Pop Song: Adventures in Art & Intimacy

Like a song that feels written just for you, Larissa Pham’s debut work of nonfiction captures the imagination and refuses to let go.

Pop Songis a book about love and about falling in lovewith a place, or a painting, or a personand the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and lossfrom Agnes Martin’s abstract paintings to James Turrell’s transcendent light works, and Anne Carson’sEros the Bittersweetto Frank Ocean’sBlondePham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself.

Pop Songis also a book about distances, near and far. As she travels from Taos, New Mexico, to Shanghai, China and beyond, Pham meditates on the miles we are willing to cover to get away from ourselves, or those who hurt us, and the impossible gaps that can exist between two people sharing a bed.

Pop Songis a book about all the routes by which we might escape our own needs before finally finding a way home. There is heartache in these pages, but Pham’s electric ways of seeing create a perfectly fractured portrait of modern intimacy that is triumphant in both its vulnerability and restlessness.

Hardcover May 4, 2021