut it pretty early on. There are whole chapters of this book that I’ve discarded. But on the smaller level, the paragraph level, I want to be very intentional. Many of the sentences in this book are printed the way I first wrote them. I don’t tend to go back and work over the prose much, because I want to be exacting. What’s exciting to me about writing is that initial burst of energy.
That’s a very critical approach to writing.
I could be less critical. This is actually getting in the way of a project I’m working on now—I’ll run into a wall and be unable to get over it because my sentences aren’t perfect. But writing Discipline was really quite joyous. Navigating the structure of it, with those paintings as anchors, gave me so much material that it felt easy to fill the container.
The paintings are a good trick. Not, like, a trick.
It’s kind of a trick.
Coming from writing criticism, it’s like you get to smuggle art criticism into your novel. What made you pick these artists? Do you draw a line through them?
I wouldn’t say that there’s a unifying principle across the artists. I planned the tour first, trying to think about what a reasonable trajectory for a person going across the country would be. Starting in Chicago, going to the west coast, making your way down. Once I knew which city she would be in, I thought about what she could encounter in each one. In Chicago, I saw there was a Celmins in the collection, though it’s not actually the one described in the book. Farther midwest she sees a Hopper, though not in a museum setting. In Portland she sees a Frankenthaler. Really, it started as a geographical exercise.
After geography came thematics, asking myself what pieces of art could ground the discussions I wanted to have. In some instances, the art created the theme for me. In others, I chose the piece because I wanted something specific to emerge. But, you know, I also chose Celmins because I like her. I’ve written about her before, for the Nation. Looking at her work, I think about genre. I think about the making of something that’s meant to look like the real thing, or reflect a memory of the real thing—I think about realism. In that first chapter, that’s also a guiding principle for the book, in thinking about how to read fictional text. I do think of that first chapter as me at my most annoying!
Why would you think that?
It’s where I’m having the most fun, where I’m being the loudest. Maybe even a little obnoxious, signaling that this is a creative thing, this is fiction. I’m winking, almost. And I loved it; I loved writing it. It’s the part of the book where I’m laying everything out, where we know Christine the least well. As we grow more emotionally close to her, the tricks are a bit more in line with what she’s expressing.
It feels very natural to think about a Hopper painting when you’re lonely in the middle of nowhere.
Exactly. And the archeology metaphor that arises from Agnes Martin’s grids—though even that also felt like me taking a moment for myself. I wanted Christine to have a Southwest moment, because that was so important for me in my own life. There are a lot of moments in Discipline that feel like they’re for me, for me to nerd out about something, or to make myself laugh. I just had so much fun writing this book.
It’s funny to me to think about you having so much fun writing this book considering the emotional stakes of it are actually quite dark. Especially where we end with Richard, where the Celmins painting of waves, that oceanic imagery, really feels like a driving force for the book. It goes into Richard’s own seascape paintings, and then we do end in the ocean, in an incredibly dark scene. Was that still fun for you?
It was. I mean, it was challenging. It was challenging to write Richard, because it took me a long time to get a handle on him. I don’t have a Richard in my life, which is for the best, but it made discovering him harder. And then the writing of those final scenes felt almost like a seance to me. I associate this with nonfiction more, but it required a kind of emotional contortion to create something and make it felt on the page. I needed to feel the stress in my body to write it, and that was hard. Really hard. I’m sure there’s a healthier way to do this, but writing isn’t healthy.
But formally, staging the encounter between these characters was exciting for me. A real impetus for me writing this book was just to make these characters talk to each other. I hadn’t really seen a book where the characters have to do that.
I do feel like it’s a common narrative motion to cut away right before the hard conversation.
Right, and that was what I was writing toward the entire time. I felt like I just needed to get them in a room together. And then I needed to figure out what the hell happened in that room.
This motivates the shift in the book to the present tense.
Yes. Past tense works for the first half of the book because I could write it from the position of Christine having arrived in Maine, at Richard’s. Almost like a report, or like she’s telling him about her travels. But continuing in the past tense wouldn’t make sense, because she would be reporting from a position of knowing what’s going to happen. The vantage point wouldn’t be right; it would be a different narrative situation that would demand a different structure. The present tense allows for a kind of discovery.
That was true to my experience writing the book, too. I had to shift to the present tense because I felt much more like I was directing the characters, moving them and positioning them in what felt like real time.
Watching them move, those movements—I really admire the way these characters act with each other. There’s a real intimacy they share that is both because and despite of the harm that was caused. I get a real sense of sympathy and critique for both Christine and for Richard.
Christine behaves badly in the second half of the book. Throughout the book, really. But she’s really selfish. She’s really cruel without quite knowing why she’s being cruel.
But why would she be nice to him?
Right, but then she is sometimes nice to him. I was interested in exploring that relationship through this kind of bruised intimacy, because it didn’t seem right that there wouldn’t be a kind of closeness. There’s a reason they were so close to begin with; it’s not like they were strangers to each other. He’s the person who taught her how to cook. Now, in his sickness, she’s cooking for him. It’s like cooking as an act of hate—it both is and is not an act of care.
I wasn’t interested in presenting Richard as a villain. Or, I was interested in not presenting him as a villain. But to have the conversation requires a more even footing. Like, he kind of has to be sick, so that she can take care of him. She pities him, in a way; seeing him in that state allows her to feel some sort of compassion for him, or allows him to become human to her. Because he’s not human to her for most of the book. He doesn’t even have a name, he’s just “The Painter.” He’s not real to her for most of the book, but he has to become real in order for her to really face him.
The whole second half of the book says so much about the intimacy of harm. They’re so close in the way that only people who are that close can hurt you that badly.
Someone made this comment to me that the real harm wasn’t that he acted badly to her, but that he killed the part of her that made her an artist. That doubt presents a real loss, and that doubt could only happen because they had such a close relationship.
My time at the Anti-Violence Project made me think really critically about the question of what we do with people who commit harm. What are non-carceral ways to address harm? What’s restorative or transformative justice really look like, and then what do those conversations look like? It’s not an easy ending and I didn’t want it to be. It couldn’t be clean.
Kyle Francis Williams is a writer from Long Island. His fiction has appeared in A Public Space, New England Review, The Southampton Review, Joyland, and elsewhere. He is an editor-at-large for Full Stop.
This post may contain affiliate links.
