Your Love is Not Good

by Johanna Hedva Narrated by Johanna Hedva

Overview

At a party in Los Angeles, a queer Korean American painter spots a woman who instantly controls the room: gorgeous and distant and utterly white, the center of everyone's attention. She wants Hanne, or wants to be her, or to sully her, or destroy her, or consume her, or some confusion of all the above. She will use art to get closer to Hanne, beginning a series of paintings with her new muse as model.



When the paintings of Hanne become a hit, resulting in the artist's first sold-out show, she resolves to bring her new muse with her to Berlin, to continue their work, and her seduction. But a petition started by a Black performance artist begins making the rounds, calling for the boycott of major museums and art galleries for their imperialist and racist practices.



Torn between her desire to support the petition, to be a success, and to possess Hanne, the painter and her reality become more unstable and disorienting, unwilling to cut loose any one of her warring ambitions, yet unable to accommodate them all.



Your Love Is Not Good stuffs queer explosive into the cracks between identity and aspiration, between desire and art, and revels in the raining debris.



Contains mature themes.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Hedva is consistently savvy and surprising.” —Publishers Weekly

“A gripping, tightly plotted novel characterized by a trenchant exploration of race, queer desire, and power dynamics in the art world” —Reed McConnell, Frieze

“Impassioned, wry, compassionate, and hell-raising, this novel illuminates its frangible but resilient world the way a painter uses color on canvas to illuminate the focal point of her vision—building layer after layer of meaning until the image appears as if it has always been there for us to see. A resplendent and fearless book. Must read.” —Kirkus starred review

“An emotional and artistic bildungsroman … filled with apt perceptions and accurate barbs.” —ArtReview

“A thin permeable line between love and hate, pain and pleasure, self-love, self-flagellation, and total narcissism. Hedva's characters show us the complexities of being (in)human(e) beings and push our faces into the mud, an antagonism inflicted unto ourselves as we bully, bruise, blur, and break our way into the waking world. Hedva's willingness to parse apart ‘love’ from ‘goodness’ is the honesty we're all here and have been waiting for.” —Legacy Russell

“This precise page-turner of a tale about bad or nonexistent mothers, race, and the erotics of painting masterfully pins the art world to the buckram of its specimen tray, pointed sentence after sentence. Here everyone loses gorgeously, definitively—and lucky readers learn a lot about the game.” —Lucy Ives

“Your Love Is Not Good is a whirlwind, and a mural, and a mirror—Hedva's prose is incisive and empathetic, wholly comedic and deeply poignant. This story about the life of our ideas, the trajectory of our dreams, and the burden of our loves is wildly moving and entirely original. Hedva deftly juggles questions of ambition and debt with what we owe others, and what we owe ourselves, resulting in a novel that's both honest and enrapturing. Your Love Is Not Good is a genuine blast.” —Bryan Washington

“Your Love is Not Good is about love and desire, where they come from and where they lead us—places that are often bad, self-destructive, unbounded by conventional ethics or politics, but sometimes revelatory spaces where great art is made.” —Diarmuid Hester

 “Hedva writes with a cool, detached apathy. An important piece of work.” —Curtis Garner

“It's more than all this, but here is something about labor, the capitalist inseams in Identity, as expressed in an international art market that careens its participants—or is it the art?—towards suicide. For those needing—by hook or by crook, by rope, knife, mirror, or by truck—to leave something, or the art world, or the debt-collision of whatever they're doing, or even the internet for the next 24 goddamned hours, Your Love Is Not Good is very worth your beautiful time.” —Caren Beilin

“Your Love Is Not Good is a dazzling tale of claustrophobia and neglect. Swinging deftly between savage realism, scathing social satire, and brutal erotic haze, Johanna Hedva moves from agony to alchemy in this meticulously layered portrait of intimate corruption. Bursting into the broken places between shame and self-creation, trauma and accountability, righteousness and complicity, Your Love Is Not Good cracks open the art world to exorcise the pain of belonging.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

“Electric, pornographic, mischievous, and deeply funny. Your Love is Not Good is a parable of the artist who in search of beauty encounters something far more intoxicating: ruin. Burn your diaries, kill your darlings, and go toast your real friends— this is the summer beach read you’ll be talking about for the rest of the year.” —Lara Mimosa Montes

“By turns funny, brutal, and (surprisingly) tender, Your Love is Not Good is a major achievement. Hedva’s prose—which is gusty and taut—conveys a thrumming,  kaleidoscopically constructed narrative structure to produce for the reader an experience of something incredibly intimate, something profuse, raw, erotic and challenging. Your Love is Not Good contains revelations (both vibrating and appalling) about artists and practice, and about contemporary art worlds. An instant classic/must-read/ important addition to the (woefully scanty) genre of books by artists about art-life. A very moving read.” —Harry Dodge

Praise for Johanna Hedva

“It’s fucking brilliant. I’m in love. If there have to be novels, On Hell is what they should do.” —Anne Boyer

“Purchase or thrash: ‘genius.’ Relocate an ‘Ancient Greek text’ to ‘contemporary Los Angeles.’ Does a geographical cure excrete ghosts, ‘visions of strange bodies poised and moving,’ or does it produce a ‘deep, reverberating sound?’ Johanna Hedva’s Minerva begins in this place and we go there, which is to say a reader does. Or might: float/trust this process of alchemical, pelvic, infinite, sub-maternal, and ceramic change.” —Bhanu Kapil

“Reverberations of this book outlast everything else in our ears, ‘what felt like a skinned, feral cat breaching from my chest.’ Definitely Minerva, goddess of genius and poems! Celestial messenger Johanna Hedva gives up gold after the cult following of their book On Hell. A (god)dess-sized reconstruction of the world we only thought we knew! Welcome home, poets!” —CAConrad

“At some point while reading On Hell, I had the sensation that my heart had pushed through my chest, my brain had pushed through my skull, and my guts had pushed through my abdomen, and that I was, in solidarity with Hedva’s writing, wearing my insides on the outside of my body. Only writing this nakedly vulnerable could be this intensely embodied, and only writing this intensely embodied could be this insurrectionary.” —Brandon Shimoda

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2023-03-28
A queer Korean American artist interrogates the legacy and aftermath of Whiteness in the form of beauty, suffering, desire, and the complex interchange of power in this autofictive roman à clef.

The narrator of this lush and brutal novel is a study in dualities. Her father is Korean and abandons the family when she is around 10; her mother is White and loves her in a narcissistic, abusive way. Moreover, the narrator is a painter whose career centers in both the sweltering sunshine of Los Angeles and the eternal nocturne of Berlin, a figurative artist whose work underscores the complex interdependence of beauty, race, and power even as it nods to Western art’s tradition of “painting beautiful white women, the kind who always had more money, beauty and power than the painter”; and she is a queer woman with a submission kink whose “fetish for giving away…power [is] actually about controlling it.” After a period of relative stasis in her career, the narrator has two important solo shows lined up but finds herself without inspiration. Her search for a muse leads to Hanne, an LA art-world siren who initially attracts her with the proud, heedless power of her beauty and quickly becomes the focal point not only for the narrator's art, but also for the dynamic conflict between the narrator's own ideas about Whiteness—how it is “hard to paint precisely because it’s everywhere and in everything.…It’s the image of the world. And yet no one can see it for itself because there’s no such thing as an ipseity of white…”—and desire, where it comes from and who controls both its expression and its repercussions. The paintings of Hanne result in the narrator's first sold-out show, but just as she is poised to capitalize on that success, an influential Black performance artist publishes a petition calling for all artists of color to boycott museums and galleries with operating budgets over $1 million for their imperialist and racist exploitation of those artists, with the narrator's upcoming venues among them. Conflicted over the opposing impulses of her desire for recognition and solidarity, economic success and artistic authenticity, excellence and anonymity, the narrator spends a long, dark night of the soul spiraling around the splendor of self-destruction like a moth to a singular flame. Impassioned, wry, compassionate, and hell-raising, this novel illuminates its frangible but resilient world the way a painter uses color on canvas to illuminate the focal point of her vision—building layer after layer of meaning until the image appears as if it has always been there for us to see.

A resplendent and fearless book. Must read.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940194812943
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	01/28/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

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