“Time is Such a Mindfuck”
Johanna Hedva on craft, care, kink and their two latest books.
It’s been nearly a year to the day since I first reached out to Johanna Hedva to appear in WORMS. Our initial conversation was intended for last year’s Psychoanalysis Season, discussing their 2023 novel, Your Love Is Not Good, which follows a Korean American artist navigating the pageantry and slipperiness of the contemporary art world. Since then, their brilliant essay collection How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom has been released, they’ve had a solo show at London’s TINA gallery, and they’ve moved from Berlin back to their home city, LA.
Suffice it to say, it’s been a huge year for Hedva—and naturally, our email exchange over the past 12 months expanded beyond its original scope, touching on craft, care, kink, disability, selfhood, and what’s next for them.
Photographer credit: Johannes Beck
Caitlin McLoughlin: I want to start with a question about craft as I know that you’re a writer who thinks deeply about sentences. Both your novels are highly crafted, to the point that they appear effortless, even in the way they are so different stylistically, yet so effective in what they set out to achieve. How did you approach writing as craft as you were writing your newest book, How To Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom?
Johanna Hedva: Thank you. It means a lot that you say that because I am a sentence bitch. It’s all I think about. I spend years on my sentences. I spend years thinking about other people’s sentences.
In the book, I devote a long passage to trying to account for this:
“I write to find out what is possible to think, meaning it’s the changing of the thought that I chase, that miraculous capacity that can expand. Once I have a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph down on the page, what thrills me is to watch what happens to the thought if it’s written in questions versus statements, this word rather than that word, a different syntax, vocabulary, punctuation. I want to know what thinking can do—what it makes, destroys, negotiates, protects, transgresses against; how it can be knife, fist, kiss, well, map, key.
“Perhaps I want this, to watch something change, because this is how my body feels. Something I was told was one thing but was in fact many. Something that keeps branching into unknowability. Something that broke open, and in that breaking—oh, what I became.”
About this last part, like, what I’m trying to get at is something about materiality. How matter is actually changed by language. That writing down a sentence actually changes the world. Think about it. Writing, “I’m gay”—that changes the world. At least that’s how it felt to me when I wrote that down at age 14 for the first time. I wrote it on a post-it note and stuck it to a water bottle that I carried around all day at school, putting it on my desk in each class. That sentence, those two words, written down, shown to the world, put into the world—it changed my world.
So, language for me—the hook it has in me, has always had—is about this. To me, the point of meaning is that it can change.
Johanna Hedva, The Clock Is Always Wrong (Other Mouth), 2023
mouthblown glass, three large hooks, chains, silicone oil mixed with pigment, carpet.
Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and TINA, London. Photo: Corey Bartle Sanderson
To stick with this idea of meaning and its maliability, in your novel Your Love Is Not Good, we bear witness to the narrators’ self-destruction, she takes a hatchet to the pillars of her life that have only just begun to offer her some semblance of stability, and in doing so explodes these ideas around identity and desire and personal narrative and solidarity, and I mean explodes and not explores, because as a reader we’re not, really, left with any kind of answer. We’re, as it says in the blurb, left to “revel in the raining debris.” I was left with a sense of these questions being somewhat unanswerable, that the ground they occupy is slippery. Why did you want to leave the reader with this sense of the unanswerable? What is your attraction to the unanswerable?
Well—what is answerable?
I don’t trust answers. I don’t think I’ve ever met a trustworthy answer in my life. Have you?
My favorite things are the ones that shapeshift, that are more than one thing. I want capaciousness, transformation, thaumaturgy, and I want this in everything. My methodology in my own work, and what I’m most attracted to in the work of others, is hermeneutical mischief.
I love to be confused at what I’m looking at, to have my expectations delightfully thwarted, I want to giggle in surprise at something that made me cry moments before. It’s so generous—change.
The fact of change, that things can change.
In writing, I want to come upon words, punctuation, clauses, ideas that seem like they shouldn’t be there, kinking the sentence, deviating the narrative. This is what I try to do when I write. It’s fun. It’s just way more fun than not doing that.
With Your Love Is Not Good, I never wanted my reader to be confused about what was happening, but I did want them to be confused about what it meant. I wanted that feeling like when you're falling asleep and you shock awake because you feel like you’re falling—every time something in the novel consolidated in its meaning, I wanted to write a scene to come after which would destabilize that meaning, make it crumble beneath you. I wanted to fuck with causality, associative meanings, parataxis.
I guess I don’t understand the idea that art is supposed to reveal a message, that the climax is comprehension. The experience of not understanding is what feels most alive, most insightful, most interesting, to me. This is what I hope takes my book out of the mundanity of my narrator’s personal drama and the mundanity of self-important art-world in-fighting, which is so often a neat semantic puzzle with a right answer. I wanted more of a metaphysical confrontation. It’s the huge black cube that hangs behind the narrator's head that she can’t ever see, but she knows is always there.
Photographer credit: Ian Byers-Gamber
I want to draw a line between this idea of self-destruction and the destruction of the self as you explore it in your essay In Defence of De-Persons. In this essay you resist the idea that we should own our political agency “like a possession”, that the ruling idea of selfhood that champions the “self-determined subject of a rational mind” only serves to prop up capitalism and oppressive and hierarchical power structures. What distinguishes self-destruction and the destruction of ‘self’ or ‘selfhood’? Do we witness the narrator fall victim to, as you quote Sara Ahmed, “the requirement to identify with the universal that repudiates you”?
It’s funny because I don’t necessarily think of the narrator as self-destructive—or, I don’t think that’s only it. A central concern of the novel is this very question of whether or not our selves are something we can keep intact, which would imply the inverse, that we can destroy them at will. Like, is this an equally available option for each of us?
One thing that was on my mind was the way that American fiction of the last 10 or 15 years, particularly the novels written by white women, have centered protagonists who are really dissociated. They float through their lives detached, they cannot find value or purpose in society or in their relationships, things happen sort of stabbingly to them. It strikes me that this ontological dissociation is the product of whiteness—of what happens when the game of the universal is rigged to let you win at such a high cost (the obliteration of everyone else).
My narrator’s problem is that she wants to win this game but she’s not even being allowed to play it. She’s got the opposite problem of dissociation: she wants too much, too hugely, she’s way too willing to put too much of her own skin in the game. She’s infested by life. Does that mean she’s “fallen victim” to this?
Like, what other options are available to her but the destruction of the self? Isn’t this the only option for those whose selves are not their own? Like, my narrator is willing to sell her “self” completely—but her self is not coherent, discrete, or legitimated as an identity of value. She’s got identities that the universal buys in bulk: cheap, 2 for 1 specials, lumped together in a bargain bin. Is her peddling of them a function of her quote-unquote self-destruction?
Installation view: Johanna Hedva, Genital Discomfort, 27 September - 7 December 2024, TINA, London. Image Courtesy of the artist and TINA, London. Photo: Corey Bartle Sanderson
I wanted to talk about the scene in Your Love Is Not Good with the character Lea after the narrator’s private view. This feels like an important scene and it’s also one that I was shook by! It feels like a moment when this idea of the slipperiness of meaning passes over into something more definable—a harmful consequence of the narrator's self-destructive behaviour. Consent is often discussed as something that is slippery, but as we experience this scene through the interiority of the narrator it’s clear that she’s crossing a boundary. Could you talk a bit about the significance of this scene and what you wanted to achieve with it?
I’m pleased this stood out to you because, yes, the Lea scene was perhaps the most important to me and I have a lot to say about it. It was one of the first scenes I wrote where I understood the scope and stakes of the novel, where the ingredients I had been messing around with really started to cook.
I understand that it’s a brutal scene to read; my aim was to make the reader think and feel into the stakes of the violence. I wanted them to ask questions: Why does this happen? What can be done about it? I think you can tell when a writer puts violence in their work in such a way that does not facilitate thought. It’s there to shock, to make you wince, shut down, it forecloses thinking.
I believe there is a way to write violence so that it produces more thinking, not less, so that it guides the reader to a space of consideration and attention, expands into thinking that is at once critical and empathic.
You can linger there, understand something new.
This is what I wanted to do with that scene; and it felt crucial to the book. At that point in the novel, we’ve spent nearly 150 pages seeing the details of the narrator’s abusive childhood, of her mother as both a monster and a sort of icon, her primary teacher. There had to be the visceral consequence of that on the page. Until then, my narrator thinks she understands how her mother harmed her, but now she is confronted with her own self causing harm, doing damage, in such a way that she can’t deny—so, now what will she do?
I am very interested in how people wind up in situations where their ethics fail them, where, despite their best intentions to be “good,” to do the “right” thing, they don’t. I was trying to write this novel to be a tragedy according to the definition that tragedy is where you watch a character make the wrong choice because there is no other choice. Perhaps the tragedy comes because they thought it was the right choice?
This might be one of the few places where narrative causality is interesting to me—this happened because that happened. I think about the cycle of abuse, the “hurt people hurt people” sort of thing, and how this might be broken, disrupted, deviated, rewritten—that, to me, is a compelling story. My own mother was monstrous, iconic, and abusive, and I feel I’ve spent my whole life dealing with the way that determined certain things about my fate. I wrote this scene as a sort of what if? for myself—setting before myself a sort of crucible, a test, and asking, what if I’d failed?
In that scene, I wanted the reader to feel like there was no way out, because this is how the protagonist herself feels. Like, she’s ended up here despite herself—why? What now? It was especially important to me to have violence between women be the central engine of this novel.
On the one hand, we are living at a time when “healing” and “care” have become their own industrial-complex, where everyone’s behavior is explained through their trauma, and no matter what you’re doing, you’re on a “healing journey.” On the other hand, we are more punitive than ever when people fuck up, our carcerality is raging. I’m not satisfied by either of these. I would prefer we let sociality be built by including mistakes, trespasses; that our fuckups are included, that there is infrastructure not just for “catching someone when they fall,” but for trying to untangle why the fall happened.
Some technical notes: My editor was adamant that I could not give the reader a way out in that scene. He wanted me to make it even more fucked up; it was his note to make the narrator’s interiority swallow the whole scene. I’m glad I had that note—I was worried about that scene for years and sort of hesitating, pulling the punch a little, and that didn’t work. Equivocation pushed it into a gray area that wasn’t effective.
It was always a crucible sort of thing for me, though. When I was searching for an agent, it came down to two possible agents, and the Lea scene is what determined who I went with. One of the agents loved the book but said I had to cut that scene; she was like, we’ll lose editors, we’ll lose readers. I said I would not cut it. She said, at the very least I had to cut the line, “I slap the cunt,” and I was like, are you kidding? This is one of the best lines I’ve ever written! In the meeting with the other agent, I specifically asked what she thought of the Lea scene. She was like, oh my god, that’s one of my favorite scenes in the whole book. You really understand the stakes! I was so relieved. I was like, what about the line “I slap the cunt”? And she was like, “one of the best lines in the whole book!” So, obviously, I went with her.
The narrator bears some similarities to your biography and your identity, yet when it comes to the choices that she makes, she behaves very differently to you? In your book Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, you defend the idea that art making can be cathartic and that catharsis can be a radical and rigorous methodology. Was there a kind of catharsis in creating this character that is you, but isn’t you and who behaves in the opposite way to you?
Yes, so the concept for Your Love Is Not Good, when I began writing in 2014, was something I was thinking of as “anti-auto-fiction.” I started with a first-person narrator who, on paper, would check all the same identity-demographic boxes as me: white mother, Korean father, very white-passing, born and raised in LA, poor as dirt, queer as fuck, kink kink kink, went to art school and now has astronomical student debt, and, lol, is trying to "be somebody." From there, the prompt I gave myself was that at every point where this character makes a choice, I wanted her to do the thing I ethically disagreed with, or in some cases was simply what I did not do.
I wanted to write about things that make me the most ethically uncomfortable, and I wanted to write a first-person narrator who I disagree with politically—and I wanted to do this through the lens of “my” “self” because it raised the stakes in a way that felt pretty scintillating. Plenty of people write about their lives or include their life experiences in their fiction—but it’s risky to give these to a character you don’t identify with, whose actions you explicitly refute. Many readers will see any character as an avatar of the author—I know that many readers think my novel is straightforward autobiography, when it’s literally the opposite.
I guess here is some of that hermeneutical mischief I like so much. Also, doing this felt directly oppositional to the over-identification with our political positions that has become hegemonic right now, especially tied to the punitive response to any ethical mistakes people make.
We’re afraid to even pretend to be someone problematic because storytellers are strung up for writing about ethical trespasses because these are taken as the positions or beliefs of the storytellers themselves.
I wanted to write a novel like this because it seemed like exactly what the novel is good for—to reach into the space between the interior of a character and the consequences of their actions. This space can most robustly develop, in my opinion, in the form of a novel precisely because of the amount of time it takes to read a novel. That interiority is built in the reader as it’s built on the page for the character itself. There’s a relationship here, not exactly a one-to-one—the reader and the characters do not have the same experience, per se—but I’m interested in how close they are.
Johanna Hedva, All Fear Is Erotic (with Ron Athey), 2024, single-channel video
10 minutes 49 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and TINA London. Photo: Corey Bartle Sanderson
In conjunction with this, you’ve also said that something “becomes political when you feel it in your body.” I love this and I think it relates here. How can we use this to understand ideas around solidarity?
For me, this space—the distance between one’s interior and then the ways in which one’s exterior is read by others—is political. I think everyone can relate to feeling like there’s some gap between who they feel themselves to be, or what’s going on inside them, and how people read them, what society assumes about them—but when your exterior is determined according to ideological systems of discrimination, hierarchy, and harm, that distance becomes animated by power.
Like, take the case of disability, for example. I know what being disabled feels like to me, all of the worlds of experience it has brought me to, but then there’s also what the world says being disabled means. These two are different, but the force and insidiousness of ableism, an external structure, erases my interior experience, or infests it to the point that it’s difficult for me to distinguish between the two. Something from the outside has radically redefined and determined what I would understand to be my own internal experience. I am very interested in this relationship of interior/exterior—particuarly fucking with it, putting my probing, greedy finger right into the place where it is messiest.
During the press tour of the novel I was using this little anecdote and analogy about fisting, and I think it’s worth saying again here. It’s that often I think of something Deborah Levy (one of my favorites) said, that “Fiction is a wonderful home for the reach of the mind.” As she said it, she reached her hand into the air and closed her fingers into a fist. When I see this image, I think of fisting. In fisting, it’s good to wear gloves. If you’re going to reach into the mind, the ass of inquiry, the gaping genital of speculation, it’s good to have some kind of prophylactic protection. Fiction is the glove.
In your new book, How To Tell When We Will Die, kink features prominently as you hold it up as a successful model of care: “What I love about kink is that it starts from the premise that we’re all freaks and then asks how to support that.” Why is it so important for us to look for alternate models of care that break the mold of feminised notions of nurturing or tending?
It’s important because nurturing and tending are not the only ways to care—and yet ableism is what narrows care to such a carceral and sexist definition that includes only that. And it’s just not true that care is only that. The project of How to Tell When We Will Die, its scope and ambition and politic, is to reveal how care shows up all the time, for everyone, in all different forms. Why we don’t understand that care is an interesting conundrum to solve, that care can be a field in which we are all situated, that care is not an inert resource that we give and/or take but a relational force, full of agency, desire, and choice—these are some of the main motors moving the book.
From the same essay you’re quoting, I say, “As there is any kind of porn available on the internet for any possible kink, care can look a million different ways too. It can be dirty, it can be full of rage, it can happen in a mosh pit, it can leave shit stains on the sheets.” I make a connection between porn and care here because of their ubiquity, their universality that is also abundant with idiosyncrasies. Like, everyone watches porn. Everyone does care. This should not be shocking, but it sort of still is. Why?
The word I’d use to reframe how we think about care is that it’s the practice that most intensely deals with our needs. This is both why it’s so ample a practice, something that can contain so much variation, but also why we’d prefer to tell ourselves that it’s actually this very limited thing that is done in only this one small corner of life. We’ve trained ourselves to believe that need is shameful. To need is to be weak, to need is to be dependent, powerless, without agency or choice. And dude, that’s just such a lie. Need is a basic condition. It’s our very ontology. How robust it is! It’s neither good nor bad; why would we soak it in morality when it’s just the condition of human existence? I mean this: why? What does that delusion, that fantasy, that fallacy, give us?
And just to say: the moments where I’ve felt the most care in my own life have been in kink. I used to be a pro domme, and now I do it as a practice, not for money. I practice it with my partner on a daily basis, and I feel it infusing my life with care, arranging my life around care as a primary engine, a foundational way to do life and all of life. It makes me think about need on the reg, as well as power, pleasure, relationality, desire, the movement and flow of consent, what we want and how we know that, how we communicate our interiorities to each other, how we can be honest to ourselves and each other, what happens if we need something but don’t know how to ask for it, don’t know we even need it yet. It’s just wet with meaning.
Because here at WORMS we’ve been thinking a lot about psychoanalysis in the last year, I couldn’t help but be drawn to this line in the book where you say you’re “bored by Freud.” It made me realise that, for a book that deals so intimately with mental health, psychoanalysis is notably absent, which felt deliberate? I wondered if you can say more about this?
There are plenty of thinkers and writers who care about Freud enough for the rest of us, and so I’ll leave it to them. That’s how I feel about it—I just don’t care enough. And I am bored by him at this point. Fuck, I don’t want to be always thinking about the phallus without anything queer or trans about it. Who does? Of course, there was a time when I did care about him a whole fuck lot. I studied Freud in grad school, spent years reading him and reading those he influenced. I especially love the European feminist psychoanalytic philosophers of the 1970s. Everyone should be reading Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous, for instance. I absolutely adore Janet Malcolm and Jacqueline Rose—I will never be bored by them. So I’d rather spend time with them, what they did with him. I love a good critique of Freud. Give it to me anytime, anywhere, and I’ll eat the whole plate.
One thing I suppose I will begrudgingly concede to him is how he was a sneaky, clever fucker, and made his own theory include how it could worm its way into everything, and so even if you are not out here explicitly claiming his influence, he would have a way to account for how you are still somehow subconsciously doing so. Sneaky.
Photographer credit: Ian Byers-Gamber
In How To Tell When We Will Die you compare the concept of crip time as in opposition to the rigidly “chronological, quantitative" time of capitalism. How were you navigating different expectations and understandings of time as you were writing the book?
God, time is such a mindfuck.
I can’t do better than that at this question right now, I’m sorry. I’m in a very specific moment of fatedness where the future is hella veiled, so.
For a couple years, whenever I’d go to a divinator—shaman, psychic, astrologer—they’d see that 2024 would be quote-unquote the best year of my life, but also that I might die by the end of it. According to one very janky ancient astrology calculation, I will die either in the year 2078, or November 2024. Since it’s now a couple weeks out from November, and I’ve only died symbolically, metaphorically, and emotionally this year, I’m, as you can imagine, feeling a lot of feelings about time.
Without wanting to linger too long on the mindfuck that is time, what's next for you?
These days are thank god quiet and calm, or at least I’m trying to make them like that. 2024 was a huge, relentless, hard, rough year that had moments of such gorgeousness they knocked me out. Being knocked out is an apt description for the vibe. For six months straight I wasn’t in one place longer than three weeks. I was homeless, living out of two suitcases, sublet to sublet. My book came out, my solo exhibition opened, my 11-year marriage ended, my 14-year relationship with Berlin ended, you see, I did die, in a way. In November, the month of my maybe-death, I signed a lease on a little house from 1922 in Boyle Heights, and although it’s giving twice-divorced at age 40, mattress on the floor, using a cardboard box for a desk, while I wait for my furniture to arrive from Berlin, I couldn’t be happier. I have a lot of sadness, a lot of deep pain, I am grieving on the reg, but I have no regrets. I will paint the living room aubergine. One of my oldest friends here in LA, Asher Hartman, when I said that, replied, “You should call it ‘eggplant.’” And I was adamant. “Absolutely not! She’s going to be aubergine!”
I have a new album I’ll start recording in 2025; what’s special about this house is there are enough rooms for different kinds of studios. There will be one for writing, one for painting, and one for music. The tenants before me recorded albums here, so it’s okay to be loud. I rehearse every day, I am so loud. The album is called Fist. I wrote it on a haunted acoustic parlor guitar that disappeared for ten years and then returned. My voice in these new songs slouches toward a sort of serenade by screeching, croaking, and growling. I’m trying to get this ragged texture in the same bar as, like, pop-song svelte. The genre is dominatrix blues, succubus folk: There is doomed lament, dismembered body parts, murderous rage, and, of course, ordinary swampy heartbreak with men on their knees.
A few months ago I started writing something new. I realized that my last three books—2024’s How to Tell When We Will Die, 2023’s Your Love is Not Good, and 2020’s Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain—were all books that I needed to write. But now, I’d like to write something because I simply want to.
