Book Title: LINH LY IS DOING JUST FINE
Character Name: Linh Ly
How would you describe your childhood?
Typical, I suppose. I went to school. I went to parties as a teenager. My parents worked to keep me fed and the refrigerator full. They sometimes fought. Parents always fight, don’t they?
Significant other?
(Laughs.) Pass.
Biggest challenge in relationships?
I’m not what guys want or think they want.
Where do you live?
In the metroplex, you know, that unending mass of cities that connect and surround Dallas and Fort Worth in Texas. It’s not really inspiring. It’s highways and heavy traffic. There are always so many cars — people driving somewhere at all hours. It’s huge and anonymous.
Do you have any enemies?
Sure, but they don’t know it.
How do you feel about the place where you are now? Is there something you are particularly attached to, or particularly repelled by, in this place?
It’s all that I know. I like the night drives I take. I love driving for hours on end. It’s my most peaceful experience.
Do you have children, pets, both, or neither?
Lollipop is my cat. She’s the best.
What do you do for a living?
I work at a university writing copy and doing whatever they tell me to do. It’s been a good, stable job so far. I know my place there.
Greatest source of joy?
Does wine count?
What do you do to entertain yourself or have fun?
Drive without a destination in mind. Do you know most people go about 90 mph on the highways here? No matter what speed limit is posted. Sometimes I can’t bear to look in my rearview mirror, to see how people are changing lanes. It makes it feel like each time you drive out you could die. But they know how to drive. They all have somewhere to go. It slows down a little at night. There’s a calmness to the dark. A reassurance.
What is your greatest personal failing, in your view?
I’m not ready to talk about that.
What keeps you awake at night?
All the dangerous things that could happen to my mother.
What is the most pressing problem you have at the moment?
The new men my mother is dating.
Is there something that you need or want that you don’t have? For yourself or for someone important to you?
Yes.
Why don’t you have it? What is in the way?
Me.
A Novel
Told with deadpan humor and brutal honesty, this debut novel follows Vietnamese American Linh Ly’s unraveling as she reckons with the traumas of both her past and present, perfect for fans of Joan Is Okay and Luster.
When twenty-seven-year-old Linh Ly’s recently divorced mother begins dating a coworker, Linh is determined to make sure he is worthy of her mother. She’s seen the kind of men her mother ends up with—she grew up watching her unreliable and volatile alcoholic father as her mother worked two jobs to make ends meet. Linh is certain that her mother can’t do this on her own, but what begins as genuine worry quickly turns obsessive.
Following her mother and spying on her dates becomes part of Linh’s routine, especially after a university shooting at Linh’s work that leaves her feeling adrift—at least her mom’s dating life gives her something to focus on. Linh doesn’t exactly have a life of her own (dating or otherwise) and figures the best course of action is action—not how she handled the shooting: curl up in a ball and wait it out.
Linh is slowly forced to reconcile the image of her mother from her childhood with the woman she’s getting to know as an adult. Growing up Vietnamese in the middle of Texas with a broken household taught Linh a certain guarded way of living—one she never quite left behind.
Moving, insightful, and caustically funny all at once, Linh Ly Is Doing Just Fine depicts a quarter-life crisis in deeply relatable prose.
Women's Fiction Contemporary | Multicultural Asian [Alcove Press, On Sale: July 23, 2024, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9781639107896 / eISBN: 9781639107902]
Thao Votang’s novel LINH LY IS DOING JUST FINE is forthcoming from Alcove Press (July 2024). Her work has been published in Salon, Hyperallergic, Sightlines, Southwest Contemporary, and Lucky Jefferson. When she’s not watering her plants or playing tennis, she can be found reading one of the many books she has put in her bag or hidden under that couch cushion. Her fiction is informed by her experience as part of the Vietnamese diaspora deep in the lone star state, her interest in how we love our mothers, and the climate catastrophe.
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