Your Love is Not Good by Johanna Hedva

Your Love is Not Good Reviews

• 
  Nancy Dawkins

  I absolutely could not put this down. Gripping and addictive.
  
  I wanted to give it 5 stars but there were a few smalls parts that I think weren’t edited perfectly and I had to reread to understand, which pulled me out of the flow that was glorious through most of it.
• 
  Ruth Z.

  "I thought of how teeth get chipped doing what they were made to do, how eyes get tired from seeing, how knees and backs become pained from bending and walking and sitting and standing, how lungs constrict when they breathe too fast, how nipples crack from being sucked on, how hearts exhaust themselves from their simple, innocent task of beating. There is a fundamental paradox to life, I've always felt infested with it, the fact that life feelings most itself, most incorrigibly awake, when it's closest, right up and pushing against the skin of death, this is where I've lived, recidivous, falling back and again and back some more into it, perhaps it's only that I've tried to make a kind of meaning out of this relapse, this lacuna, and it's not about dying, this is the puzzle, but about how to live."
• 
  James Deighton

  this is 100% up there as one of my favourite books i’ve read! a large part of that is down to the writing style which completely engrossed me. it’s wild, vivid imagery not only felt entrancing at times but also fit perfectly within the overall context of the story (that being centred around an artist) that made it seamlessly transition from the very real-life imagery (the actual artwork being created) to the more psychological & impactful imagery used to demonstrate the books themes! the themes the book does explore are handled incredibly well imo and all in a way that gives the book an incredible flow! race, identity and guilt are arguably the main 3 that can be seen constantly throughout, and each topic is dissected and dispersed at points which make them feel most impactful! can’t praise it enough, this was so good!
• 
  Aron

  Another boring book about insipid, privileged people written by a pretty decent US writer. It seems young US writers are so caught up in their blinkered ideology while being anesthetized by their wealth and privilege, that they have lost sight of reality.
  
  If you can afford to get yourself into a quarter million dollars of debt, and live between Berlin and Los Angeles (as does the main character, and it seems the author themself) you are privileged, no matter how you “identify”. Sure you aren’t the 1% characters, each of whom you disdainfully call “white” girls (are you sure you”re not misgendering them, missy), but you’re better off than 99% of the rest of humanity. Hence your so-called “artistic suffering” comes off petty and whiney, best not put on paper, because it makes you sound pretentious.
  
  I want the couple hours I invested in this book back, so recommending you don’t waste your time. If you want to read a really great, semi-autobiographical first novel about becoming a young person becoming a transgressive artist, read Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
• 
  Jules Nymo

  I need to process this freaking book oh god I love it I can’t
• 
  Glen Helfand

  Ego is a mother. And both are reasons that make artists. Mother, ego. But what about love? Or the lack thereof. Your love (her love) is never enough. Mother is witchy and controlling, her studio full of magical and inappropriate smells. Or inappropriate, isolating actions. Mother made a complicated daughter, and they haven't spoken for decades. The art world can also be a bad mother, the opposite of nurturing. Daughter, our narrator, is a good painter, perhaps better than her mother, but full of intersectional uncertainty and self-destructive attachments. She's obsessed-*obsessed*-- with a woman who is first identified as a twin, but eventually gets a name. She is ultimately a mean muse, which makes the artist pass along the cruelty to a next generation. It's hard to know what the artist sees in this cipher of a muse, who is blank and disinterested. It's hard to even picture what she looks like. For those who know the specter of contemporary art, its contours are vivid here. But so is the unlikability of its denizens in downtown LA and Berlin. These are lands of mutable attachments, sticking and unhooking, but full of yearning. You want to be there, but constantly question what you're getting out of it.
• 
  Edward Champion

  Points for breezy chapters (all titled art terms) and kink representation, although this novel about a painter fresh out of art school and bouncing around Berlin and Los Angeles isn't particularly interesting and quickly wears out its welcome. Sell art, wear lingerie, bemoan loss of family. Yada yada yada. I wish I could care, but I didn't.
• 
  John

  One of the last two offerings from And Other Stories, this book is part of the increasingly crowded field of 'authorship as therapy'.
  
  These explorations of idiosyncratic angsts, however courageous and honest, rarely seem to have much to offer anyone over the age of, say, 45 (and for whom the stylistic stratagem of using explicit eroticism tends to elicit a yawn rather than the reader's engagement).
  
  The book's intent is to expose the pain caused when love is intertwined with power, oppression, and societal norms around race, gender and sexual politics. On the positive side, I can understand how some passages may resonate with a younger mixed-race and non-heterosexual reader facing the same struggles to locate their place (their "tribe") in the world where they can be happy. Hedva's writing flows easily as (or should that be in spite of being) a raw account of the author's experience with relationships within the context of the brutally competitive and devious art world. Some of the descriptive passages are well crafted.
  
  However, in Sections I and II the overall impression is of just one other damaged person (like all of us, depending on the definition?) who is spinning in a cloud of self-pity (at the end of which I nearly gave up on the book). Only in Section III, in Berlin with Yves, did I start to see her (and Yves) as a believable version of a human being. And the debate over Iris Wells' challenge to the art world is a far more interesting way to expose the issues underlying the book compared to her interminable infatuation with Hanna.
• 
  Staceywh_17

  We don't get to find out the artist's name, which I did struggle with as I couldn't connect with her. As the book furthered I began to feel that our anonymous artist is actually Hedva herself and this was her story, who knows?
  
  Hedva's writing is rich, deep and provocative. I found the chapter headings particularly interesting as each one of them conveyed an artist's terminology of colours or painting styles.
  
  The characters are privileged pretentious and their egos are huge. Is artistic suffering really a thing?
  
  Your Love Is Not Good is queer, sexy and raw.
  
  Many thanks to Tandem Collective for my spot on the readalong.
  
  Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐
• 
  Mikki Janower

  really pertinent to the present moment in the art world and *really* hard to put down
• 
  lyraand

  "set in the Berlin and Los Angeles art worlds, following a queer biracial Korean American painter on the precipice of success as she struggles to reconcile her ambitions, her growing debt, and her complicated relationship to whiteness with her support for a boycott of museums and galleries for their racist and imperialist practices"