... stunning, vulnerable ... Using work by artists like Louise Bourgeois, Nan Goldin, and Yayoi Kusama as a prism, Pham shares her experiences with, and thoughts about, pain and trauma, sex and obsession, crushes and breakups, and intimacy in all its forms. Within these topics, Pham also crafts a vulnerable, nuanced story about the nonlinear process of overcoming heartbreak and letting go. Like your favorite song or first love, Pham’s words won’t just get stuck in your head. They’ll stay there.
... a masterclass in the art of looking closely. Pham’s attention is delicate and lucid, cleaving to her subjects like film. Through her prose we see objects not only for what they are, but for what they represent – the emotions and memories they bear ... These subjects are not ornamental to Pham’s interests, but the very tools with which she is able to excavate her personal and romantic history ... There is a magnetic quality to the way Pham narrates the course of the relationship, seducing us toward collapse with increasingly lush passages about love and lust, and the landscapes over which they are draped. Often, I felt the catch of breath in my chest – an echo of the longing that Pham so expertly renders, and the dread of knowing that to journey through longing is to arrive at loss ... It is an especial pleasure to receive this book at a time when the type of relationships that Pham describes feel like the product of a bygone era. Cloistered at home, Pham’s descriptions pinched at my sense of nostalgia ... As I turned the pages of Pop Song I was transported to the same state of total, thrumming presence that I once had in front of works of art. In these moments, I felt that Pham and I were no longer author and reader, but companions in gaze. How delightful, to return to the quiet comradery of mutual consideration ... Like the music from which it takes its name, Pop Song is alchemical, broadly appealing. It is as accessible as it is smart. Pham’s introspection is never solipsistic, but rather an insight into a mind tuned to life’s minute rhythms. 'What if, I wondered, I could stop reacting so much to the world…' Pham questions early in the collection. I hope that she never finds out. Pop Song is an extraordinary reaction, surely the first of many to come.
[Pham's] observations span a lot of ground — night runs on Yale’s campus, a painting course in France, a residency in New Mexico, each place an astute rendering from a definitive voice ... Her tone is steeped in millennialisms, with chapters occasionally beginning in sentence fragments, but Pham tries neither to dismiss the context of her Internet upbringing nor to over explain it. She describes the particularities of her formative years online through anecdotes that are fittingly visual ... wherever Pham looks, her gaze is ceaselessly empathetic, and it is this generosity that binds the reader to her quest for understanding ... The abundance of artistic references is surely important to the book’s goal, but her criticism sometimes gets away from us in an overly sentimental lyricism. Nonetheless, the book emits kindness, and even with all the pain of heartbreak, violence and loss, Pham manages to generate sincere hopefulness.
Pop Song begins to read like a beautiful, literary breakup album, each essay operating as its own track. By the time you’ve turned the final pages, you want nothing more than to flip the metaphorical album over, drop the needle, and begin again ... The space that [Dolly Parton's] 'I Will Always Love You' creates for the listener to superimpose their own romantic stories onto the lyrics is likewise something that Pop Song masters ... Like her use of the vague 'you,' Pham’s descriptions of pain afford the reader a chance to recognize their own relationships within the pages; it is these ambiguous details of her romance, details that for Pham often seem tender to the touch, that elevate the experience of reading Pop Song to the same level as a pop song on the radio ... Pham offers us the catchy, familiar storylines of love and breakups so that we might recognize some of ourselves, and then she blows past us with a truly original meditation on life and art that one can’t help but awe ... There is an innocence to Pop Song. It is youthful and full of the college-aged idiosyncrasies and fears that many of her readers can relate to. At times, this innocence can feel a bit meddling, as if it’s unable to see past its inexperience towards something sharp and revelatory. At the same time, though, isn’t this what all great breakup albums do?
Pop Song reads like the lovechild of Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City and Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not in the Mood, essay collections that consider art and love from the perspective of literarily inclined women. Pham’s essays are most successful when she enters a more critical mode and flexes her knowledge of visual art ... Most of Pop Song’s essays have a wonderful wandering quality; Pham excels at leading the reader down sinuous paths and arriving at unexpected insights. Still, some essays are admittedly bloated. Nevertheless, breakthroughs and epiphanies abound ... The art that moves me most is that which enables an experience of recognition, of reflection, of likeness. Reading Pop Song I had that same experience, with Pham giving language to the ineffable and assembling an arsenal of artists to help.
Pham’s collection boldly reinterprets the memoir-essay genre by accompanying her stories of love with ekphratic commentary on the visual, aural, and verbal language of intimacy. This oblique, innovative method is the author’s makeshift solution to the problem she poses in the collection of how to write on intimacy. Through this form of ekphrasis, she is able to give texture to surface-level events and feelings, as well as to map out her own unique artistic sensibility ... Pham’s absorption with the collection of vessels of intimacy, most explicitly represented by photographs of her and her boyfriend, is motivated by a fear of losing that intimacy, of loss of love. She repeatedly resorts to artifice and performance to construct a narrative of her relationship that preserves intimacy despite its infidelity to reality. If there is a coming-of-age for Pham in this textured, meditative book, then it lies in the shedding of artifice.
...provocative ... Reading Pham feels like scrolling through classic Tumblr (a post-Facebook, pre-Instagram microblogging website founded in 2007). She has the unselfconscious, unsure, divulging style of early-aughts internet sites that monetized the bleeding-heart confessional at a time when being unfiltered was a rarity. However, she proves far more sophisticated than these posts as she experiments with style and weaves in probing commentary on everything from Frank Ocean’s Blonde album to the experimental essays of American poet Brian Blanchfield ... It can be difficult to write about sexual power dynamics in a way that’s not overripe, but Pham approaches the subject with both scrutiny and softness ... In the lurch of new love, it is easy to get lost. Everyone knows the feeling of wanting what evades you; what is youth, after all, but intense yearning for something you’ve yet to actually experience. Pop Song is an electric exploration of this emotion. It is about the art of feeling and the feelings art provokes.
The instinct to mythologize your desire in this way feels inherent to youth, particularly to people, myself included, who came of age and to writing in the heyday of the first-person industrial complex and Tumblr. So it’s no wonder Pop Song feels almost painfully familiar to me—less like looking in a mirror and more like watching an old video of myself, or maybe rereading an old journal. Pham is familiar with this era because she was there too, as a fellow member in the cult of beautiful suffering, taking pictures of her bruised knees ... Pop Song at times feels more like a letter than a memoir: one from a lover with a copy of their favorite poem tucked in, a gift that says, Here, my words are not enough, but this is what I am trying to describe to you ... By recreating a moment of absolute feeling, Pham takes your head in her hands, looks you in the eyes, and makes her desire known. That’s what the journey is all about: learning you’re allowed to want, then learning how to put your body’s catapulting desires into words of your own.
Pham’s memoir is about many things—art and relationships, travel and self-awareness. However, while it touches on a variety of compelling subjects, it does so in a jumbled way that sometimes makes for a chaotic read ... Pham writes with a great deal of passion, which is one of the work’s strengths. However, the transitions can be jarring and often interrupt the flow of the book. Musings on art run throughout, but again without much structure. There are few narrative clues to guide readers and keep their attention. While individual sections of the book are interesting and memorable, the complete picture isn’t as gratifying ... Though it doesn’t always come together as a whole, Pham’s work features a promising voice. Readers with a strong interest in the visual arts will likely get the most out of this book, especially where Pham writes about finding meaning in the work of artists like Agnes Martin and James Turrell; and Gen Z and younger millennial readers might find Pham’s experiences and relationship dynamics to be particularly relatable.
Pham is valiantly candid and philosophical about her 'displacement' as the American-born daughter of Vietnamese parents, her eating disorder and sexuality, pain and trauma, and racism public, private, and entangled with misogyny ... Pham brings intellectual power, sensuousness, and psychological astuteness to her encounters with art ... A thrillingly frank and incisive self-portrait of an exceptional young writer coming into her own.
In her first full-length work of nonfiction, Pham, an inaugural Yi Dae Up fellowship recipient from the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat, thoughtfully collects a series of essays exploring themes of love, beauty, pain, trauma, art, and identity. Over the course of 11 pieces, Pham writes and rewrites her own story using her most honest memories alongside the lives and works of other artists and writers she admires ... Each curve in the collection leads readers to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of Pham’s unique perspective. In a manner reminiscent of contemporaries Leslie Jamison and Jia Tolentino, Pham seamlessly blends the personal and the cultural, the confessional and the critical, the cerebral and the sentimental, to create an exciting and imaginative memoir ... A vital playlist that hits all the right notes; readers will reach the end ready to hit repeat.
Pham reinvents the memoir in a stirring debut that explores the power of language, art, and love ... In 11 essays, she interrogates desire in all its forms, beginning with an evocative piece about finding solace in the act of running ... This is a masterpiece.
