entering the land of milk and honey
my new novel, O'Keeffe, and fragments of creative connection
I’m writing a week after the official reveal of my new novel’s cover, and I am still, clearly, not over it.
It is entrancing: powerfully feminine and softly erotic, earthy and unearthly, open to a sense of wonder. The novel, which you can now preorder ahead of its September release, follows a chef who flees her dying world for a mountaintop enclave in Europe, where she rediscovers the necessity of pleasure and the murkiness of promised paradise. This cover distills all that desire and female ambition, and the yearning for a place to go when the thing you love no longer brings you joy. It comes from a painting by Joani Tremblay, a Montreal-born artist I hadn’t heard of; yet I felt an immediate jolt of recognition when I saw it.
At the end of 2021, I was curled up in my new Brooklyn apartment when I came across the description of an O’Keeffe painting titled “Red Canna.” I was reading Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, the latest in my pile of biographies about women artists and writers. This habit had started during the worst parts of 2020, when I craved the simple, dumb assurance that women artists could, indeed, live into old age (or, in the case of Angela Carter, into an age sufficient to produce works of ageless brilliance). But by December of 2021, having shot straight from pandemic isolation into the overwhelming social life of New York, I was also reading biographies in hopes of finding a way to make sense of the life I’d been given.
O’Keeffe painted the fleshy, saturated petals of “Red Canna” in 1924, at a time when she wrestled with her own questions of how to order a creative life. “The thinking gets more serious when you…think alone” she'd written earlier, in 1916, of her move to South Carolina to teach art—a move that would presage her later, more famous departure for the remote vistas of New Mexico, where she learned to drive—slowly, stubbornly, confidently error-prone—on those wide, forgiving desert roads.
1924 was the year of “Red Canna,” and the year of O’Keeffe’s first major exhibition at Anderson Gallery in New York, and the year of her marriage to the man who put together that exhibition, George Stieglitz. This is not a story about nepotism; O’Keeffe’s talents are undeniable. Nor is this a story about the glitzy, dizzying art world of the 1920s in which O’Keeffe was a central figure—so central that, in 1927, the Brooklyn Museum honored her with a retrospective.
I live fifteen minutes from the Brooklyn Museum, and what interests me is the walk O’Keeffe may have taken up to her own retrospective. Maybe, at forty years old, she passed through the quieter, residential streets of Brooklyn, and the green acreage of Prospect Park. Maybe she was already imagining even greater spaces. I’m interested in the quiet, unglamorous private work that occurred as O’Keeffe’s public career took off: the difficult, necessarily lonely labor of separating the life that produces the work from the life made possible by producing the work.
I’ve pondered this question since my first book came out. The Writer, the person I’ve been for so long, is all interiors. The Author, a figure created and sent out into the world as a kind of midwife to the book, is all surfaces. New York has a reputation as a chilly city, capable of hardening its residents; and indeed, vigilance is necessary to prevent those cool, gleaming surfaces from spreading, like ice, into the interior. It is easy to go to an event every night, and to spend every waking hour speaking of writing with other writers—and to find that those things have replaced the writing itself.
By the way, that first major O'Keeffe exhibition in 1924? It was a joint show. O’Keeffe’s drawings and paintings shared space with Stieglitz’s photographs, some of which featured O’Keeffe, some of which showed her in the nude. One famous Stieglitz photograph, which I won’t show here, seats O’Keeffe with loose, flowing hair. She wears a gauzy white gown poised between the virginal and the maternal. O’Keeffe was deeply aware of how the images she created and the images created of her collided; you have only to see the severe, masculine beauty of the clothes she chose later in her life, in New Mexico. The bolo ties and geometric, wide-brimmed hats under which hair all but disappears seem severe, yet O’Keeffe within them looks relaxed—supported, perhaps. The clothes are a reclamation of cowboy masculinity that I won’t get into right now, but boy, do I think about it.
In 1929, just four years after moving with Stieglitz into the Shelton Hotel in Midtown, O’Keeffe painted her last New York landscape. She would never again touch that subject matter. That same year, she traveled to New Mexico for the first time.
Have I mentioned that I’m terrified of driving in cities?
Tremblay, whose work has a forceful and undeniably feminine beauty that reminds me of O’Keeffe, cites poetry, not visual art, as the most direct source of inspiration for the painting on the cover of Land of Milk and Honey. This painting hung in Harper’s Gallery as part of Tremblay’s 2022 debut solo exhibition, which took its title from a Sarah Burgoyne poem: “The whole time, the sun.” Poems were offered in the gallery alongside paintings; and on Tremblay’s website, a Burgoyne poem is the first image offered of the exhibition—a mixing reminiscent of that Stieglitz and O’Keeffe show, yet different.
Reading the below Burgoyne poem jabs me with a bright, breathless shard of déjà vu: there’s a scene in Land of Milk and Honey in which these same elements of car, sun, and a gaze shared between two people are remixed.
Am I making too much of this? Probably. Sun, staring, and thirst are the common stuff of experience—yet I choose to find the line running from my work to Burgoyne’s, through Tremblay and O’Keeffe, magical. Early readers have described Land of Milk and Honey as “unique” and “singular,” and these are true qualities that I worked hard to create—yet the closer I get to the singularly lonely experience of publication day, the more I’m drawn to places of overlap rather than originality. These glimmering, fragmentary, and timeless connections—to visual artists and filmmakers, to other writers publishing this year, to writers who made my work possible—cannot be forced. It’s like the process of writing itself: wondrous in its unpredictability. You can only be at the right place at the right time to catch a beam of light.
Or you might say that it makes sense, dramaturgically.
xx,
Pam
My preorder pitch
Please do preorder Land of Milk and Honey, "a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world.” It did feel rapturous, writing it. I’ll let a few writers I admire speak to the reading experience.
“It’s rare to read anything that feels this unique.” –Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
“The way Zhang writes about food and desire and human failings is exquisite—sensually detailed, at times visceral. This is a tremendous novel that explores the way people will break when the world itself is broken. Land of Milk and Honey is truly exceptional.” – Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist
“When I read I’m always searching for pleasure, for the want, and this book helped me feel something.” –Raven Leilani, author of Luster
“C Pam Zhang is one of the most talented novelists writing today.” –Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of All This Could Be Different
“No one writes like C Pam Zhang.” –Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin
“What a delicious world Zhang has created—full of so much wonder.” –Kat Chow, author of Seeing Ghosts
It is all terribly undignified, I know, but in the small, precarious ecosystem of literary publishing, preorders really do matter. Imagine them as important early bat-signals pinging out to the literati scribbling in their caves; plus, they count toward first-week sales. It would mean a great deal if you preordered, or requested the book at your local library, or told a friend.
And, if you would consider supporting your local indie bookstore, and even taking that huge leap of faith to preorder from a real live bookseller, on the phone? Magical.
(I might mention preorders once or twice more in the run-up to publication, but I am quite allergic to talking only about myself. I send newsletters very infrequently. You can unsubscribe at the bottom of this email.)
Read/reading/recently:
The Haunting of Hajji Hotak by Jamil Jan Kochai
Prophet by Sin Blaché and Helen MacDonald
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid
Sea Change by Gina Chung
The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chang
Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson
Real Americans by Rachel Khong
Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie
To Be a Man by Nicole Krauss
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, Luster by Raven Leilani, and The Sentence by Louise Erdrich, in preparation for an online novel intensive I’ll be teaching.
A non-exhaustive list of some indie bookstores you might support this month: Greenlight, Brooklyn; Yu & Me, Manhattan; Skylight, LA; Powell's, Portland; Loyalty, DC; Green Apple, San Francisco; Prairie Lights, Iowa City.
Can you share some of the bios of women artists/writers you’ve been enjoying?