Describe your latest book/project/work.
Land of Milk and Honey is about the search for pleasure at the end of the world. A smog has descended and killed all food crops when an American chef is lured to a secret colony of the wealthy at the border of Italy. It’s the story of how one woman comes alive again to food, to her body, to her own source of pleasure in a world that seems to be dying; and it’s also the story of how society grapples with questions of how we divide limited resources. Most of all, the writing of this book was a joy to me.
What was your favorite book as a child?
For the purposes of this particular novel, I will cite
Bread and Jam for Frances.
When did you know you were a writer?
One answer is that I knew from as early as I can remember, when I was writing and illustrating my own, stapled-together books. Another answer is that I knew writing was for me the moment I realized I was not very good at drawing.
What does your writing workspace look like?
In attempting to pin down this answer, I will get it wrong. I have never maintained a regular routine, or workspace, for very long. If I do settle into one temporarily, I get itchy within about six months. Possibly this is a holdover from my peripatetic upbringing. Currently, as publicity for
Land of Milk and Honey eats up my daylight hours, I have taken to writing as late as three in the morning, in a very small, chocolate-colored office where the door is kept closed no matter how hot or stuffy the night. What I need right now is that feeling that everyone else is asleep and no one can reach me. I’ll need something different next year, in five years, in ten years. I try to listen to what the current project demands.
What I need right now is that feeling that everyone else is asleep and no one can reach me.
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What do you care about more than most people around you?
Background noises. Snack foods. Texture, particularly.
Introduce one other author you think people should read, and suggest a good book with which to start.
Kathleen Alcott writes short stories that not enough people know about. She captures the delicacy and dagger-edge of being a woman with a clarity I rarely encounter. Her collection,
Emergency, possesses the warping force of truly excellent fiction. I read it on the train. I read it walking down the street. The rest of the world blurred a bit when I had it in my hand.
What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?
Summer intern at a tiny company in Berkeley, run by a screaming narcissist, that more or less sold gold labels of the type that would be stuck onto food products as a marker of quality. It may have been a scam. The work itself was dull, the power dynamics fascinating. I think that I once spoke to Martin Yan on the phone.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
No. I generally like writers to remain as close to fictional as possible.
What scares you the most as a writer?
The possibility of stagnation. I would like to never know exactly what I’m doing until I’ve done it; were it possible, I’d write with my eyes closed, I think. Or develop deliberate, siloed bouts of amnesia as an editing tool.
I would like to never know exactly what I’m doing until I’ve done it; were it possible, I’d write with my eyes closed, I think.
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Offer a favorite sentence or passage from another writer.
“Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.” —
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
Share a sentence of your own that you're particularly proud of.
“He never stored a strawberry cold. Close to the stem, he said, closest to the earth, their perfume is complex, not sugar: closer to flesh, the flesh of a loved one, not sanitized, not anodyne, but full of many waters.”
What's your biggest grammatical pet peeve?
Peak and pique are up there.
Do you have any phobias?
I used to feel immense horror at the thought of any viscous, white food served at room temperature. Mayonnaise! Ranch dressing! Don’t even get me started on runny cheeses. To a person who did not grow up in a culture desensitized to rotting animal milk, these were quite a psychological hurdle. My current phobia is picking up any unscheduled phone call.
My current phobia is picking up any unscheduled phone call.
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Name a guilty pleasure you partake in regularly.
No pleasures are guilty. I am very proud of my ability to slowly, ridge by ridge, consume a bag of sour cream and cheddar Ruffles while watching mediocre reality dating shows. You learn a great deal about human behavior while watching people perform what they think is their best and worst.
What's the best advice you’ve ever received?
Write as if the world has ended and everyone in it is dead.
Five books of transition
I love the fall because it is a season of transition, when one feels correct in walking melancholically down the street, thinking wistful thoughts about beauty and loss. These five books capture that feeling of angsty girl autumn.
Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
The Gastronomical Me by M. F. K. Fisher
Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
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C Pam Zhang is the author of
How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature[CE1], long-listed for the Booker Prize, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and one of Barack Obama's favorite books of the year. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a New York Public Library Cullman Fellow.
Land of Milk and Honey is Zhang's latest novel.