Larissa Pham on Her New Novel, Discipline, and Finding Truth in Disaster

From Painter and Model (The Creation Chamber) (1931) | Arshile Gorky / Smithsonian American Art Museum /
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Larissa Pham’s new novel, Discipline (Random House, 2026), started out as something else entirely. “I was going to write ten really gnomic, mysterious meditations on American paintings,” she told me, as we chatted on a snowy day in January. “I have this whole fantasy of writing these weird meditations. And then I was like, no, don’t do that. You need to make money, actually. You should write a novel.” She laughed.

Pham began her writing career with the novella Fantasian (Badlands Unlimited, 2016), followed by her memoir in essays, Pop Song (Catapult, 2021) and criticism published in The Nation, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. Though Discipline is a return to fiction, it continues the through line of her nonfiction writing: the intersection of desire, art criticism, gender, and race. The result might not be gnomic, but it is a meditation on art and identity. Discipline follows Christine, an artist, as she embarks on a book tour for her novel about her relationship with her former painting professor. Blending aspects of literary fiction and thrillers, the narrative traces Christine’s experience coming to terms with the fact that her professor has read her book—and he doesn’t agree with her version of the story.

At The New School, Pham is an Assistant Professor of Writing Nonfiction. Her literature seminar guides writers through novella-length books with the goal of helping them identify the craft questions that fascinate them.  

Jacqueline LeKachman: Why were you compelled to write this novel after writing your novella and essay collection?

Larissa Pham: Many authors, myself included, tend to revisit the same themes over a body of work. When I wrote Fantasian, I was really interested in class and the sort of chameleon nature of joining a new social class. But it’s also about sex and power. In Pop Song, I was interested in similar themes, but through a more personal lens. With Discipline, I wanted to stage a scenario where I could explore a certain question, which has interested me for some time: How do we relate to people who have harmed us? It was important to me to explore that in the context of fiction, where things can be invented and you can really tune and craft the scenario to get at the questions that you want the reader and the characters to think about.

LeKachman: Did any new questions emerge while writing?

Pham: Another question that was on my mind was a Sheila Heti-ish question: How should a person be? In the first half of the book, I think that Christine is really trying to understand, What is the best way that we should live our lives? And how do we relate to others? She has long conversations with other people about their lives because she’s trying to understand something about how humanity works, so I would say that was a driving question for this project, especially in the first half. Writing those long conversational moments allowed for lots of other questions to come up organically within the work too. Another sort of sub-theme of the book was: What does writing do? What does art do? What does it mean to tell a story and feel like you have ownership of that story and have that story be challenged? 

LeKachman: Speaking of art, how is art functioning in the book?

Pham: Art is functioning in a couple of different ways. Structurally, the first five chapters are all staged around these encounters with art. Some of them are very literal, like in Chapter One when Christine is in a museum. But in Chapter Five, we have the memory of the Agnes Martin painting. Like I said, when I first started writing this book, I wanted to structure essays around ten American paintings. The scaffolding of centering on a painting stayed because I realized that was a good way to get a character to move from place to place. And what I didn’t realize until I really started writing was that including a visual artist allows you to draw on the scenes in their art to talk about themes. This can be very subtle, or more obvious. 

LeKachman: How did drawing on visual art impact your writing?  

Pham: Art is so rich with associations and feelings that are nonverbal. And then there’s thinking about how it’s made, its context, what the artist is moving through. I found that to be really fertile territory for exploring related themes in each chapter. The first chapter of the book sets up this comparison looking at Celmins, who’s a realist painter, but she’s not interested in reality because she wants to make something look real. She’s more interested in the texture of reality, and how that relates to memory and the physical object, the detritus of memory. So looking at one of her works prompts this conversation about realism and genre between Christina and Henry. For me, that was a way to say, Okay, I’m talking about genre here. I’m talking about the genre of realism. I’m talking about, what does it mean to make something that resembles life but is not actually life? And what does it mean to allow that elasticity? 

LeKachman: You have two epigraphs at the beginning of the book. The first is from the art critic John Berger’s Ways of Seeing: “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” Can you talk about your choice here to emphasize self-image versus how others see you?

Pham: I wanted to gesture immediately toward canonical art writing that looks at ways of seeing. This particular epigraph is alluding to this double consciousness that women have where you are yourself, but you’re also aware of how people perceive you, and you have to manage that perception at all times. With this book, I thought a lot about the trap that young women are often placed into, this trap of are you actually being seen for your talent? Or are you being seen for what you look like and how you behave? In a book where Christine has written herself as a character, I also think it’s just interesting to consider how Christine is thinking about her own perception of her character.

LeKachman: The second epigraph is from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art”: “though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” Why were you drawn to this quote? 

Pham: I didn’t want to have two white writers as my epigraph, but I feel like the whole book is straining against whiteness in a way. With Bishop, I love that parenthetical and that exhortation. Bishop is saying things will not go the way you expect them to. To me, it felt in alignment with Christine’s project because it is going to end in disaster for her. I don’t think that Christine is acting in her best interest by writing this novel, but she writes it because she has to. 

LeKachman: You’ve spoken in class before about form and genre, and how authors can play with those expectations in their writing. How did you think about genre for this book? 

Pham: I was interested in writing a book that opens in a seemingly familiar mode, which is the literary elliptical novel popularized by Rachel Cusk, whom this book owes a great debt to, as well as writers like Katie Kitamura. But then the book opens up into something different. By the second section, you’re like, Oh, this is perhaps more of a thriller. 

Another book that I think about a lot is The Round House by Louise Erdrich. The way she creates tension in that book is marvelous because she’s allowing us to spend time with the narrator who doesn’t really know what he’s going to do. There’s an element of that in Christine, too. You’re like, What is she going to do? Where is she going to go? I was interested in writing something that maybe felt like it was going to be a little bit slower, a bit more luxurious, but that turns into something that makes you sweat a little bit.

LeKachman: Speaking of form, I’m curious about the choice to forego quotation marks in dialogue. 

Pham: I often prefer to write my dialogue without quotation marks. To me, quotation marks give the impression of the dialogue being true in some way. Not including quotation marks can make it become reported speech, where it’s more obvious that everything is being filtered through the point of view of the character. I enjoy that because you become more fully immersed in Christine’s world. I was also interested in how not using quotation marks allows you to play a bit more with express versus felt.

LeKachman: Let’s talk about the second section of the book, where the tension between Christine needing to write her novel and the painter’s disagreement with it heightens. How did you negotiate that tension? 

Pham: Something that I’m interested in in this book is that Christine has not chosen a great way to process her trauma. She truly believes that the old painter has ruined her life, so she’s worked up this rage, and she’s written this book, and she thinks it’s going to release her. But it’s actually gotten her deeper into the mess. In this section of the book where she’s dealing with those consequences, I think it’s important to show Christine’s development. She revisits the story of her relationship with the old painter a couple of times in the book. The first time we hear it, it’s in this distant way where she’s identifying the power dynamic and telling it from this very brittle place. Later she’s a little bit warmer with a little bit more nuance. And then in the second half of the book when you hear about the cooking lessons, you’re like, Oh, this relationship was actually pretty complex. There’s a lot that passed between them. I was interested in getting Christine to that place of complexity and showing the change in how she relates to her own story and begins to narrate it. 

LeKachman: One of my favorite things about the ending and the entire book is what’s communicated without being said. What intention drove the choice to communicate things without being explicit? 

Pham: In fiction, I like having to make certain leaps myself. When I read, as you may have noticed from my syllabus, I kind of like it when people don’t connect the dots as much. And I also feel like real life can be quite hard to understand. There’s a lot of things you don’t say to each other. There’s a lot of things that are conveyed through glances, actions, silences. It felt true to the universe of this book to have a lot that goes on unsaid.

LeKachman: You have mentioned that many people helped you shape this book. What most surprised you about what changed from the point of having your manuscript to working with your agent and then working with your editors?

Pham: Something unexpected and fun was how collaborative writing can be. Once I’m confident that my vision is clear enough that other people are allowed into it, there’s a kind of brain trust that allows for more collaboration in a really exciting way. Other people can see things that I can’t see. For example, there’s one paragraph at the very end of the book where my agent, editor, and I got on a call, and the three of us were like, What should she do? Someone said, I think if she can get back in touch with her body, that would be good. And we were like, Okay, what would that be? And then I said, Oh my God, I know what it is. She’s going to take a shower. And we were like, Yes! And that was a moment where I thought, This is really fun. No one is doing the writing for me, but there’s this collaboration where we’re able to work under this shared vision. 

LeKachman: May we all find that. What are you looking forward to next?

Pham: I have a new novel idea that is kicking around. It’s historical. I’m trying to get out of the research wormhole that I think can consume writers of historical fiction because you just want to make sure you’re getting it right. I also remain interested in how to provide a pleasurable reading experience that feels plotted and maybe yearning, while still getting to do the literary formal play that I really enjoy. That balance is something that I’m very interested in exploring in fiction.