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Souvankham Thammavongsa Doesn’t Mind If You’re Jealous of Her Career
I had never been to a literary event with booing until I attended the launch of Souvankham Thammavongsa’s debut novel, Pick a Colour, at the Toronto Public Library. She had chosen Steve Paikin, a Canadian media celebrity of sorts, to interview her. “I don’t read fiction,” he said up top. Thammavongsa, of course, won the Giller Prize for How to Pronounce Knife, her acerbic collection of short fiction, and her stories have been published by the likes of The New Yorker, Granta, Noon, and this very magazine. “Is this book really just for female readers?” he asked. Pick a Colour, which the following month won Thammavongsa her second Giller, is told over the course of one day by Ning, a former boxer and the owner of a nail salon. “Men are just, for the most part, completely, well, this man for sure . . .” Paikin hedged, then trailed off. “If I ever have to go into one of these places, it is just not natural territory for me.” The crowd bristled, but Paikin did not abate. “Why is it only Southeast Asian women who work at nail salons?” “Do you write small books because you’re a small person?”
These are the kinds of questions that Thammavongsa has fielded throughout her thirty-year career. Thammavongsa was born in Nong Khai, Thailand, in a Lao refugee camp. The family moved to Toronto when she was one year old. She grew up in a one-room apartment with her parents and brother; when she was fifteen and her parents decided to open their own business, she, her mother, and brother spent months sleeping in the family van to make the transition work. “I got 100 percent on things so that nobody would question or want to talk to my parents on parents’ night,” she says.
At four-foot-eleven and ninety pounds, Thammavongsa is, indeed, the writer of slim, sharp books. She first thought about becoming a writer in grade two when she auditioned to be Little Red Riding Hood in the school play. Instead of letting the wolf attack her, she fought back. The director told her to stop and follow what was in the story. “I said, ‘Well, who decides that?’” Thammavongsa tells me. “And he said, ‘The writer.’ And I thought to myself, I want to be the writer.”
She earned her degree in literature from the University of Toronto and then worked at an investment advice publisher’s office for fifteen years, sometimes preparing taxes, while publishing a string of critically acclaimed volumes of poetry with indie Pedlar Press. As is so often the case with homegrown talent, Thammavongsa had to publish abroad to get recognition in Canada. After Harper’s Magazine published her story “Slingshot” in 2018, the bigger publishing houses came calling, and Penguin Random House Canada published her debut short story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, in 2020. She is the fourth writer to win the Giller twice.
Writing on Thammavongsa is often constrained by the details of her early life. “I am not a professional refugee,” she tells me. Thammavongsa refuses to bend to what audiences want from her. Her characters frequently refuse to feel the shame that’s expected of them. In the titular story of How to Pronounce Knife, a first grader is misinstructed by her father to enunciate the silent k in knife: “kahneyff.” She is “humiliated,” a number of reviewers observed, though the child in question never expresses anything resembling humiliation. In fact, she argues with her teacher that her dad must be correct until she is eventually sent to the principal’s office. Pick a Colour follows a similar gambit—if customers aren’t able to differentiate between the different salon employees anyhow, why not just have all the employees go by Susan?
In a 2023 essay for The New Yorker, Thammavongsa recalls when, in grade-seven gym class, her pad fell out of her shorts (she could only afford the cheap kind, she writes, which didn’t have sufficient adhesive). The gym teacher yelled at the class, demanding the owner of the pad throw it out. “She called it disgusting, but it looked beautiful to me,” Thammavongsa writes.
This is what is unsettling about Thammavongsa, both in her writing and conversation: she refuses to behave as you might expect. She does not abide by the script of social norms, and in a literary landscape oversaturated with neuroses and obsequities, Thammavongsa is unabashedly herself. She doesn’t laugh just because a joke is made; she doesn’t respond to a question just because she’s been asked.
So many writers, she says, are embarrassed to be Asian. She is not embarrassed to be Asian, nor feminine, nor “tiny,” nor successful. Perhaps what is most jarring is not that she doesn’t feel any shame about her ascent, but that she doesn’t comply with the secret desire of audiences that she at least humble herself.
“I was at a party, and this guy came up to me dripping with disdain,” Thamamvongsa tells me. “He said, ‘I bet you have the career you want, don’t you?’” The proper, Canadian thing to do would be to blush or shrug and inquire about the man’s own writing. “But I said, ‘Yes. I do,’” she beams. “Do I have the career that I want? I do.”
“I am a family of one,” Ning says at the beginning of Pick a Colour. “You can be that, you know. A family of one.” The novel unfolds like a play, in a single setting, the nail salon, over the course of a single day. Customers come and go but rarely do we hear from them. Mostly, it’s the girls of the salon, who converse in their native language, and they are indeed, as many may have feared, complaining about their customers. Ning is a passive therapist to the clients, who fling the horrors of their wretched love lives at her, but we know little about her own life—what prompted her to abandon boxing or why she’s missing her ring finger, a detail that customers rarely seem to notice. Instead, we know that Ning lives in a tiny apartment above the shop that feels like she’s “inside a mouth,” reliant on no one except herself.
“I could have written this book differently,” Thammavongsa says in a note to the reader. “I could have made it span generations, continents, time, bending and twisting myself to appeal and to answer the question ‘Where are you from?’” We are never explicitly told the native country of the women who work in the salon, nor the name of “our language” to which they refer. She had no interest in the multigenerational novel that seems to be the tacit mandate for debut novelists: if the political axiom du jour is that writers of colour ought to “take up space,” Thammavongsa’s project is to see how much she can fit in as tight corners as possible. (Her debut poetry collection, Small Arguments, is all about tiny objects—a slice of pear, grains of salt, an earwig’s limbs.)
Failed connections permeate Thammavongsa’s oeuvre, but so does their inverse: the idea that a person might need only herself. In “Good-Looking,” a short story which she published in The New Yorker in 2021, a university professor asks out her gym instructor for tea. He says yes, but brings his son on the “date” as a buffer (he has intentionally not worn his wedding ring to work to attract more clients). “Do you think of ‘Good-Looking’ as a love story?” her editor Cressida Leyshon asked her in an interview about the piece. “Yes,” Thammavongsa responded. “The woman gets to be alone—and being alone is profound and loving too.”
I wonder if I believe her, that a person can be a family of one, or if it’s another boxing strategy of Ning’s. In one of the novel’s most revealing episodes, Ning’s employees go for lunch. She desperately wants to join them, it seems, but is unwilling to be vulnerable and ask to come with. She never says anything, but they sense her desire, and bring her back some food when they return.
Thammavongsa is a writer preoccupied with absence—“I notice the empty,” Ning says in Pick a Colour—and has compared herself to the painter Agnes Martin, whose gridded canvases are similarly mysterious and withholding. As with Ning’s missing finger, Thammavongsa is content to leave some mysteries off the page. This is how she speaks too; she is not vulnerable to conversation tics of filling space or filibustering, and she takes her time to answer me, pausing for so long sometimes that I worry she has rejected my question altogether. When I listened through our first interview, I realized that I am prone to filling these gaps with drivel—to offer explanations that she didn’t ask for or need—and so in our second meeting in her apartment, I am determined to interview her like a Martin abstract or a Thammavongsa poem.
“Do you hear that?” Thammavongsa asks me when I walk into her home. I don’t hear anything. “It’s called peace. I live alone.”
Thammavongsa’s 400-square-foot apartment is like that of a contemporary Patrick Bateman’s, if he liked the colour pink and had an early edition Tennessee Williams. It is as fastidiously designed as her literary universes. Her skin care regimen sits perfectly lined up on a shelf (which, to be fair, she left out because she knew it would interest me), she has exactly six pairs of designer shoes—four in black, two in white, in a size four—each of which she bought herself for a different book. She has a rowing machine and offers to show me her abs. “Spare,” she says, when I ask her to describe her style. “It comes across as simple, but when you give it your attention, it’s mesmerizing and has a real magic to it.”
Since our previous interview, she has been eager to show me the painting she owns by Margaux Williamson, the Canadian painter whose friendship with Sheila Heti was mythologized in Heti’s How Should a Person Be? It’s a small, gestural still life of two flowers and a littered paper cup. She loves the painting precisely because “those things are all treated the same and are all equal,” she says. This is how Thammavongsa writes too; a bloody pad has as much potential for beauty as a symmetrical face. We admire the painting, but she has one request, which she repeats quite a few times. “I can show you the painting, but I can’t tell you how I got it,” she says.
In Pick a Colour, there always lurks the promise, or threat, of physical touch. Cataloguing the details of a person’s face and gait is an act of love—“I watch her like I think she’s beautiful,” Ning says of her closest colleague, Mai—but also of warfare. In boxing, you need to register a person’s weak points—a tilted stance, a telling glance—and exploit them. A nail salon requires more tact: you can’t just tell someone they have a unibrow in the hopes they will book a $15 waxing appointment, because “people don’t forgive you for giving them bad feelings. Especially about themselves.” These moments of contact can be fraught, romantic even—Ning gives her former boss a salon treatment with an attention to detail that is sexually charged, describing the skin on her wrist as “soft and pretty”—but there’s always a potential for danger. One salon employee files a client’s nail for a second too long and “blood rushes out”; Ning recalls a thrown jab at an opponent and “Flick. A gash opened up by her right eye. Red.”
“Love is actually not reliable,” Ning says. “You have to depend on someone else to say they feel it too. And even when they do, you can’t be inside to see the truth of that.”
Thammavongsa says that she, too, is entirely self-reliant. “I’m only as good as my ability to work,” she says. “I have nothing else.” Thammavongsa was married once, a relationship she wrote about for the New York Times. “We didn’t know each other very well, but two weeks after we met, we decided to get married,” she writes. The couple stayed together for twelve years. At forty-seven, she is still boy crazy. “I have crushes on people all the time, but it never works out,” she tells me. “So, they just become New Yorker stories.” Mostly, she says, the men who approach her are after blurbs or an introduction to an agent or editor.
In 2022, Thammavongsa’s younger brother John died by suicide. “These days, I don’t see my parents all that much,” Thammavongsa tells me. “I think because I look exactly like my brother, so they see his face in mine. And I think they don’t like looking at it.”
Thammavongsa’s parents divorced when she was in her thirties, but their relationship was tumultuous throughout her childhood. Her brother, who spent his own birthday money on fancier menstrual pads for her after the gym class incident, was often the mediator. “He was somebody who, when my parents fought, he would communicate for both of them to try to bring them together,” she says. “Whereas I look at my parents and I think, Oh, you want to fight; then you have at it.” Her brother would comfort her too. “Sometimes, I think I’m a bitch,” she says. Once, when she expressed this to John, he texted her, “You just know who you are, that’s all.”
Thammavongsa says she takes after her father—funny, unaffected, dry—while her brother resembled their mother. “When both of them love you, they just love you so much that it almost feels painful to them,” she tells me.
In “The Poison that Tastes Like Home,” a stunning 2025 essay for Harper’s, Thammavongsa writes about her relationship with her mother, who is a perennial quasi-child. “I did not want my mother,” she opens the essay. “She was already here before me, fully formed, and on her own, talking in full sentences. She was the one who wanted me.” Her mother flits in and out of her life over fifteen years, often reappearing to ask for money. But nobody else in the world can cook like her. After making “the best meal I have had in a long time,” she tells her daughter about a poisonous plant she’s growing. “I think of the time she asked me if I have life insurance, and feel safe that I told her I do not,” Thammavongsa writes.
The two share a fixation on seeing John reincarnated, and plot dates for Thammavongsa to find a partner, have a baby, and birth her brother’s spirit. Ning is the name her brother called her in private, a detail she included in the book, she says, because “I just wanted to hear somebody say that name out loud, and the person who I most wanted to hear it from doesn’t exist anymore.”
As a child, Thammavongsa had an instinct to protect her parents too. She shows me a scar on her left hand that she got when she was eleven from cutting a carrot. It started bleeding profusely, but she didn’t go to the doctor, she says, because “I was home alone, and I was afraid if I went to the hospital, my parents would be accused of neglect. So, I just thought, It’ll just heal up by itself.”
Thammavongsa says her parents are proud of her—her mother tells people that her daughter is a famous writer; her father, though more reticent to share the news of his daughter’s fancy prizes (he does not, he says, want to take ownership of her success), still listens to her interviews in awe. I ask him if it upsets him that Thammavongsa writes of such personal family matters. He says if people read it and like it—or even if they don’t like it—“What can I do?” But her parents’ support makes her trepidatious. “Often when I tell my mother about my crushes and how they don’t work out, she will say, ‘So? You’re still beautiful.’ And I hate that,” she says. “I hate that I need my mom to say it, or that it is so meaningful and that it touches me.”
I am struck by her description of her mother and brother, that they loved people so fiercely it hurt them. In elementary school, she says, she got good grades while her brother was the popular one—it was important to him to be liked by everyone. She didn’t talk much, her father tells me of his daughter. “If she doesn’t like something, she tells you right away.” I ask her if this was a coping mechanism in some way, not to play peacemaker or absorb the pain of everyone around her, not to need to be liked.
“That’s probably why I’m still alive,” she says.
Thammavongsa has honed a voice that is unmistakably her own, that can carry a project as ambitious as a novel set in a single day. Editors were skeptical of this structure for a debut, she says.
“I was like, ‘Oh, fuck you. You think a single day is tight?’” she says. “I’m gonna write a novel that takes place in an hour and another novel that takes place in a minute and another novel that takes place in a second.”
It’s the strength of her voice that propels the span of a seemingly quotidian workday. “She does what a really good writer does, which is you always know it’s a story of hers,” Leyshon tells me of working with Thammavongsa at The New Yorker. “Her voice is so distinctive,” she says. “It’s this mixture of very naive and very knowing at the same time.”
Thammavongsa at once speaks with a childlike wonder and world weariness; she discusses the prose of Katie Kitamura in one moment and then the lyrics of TikTok artist Sombr the next; she may not donate a laugh to a joke she does not find funny, but she is not ungenerous and insists on feeding me during our interviews. Though she is not, as she says, a “professional refugee,” she is often read as deeply serious—“It probably won’t make you laugh,” the Times wrote of Pick a Colour—but how else can you read a line like Mai’s insistence that their former boss “probably tells everyone we all have sideways vaginas.”
And yet, for all these contradictions, I am still bewitched by her insistence that she is content relying entirely on herself, and I wonder if it’s true.
“I feel sometimes there is a stronger sense of melancholy than I think she’s always acknowledging,” Leyshon tells me. “You can be a family of one, but there is something sadder underneath that. Or more, it’s a hard-won victory to believe that you can be a family of one.”
I think of a story Thammavongsa told me about seeing an energy healer to get over a crush she seemingly could not move past.
“I didn’t understand why I could not detach. He didn’t like me, and I knew it, but I just had these feelings of intensely liking him,” she tells me. The healer told her that, in a past life, her crush had been king and she a peasant farmer, and she grew fruits and vegetables for his kingdom, and he took her harvest, until she decided she didn’t want to provide for him anymore, so he had her beheaded. “And that made sense, because he’s a guy that everybody gives things to. He wants to write a book, so they give him book deals, even though he has nothing written . . . He attracts all these amazing, brilliant women, and he doesn’t want them.”
In his presence, the healer told her, she still feels like a peasant, but in fact, before he had her beheaded, she made a vow that in her next life, she would be king and treat him like a peasant. “In terms of our careers,” she says, “I am king.” He invited her over for dinner, she says, but six months passed and he never followed up. She ran into him at a party, where he asked her about dinner again. “I thought, It’s been six months. I know what I have to do,” she tells me. “I have to live out my karma. And I said, ‘I don’t think so.’”
How did he respond? I ask her.
“He was so embarrassed and shrunk into himself. And he said, ‘Well, I’m gonna go now,’” Thammavongsa says. “Usually I would say, ‘No, hang out with us.’ But I didn’t care. I am king.”
The post Souvankham Thammavongsa Doesn’t Mind If You’re Jealous of Her Career first appeared on The Walrus.
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