Full Description
In her funny, idiosyncratic, and propulsive new novel, Art Is Everything, Yxta Maya Murray offers us a portrait of a Chicana artist as a woman on the margins. L.A. native Amanda Ruiz is a successful performance artist who is madly in love with her girlfriend, a wealthy and pragmatic actuary named Xochitl. Everything seems under control: Amanda's grumpy father is living peacefully in Koreatown; Amanda is about to enjoy a residency at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and, once she gets her NEA, she's going to film a groundbreaking auto-critical documentary in Mexico.But then everything starts to fall apart when Xochitl's biological clock begins beeping, Amanda's father dies, and she endures a sexual assault. What happens to an artist when her emotional support vanishes along with her feelings of safety and her finances? Written as a series of web posts, Instagram essays, Snapchat freakouts, rejected Yelp reviews, Facebook screeds, and SmugMug streams-of-consciousness that merge volcanic confession with eagle-eyed art criticism, Art Is Everything shows us the painful but joyous development of a mid-career artist whose world implodesust as she has a breakthrough.
Contents
1. I Didn't Even Know These Existed
2. A Struggle That Probably Won't Pay Off In The End
3. Maybe I Shouldn't Have Insisted On Taking This Trip
4. Hey Can I Come Back Home Now
5. I Didn't See That One Coming
6. Weird Social Media Stuff You Do When Your Dad Dies
7. This New Job Isn't That Great
8. I'm Not Sure If I Should Have Pressed Send
9. Is This Healing Me or is It Propaganda
10. I Am Trying To Care About This But It's Not Really Working
11. Unlobstering
12. It's Not Stalking, It's Just Finding Somebody's Number and Calling Them on the Phone
13. Crucifixion and Happiness
14. Authenticity Culture is Dumb
15. The Science of Invisibility
16. Private Language
17. Hope In a Phone
18. It's Fine to Be Edited by Your Gallerist
19. Maybe This Will Make Me Some Money
20. Crushing It
21. I Don't Think I'm Handling This Very Well
22. The Disease of the Learned
23. This is Bad
24. The Sucking One
25. Yeah Getting a Job is Probably a Good Idea
26. BjÖrk's Kids Seem OK
27. The Cry It Out Method
28. Own Your Emotion
29. Make Something Out of It
30. Arte Povera
Sources
List of Illustrations
