I AM an ambitious woman,” R. O. Kwon says early in our conversation about her new novel, Exhibit, forthcoming in May from Riverhead Books. “It feels dangerous to say that. And coming from a body like mine, it feels dangerous to say I am an ambitious artist.”
Kwon, who was born in Seoul and grew up in Los Angeles, is speaking from her apartment in San Francisco, a city she has called home for almost fifteen years. She appears poised yet relaxed in her office, which doubles as her dining room, a space she has made cavelike, ideal for writing, the windows and curtains closed, lights low. The fruits of Kwon’s ambition can be found in her still young but impressive career: Her debut novel, The Incendiaries (Riverhead Books, 2018), announced her as a striking, essential voice in contemporary literature. That novel, which took ten years to write, made it onto “best book of the year” lists in over forty publications. Some of her essays, like the one she wrote in 2018 for the Cut about her distinctive under-eye makeup (“Why I Don’t Leave the House Without Putting on Black Eye Shadow”), or the one in Vogue (“Join Us”) in 2019, not long after she came out as bisexual, were ubiquitous on social media in the days after they were published. The anthology she coedited with novelist Garth Greenwell, Kink (Simon & Schuster, 2021), became a best-seller, and now her sophomore novel, Exhibit, is one of the most buzzed-about books of the year, festooned with glowing blurbs from acclaimed authors such as Madeline Miller and C Pam Zhang and anticipated in literary publications and pop outlets alike, from the Rumpus to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.
For Kwon, the start to this impressive artistic career has felt subversive, sometimes even fraught. She says she feels pushed by society to want certain things, such as being a “mother of,” “daughter of,” “sister of,” “friend of,” and to not want certain things, such as sex, food, creative achievements, and time for herself. “At some point I realized that the things I’m pushed to want are all mediatedthings that are more clearly and purely for myself,” she says. “I wondered why wanting for myself feels so dangerous, so wayward.”
