Contemporary Authors

• Too Much and Not the Mood ( essays) Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2017

1. Too much and not the mood LCCN 2016041344 Type of material Book Personal name Chew-Bose, Durga, author. Uniform title Essays. Selections Main title Too much and not the mood / Durga Chew-Bose. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Description 221 pages ; 20 cm ISBN 9780374535957 (softcover) CALL NUMBER PS3603.H49 A6 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durga_Chew-Bose

  Durga Chew-Bose
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Durga Chew-Bose
  Born 1986
  Montreal, Canada
  Alma mater Sarah Lawrence College
  Occupation Writer
  Notable work Too Much and Not the Mood
  Home town Montreal
  Durga Chew-Bose is a writer and author based in Brooklyn, New York. Her first book, Too Much and Not the Mood, was published on April 11, 2017 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux and met with positive reviews.[1]

  Contents [hide]
  1 Early life
  2 Career
  2.1 Too Much and Not the Mood
  2.2 Writers of Color
  3 References
  4 External links
  Early life[edit]
  Chew-Bose was born in Montreal;[2] her parents are from Kolkata.[3]

  Chew-Bose moved to the United States at 17 to attend boarding school in New Mexico for two years.[3] She went on to attend Sarah Lawrence College and spent a year at University of Oxford.[4][5]

  Career[edit]
  Chew-Bose has written for publications including The Guardian, Buzzfeed, The Hairpin, Rolling Stone, GQ, The New Inquiry, n+1, Interview, Paper, Hazlitt, and This Recording.[6] In Nylon, Kristen Iverson described Chew-Bose as "one of our most gifted, insightful essayists and critics";[7] in The Guardian, Sarah Galo said, "If millennials have an intelligentsia, Brooklyn-based writer Durga Chew-Bose is a member of it[, writing] thoughtful long reads on identity and culture that command readers’ attention."[8]

  Chew-Bose has also taught writing at Sarah Lawrence College.[9]

  Too Much and Not the Mood[edit]
  Titled after a line in one of Virginia Woolf's diary entries[3] from 1931,[10] Chew-Bose's Too Much and Not the Mood is a 14-essay collection[11] describing "the complications of growing up and establishing oneself...what it means to be a brown girl in a white world and 'the beautiful dilemma of being first-generation' Canadian."[12]

  Critics have emphasized the stylistic innovation of Chew-Bose's writing in the collection. Naming Too Much and Not the Mood to a Bustle list of "15 Most Anticipated Feminist Book Releases Of 2017," Sadie L. Trombetta described the book as a "collection of essays, letters, prose, and poetry."[13] Listing Too Much and Not the Mood among the 25 "Most Exciting Book Releases for 2017", Maris Kreizman said in New York Magazine's Vulture, "If you admire Maggie Nelson’s ability to combine the personal and the academic into a thrilling new art form, Durga Chew-Bose will be your next favorite writer."[14] Publishers Weekly said of the collection, "Twists in language and heady cultural references elevate Chew-Bose’s debut above the recent crop of personal essay collections by young writers."[12]

  Chew-Bose has noted that artists and writers Agnès Varda and Wong Kar-wai are important influences.[15]

  Writers of Color[edit]
  With Buster Bylander,[16] Jazmine Hughes and Vijith Assar,[17] Chew-Bose cofounded the website Writers of Color in April 2015.[18][19] Writers of Color is a searchable database of contemporary writers of color aimed at "creating more visibility for writers of color, ease their access to publications, and build a platform that is both easy for editors to use and accurately represents the writers."[20]

• Interview - https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/durga-chew-bose

  DURGA CHEW-BOSE
  By Amanda Stern
  Photography Sebastian Kim

  Published April 10, 2017

  DURGA CHEW-BOSE IN NEW YORK, MARCH 2017. JACKET AND TOP: BURBERRY. EARRINGS: CHEW-BOSE’S OWN. SCARF: MEESH. STYLING: MICHELLE CAMERON. HAIR: DENNIS DEVOY USING KÉRASTASE FOR WHITEROOM BK/ART DEPARTMENT. MAKEUP: STEVIE HUYNH/BRYANT ARTISTS.

  Three years ago, Durga Chew-Bose, a then-28-year-old freelance writer in New York, was chosen by a mystery curator to read in a literary series called Secret Admirer. The event, held in someone’s Brooklyn apartment, also featured the writer Luc Sante. After hearing Chew-Bose read, Sante promptly contacted publisher Jonathan Galassi to rave about the young woman. What happened next is the literary equivalent of being signed by a Wilhelmina model scout while shopping at a mall in Norman, Oklahoma. Galassi e-mailed Chew-Bose and arranged a meeting. The result is Too Much and Not the Mood, a collection of delightfully insightful essays published by FSG Originals this month.

  “In the past, I felt like I was in the service of writing about and for other people,” Chew-Bose says about the difference between her freelance work and penning her own essay collection. “Now I feel like I can write for myself. I feel like I created a home for my work that’s my own.” Fittingly, the book’s title is taken from the last line of a Virginia Woolf diary entry. Chew-Bose, whose parents are from Kolkata, grew up in a small, close-knit family in Montreal and moved to the United States at age 17 to attend a two-year boarding school in New Mexico. As a child, she envied the girls around her—white girls mainly—awed by their casual natures as well as their incuriosity. Chew-Bose wanted to belong but tended to watch instead from the sidelines. “I like the corner,” she says. “I had to develop young a utility for being forced to the side. When you don’t feel a natural belonging, a normal reaction is, how can I use this? I was collecting images from that vantage point.” Those images appear in exquisite detail throughout the 14 essays that comprise this meditation on the self in a society that codifies sameness. Whether Chew-Bose is riffing about her own difficult-to-pronounce name or dead squirrels, the bounty of the book lies below the surface, in the subterranean underworld of each essay. Collected there are the discards of daily life: the textures we ignore, the memories we hold for later and never return to. Chew-Bose seems to pay close attention while everyone else races ahead to the next thing, and she’s generous with her findings. “You carry ideas and images with you for so long, ” she says, “you just have to find the language for it, because the images have always been there.”

  Part of that generosity reveals itself in her abounding references to other artists—from painter Karin Mamma Andersson to playwright Annie Baker. In some ways, the book functions like an interactive experience happening in real time, and the rain of cultural allusions broadens the reader’s knowledge base. Ever curious, Chew-Bose was headed to Chelsea after we met over coffee to discuss her book. She wanted to catch the Alice Neel exhibit, and she promised a full report.

• Creative Independent - https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/durga-chew-bose-on-the-power-of-uncertainty/

  Durga Chew-Bose
  Writer, Editor
  Durga Chew-Bose is a Montreal-born writer, whose work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, Filmmaker, The New Inquiry, and The Guardian, among other publications. Her debut collection of stories, Too Much and Not the Mood, came out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April, 2017. She works editorially for ssense, an online retailer of luxury fashion and independent designers. Reflecting on her process, she says: “I do get a bit anxious about losing my way or losing what makes my heart want to write. I return to films, or poems, or email exchanges between close friends, that remind me of why I see things the way I see them.”
  Conversation
  Durga Chew-Bose on the power of uncertainty
  Writing, Process, Inspiration, Education, Identity
  From a conversation with Thora Siemsen
  September 29, 2017
  Highlights on
  Download as a PDF

  Your book, Too Much and Not the Mood, came out 86 years, to the day, after the Virginia Woolf diary entry that inspired its title. What did that gesture mean to you?

  Wow, I haven’t had anyone pose the title in that way before. I didn’t realize it was actually 86 years. To me, it didn’t feel as impactful in that way so much. Like most things creative for me, I just wait for whatever I want to express to fit, and this title fit the project that I was working on. It was a title that I had stumbled upon a few years prior when reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries. It was a string of words that I simply really loved the rhythm of, and I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. With names in general, you can’t overthink it. It just has to happen at the right time. When I was working on the book’s proposal, I didn’t have a title for it, and I remembered that I had underlined that string of words in her diary. It just seemed right, and then I never thought of a different title. That was it.

  Is there a place you’ve seen your book where you’ve least expected to?

  I’ve had a couple of friends send me pictures of commuters on the subway reading it. It’s not that I don’t expect it there, it’s just that it’s always surprising to see it out in the world. There’s something so public about the subway, but also equally intimate, especially when someone’s reading a book. No one can bother them. I guess in the subway it’s always actually just really lovely to see pictures of that, especially if friends see it, and then they send you the picture. To know the picture exists in a text message. I think it’s lovely. I think I’m still surprised by even seeing it in bookstores.

  A book you’ve written about is The Lover by Marguerite Duras, where she writes, “She pays close attention to externals, to the light, to the noise of the city in which the room is immersed.” When did you first read that book, and how did it impact you?

  I read that book my sophomore year of college at Sarah Lawrence. I was studying with this professor, Angela Moger. She was one of those professors that has been incredibly impactful in my life. I truly believe I learned how to read taking her class sophomore year. Something about reading very thin books over the stretch of a semester was completely novel to me. We spent a long time with that book, and I think that combined with what the book is about—feeling young and old simultaneously; friendship with women; women’s bodies; how impossible it is to have an honest relationship with memory—has inspired the way I read. Angela inspired the way I read. That book inspired the way I write. That book inspired my own relationship to telling my own story, and honoring that. Also, it’s a kind of a book that’s, even in its brightest moments, sort of mournful. I feel like that’s a quality that I share. I can’t write about happiness without underscoring sadness, too. I don’t know why, and it’s probably something I would eventually like to move away from, but I haven’t quite yet. I think that’s why that book affected me so much. It’s also just so beautiful. It’s a book about writing as much as it’s a book about memory. There was a sentence about writing being all things confounded, all contraries confounded, so it’s about being a person with an incredible amount of contradictions, which I also relate to.

  When did you have the clarity that Duras expresses in that book about knowing she was a writer?

  Probably more recently than one would expect. I was definitely never a kid who thought she was going to be a writer. I was definitely never a teenager who thought she was going to be a writer. Even quite early into my 20s, too, I didn’t think much of it other than I would write one piece of writing and then the next one, so it was more an accumulation of written pieces that made me a writer. Definitely not a moment of clarity. In fact, I wish I had more moments of clarity in my life, in general. I definitely am a writer now, and I identify as one, but it wasn’t like I reached the last rung of the ladder and then climbed on top of some rooftop and was like, Okay, I’m a writer. It was very slow to realize for me.

  You’ve said before that you will sometimes watch a series finale of a television show before settling in to write. What are some benefits of this practice?

  I think it’s because they’re so melodramatic and they try to wrap things up without wrapping things up. I’m into trying to control my environment when I’m seeking inspiration. A lot of that is either sonic, i.e. with music I listen to on repeat, or controlling something like harvesting familiarity. A series finale of a show I really love, deep diving back into those characters, has less to do with inspiration than finding a quick remedy for blocking out the world, and reminding myself what it is I want to do with my work.

  Something about series finales, it’s about ending, but ending with an opening. That’s something I’m drawn to, but also it’s just a form of procrastination, if I’m being really honest. Most writers, I assume, have a wealth of ways to procrastinate. That’s one where I find maybe less guilt.

  You write frequently about film, the private bliss of going to the movies, and even mention in your essay, “Upspeak”, having worked on a feature-length screenplay in 2012. Is writing a film something you plan to do in your career?

  For sure. It’s definitely something I do now, but I don’t think it’s part of my career yet. Writing scripts is something that I love to do. I’m pretty terrible at plots and dialogue, those are two things I would like to get better at. When I’m in the script format, I feel like it gives me an opportunity to contend with those two things more honestly. I see the world very cinematically and I see writing very cinematically, so it just seems like a natural progression for me. I would love to write movies, and write them not just privately for myself, which is what I do at the moment.

  “Mindlessly self-deleting, it turns out, is addictive. And while these little accommodations have simplified some experiences, there is the gamble that my willingness to write myself out of my daily encounters will curb the potential for A Tremendous Me: big goals, big wants, and dreams I’ve left in the cold or crystallized,” you write. What are some rituals you adhere to that bolster your sense of “A Tremendous Me”?

  Honoring my capacity to not be around people a lot as a way to get my work done, and hear the voice in my head, while also managing how quickly that can become isolationist. Being aware of that. I go on long walks, like probably every writer. I connect with the people that I really love and that love me back, because sometimes that reminds you of who you are. It cuts out a lot of the extra stuff that we require to be in the world. One of the most integral parts of that is returning to whatever art has made me want to pursue writing. If it’s a movie that reminds me of what’s important to me, or a poem that restarts my day, those kinds of things really remind me of who I am, and how what I want to do requires quiet time with the art that has galvanized me.

  In 2015, as part of your feature in Brooklyn Magazine’s 30 Under 30, your advice to writers getting started was, “Pay no interest to media madness, don’t feel shy about declaring your dream assignments, take edits, practice pushing back, cancel plans to stay in and read and go to bed early.” What advice would you add now?

  Take your time. Don’t rush through your projects, and don’t believe anyone who’s telling you to rush through them either. Just really take your time with your work. Follow what is weird and strange that you do privately and consider that there’s probably writing in there. The stuff that you don’t ever talk about that you do when you come home after spending a day out with a lot of people. Whatever interests you have that you aren’t sharing with anyone. I don’t mean share that necessarily, but there’s a story there. Listen better.

  Since the book, it feels like so much has changed and nothing at all has changed, which is an unhelpful statement. I really believe that there is a sense to produce at a quick clip, and I just think that we could all benefit from slowing down a little bit. There’s a way to be reactive while still slowing down. I think the two get confounded, because the world incites reaction, obviously, and it’s important to react and it’s important to be members of the world and react to the state that it’s in. I think that there’s a way to do it thoughtfully, as well.

  Are there certain writers that you read that you think do that very well?

  Yeah, definitely. Friends of mine do it really well. Doreen St. Félix is a perfect example of that. I’m always blown away by how quickly she can get her thoughts out, but they don’t feel rushed. They feel like she’s been building towards it, which is impressive considering she’ll be commenting a lot on stuff that happened a day before, yet the writing always feels like it’s been building up her whole life. Sarah Nicole Prickett, too. Anytime she writes anything it feels like she’s been harvesting those sentences forever. It’s impressive. It’s really impressive to me. It’s writers right now that are able to comment on the state of the world, while also commenting with a sense of personal history.

  You taught a course at your alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College, called “On Not Writing.” Per the course description, “‘On Not Writing’ is, in a manner of speaking, a variety of writing. It’s the writer accumulating and accessing new points of entry. It’s the writer drawing connections over time, without coercing meaning but, instead, allowing it to surface.” What surprised you most about teaching that course?

  It was my first time teaching, so my capacity for surprise was huge. I was teaching a lot of text that I’m really, really familiar with, so having it interpreted by students who are reading it for the first time and reopening the book or the text, for me, was really surprising. Reading something I thought I almost had committed to memory, but hearing it from a different point of view was really surprising.

  What were some of them?

  We read Jamaica Kincaid’s Talk Stories. We read Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors. We read some Fanny Howe. We read some Woolf. We read Marguerite Duras’ writing. Also, her book Practicalities, which I absolutely love. We read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.

  When you were on the Rookie podcast talking to Tavi Gevinson [founder and Editor-in-Chief of Rookie Magazine], you said that when your students apologized while turning in an essay it often indicated they had gone to this unconscious place in their writing. I love this idea, and it’s so different from telling writers to not apologize for their work, without also telling them to.

  I could always count on experiencing their best work when they were apologetic about it, because I felt like it meant they let go and didn’t really follow the prompt, which is the ultimate goal. It also meant to me that there is something about apologizing about one’s work that means it somehow impacted you. You created an attachment to it, even if the attachment is feeling bad about it. I think there is something there that I’ve always really loved. Every time a student apologized I was blown away by where they went, because it meant that they let go a little bit somewhere in the process. What they’re apologizing for is that instinct we have to then, once we write, rejoin the world; rejoin the assignment; rejoin what the purpose was. Then you feel bad that you didn’t deliver on the purpose, but the real joy is that you didn’t deliver on the purpose. I was always excited when a student would apologize, like, Oh, this is going to be great.

  In your book’s fourth story, “Gone!”, you write, “Even very young, I was aware of how inclusion, no matter how warm, alerts me to further ways I might need to catch up.” How does this awareness manifest in what you read and write?

  I think it makes me hesitant when I feel a sense of belonging, actually, which I think is good, but I think it also makes it very clear to me that so much of my writing is rooted in watching and not understanding; or not fitting in; or feeling like it takes me a few extra beats to understand what the punchline was. It means that my interpretive powers maybe are a little [more] delayed than most people. It makes me aware of how important it is to trust my instincts. Even if I can’t interpret the instinct, it happened in that moment, and even if it’ll take me a long time to figure out what that instinct was directing me towards or directing me away from, it’s important that it happened and not deny those.

  I wouldn’t say I’m this obvious outsider or anything like that, but I do feel that it has made my writing about contending with a sense of separation. How do I bridge that separation? How do I also take advantage of that separation? How do I use it to sharpen my point of view, as opposed to just passively experience it?

  You edit and write for a fashion website called ssense, where you’ve created a new feature called Fiction Dispatch, where “An author selects an item from [the] site valued at under $500, photographs it, and writes a piece of short fiction under 500 words.” What are some ways that you see an economy of words as a luxury?

  It seems incredibly daunting and impossible to me, so I think the real luxury is putting yourself in a position where those parameters are going to make clear what story can happen in such a small space. I think what’s also cool about it, too, is that the luxury is that you are forced to find story in the slightest moments as opposed to requiring a story in three acts. I also love the idea of brevity, meaning that the world that you are creating is inconclusive. I think that’s really luxurious. I think inconclusive narratives toll longer with the reader. It’s funny, we talk a lot about brevity and how did someone compact so much in such little space, but really what they’re doing is creating something with such a long life because it’s so brief. As in, the reader carries it with themselves for longer.

  What are some ways that feeling temporized can become a state to work from?

  It almost buys you time. I think maybe this is related to what I was saying about slowing down a little bit. It is a form of avoidance, but this whole conversation has been about highlighting all the things I avoid, like procrastination and making decisions. I think it’s great. I think it’s such a huge part of how I operate in the world, and it’s something I should probably more interpersonally work on. I avoid, avoid, avoid, but I think I might confuse avoiding with accumulation, and so in avoiding I’m gaining something else. That might be a way that I write, as well. I don’t want to commit to anything permanent. I feel like I can express better what I’m experiencing when I’m being indecisive almost, because I am full of contradictions.

  I know that I can seem like I’m just not forcing myself to be articulate and that I’m kind of being a bit lazy, but I do really feel like a certain caliber of inarticulateness [is] the closest I’m going to get to knowing myself, honestly. I actually feel like I’m the worst version of myself when I’m completely certain. I’m not kind to people I love and my work is less true to me, but when I spend time wading through my indecisiveness, or whatever has temporized me, I get as close as I’ll probably ever get to knowing my true self.

• Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/13/durga-chew-bose-too-much-and-not-enough-interview

  Durga Chew-Bose: 'I don't really believe in writing as catharsis'
  Too Much and Not the Mood is a lyrical collection of essays considering the human heart from many angles. She explains why she writes without a plan

  Anna Furman @ayfurman
  Thu 13 Apr 2017 06.19 EDT Last modified on Wed 20 Sep 2017 05.36 EDT
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  Durga Chew-Bose

  “The best ideas outrun me. That’s why I write,” Durga Chew-Bose muses in the opening essay of her first book, Too Much and Not the Mood. The relatively slim volume is packed with 14 evocative pieces that evidence that chase – from her childhood growing up in Montreal to her 20s in Brooklyn.

  Just as Joan Didion homes in on small physical details, Chew-Bose loves painstakingly specific descriptions. In the sprawling, 90-page essay Heart Museum – named after an emoji – colours are “shell-pink” and a “lathery shade of peach”; a glass window doesn’t shatter, it is “veined”.

  Also like Didion, Chew-Bose mines the content of her life for her writing. While the events recorded – Chew-Bose’s father has heart surgery, she takes a rickshaw ride in Mumbai, a friend gives her a Build-A-Bear heart – are wildly tangential, they are drawn together by a central motif of hearts. The gauzy, atmospheric mood that permeates her writing invites a reading experience more akin to listening to rainfall on a tile roof than hearing a song with a catchy chorus. Since there is often no decipherable beginning, middle, or end in these essays, it’s best to steep in a passage, rather than attempt to swim through to the other side.

  We meet for breakfast at an old-timey diner in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where she is living for a semester while teaching at Sarah Lawrence, her alma mater. The syllabus for the class – a writing workshop called On Not Writing – is stacked with writers like Lydia Davis, Anaïs Nin, Sarah Manguso, who share Chew-Bose’s self-referential, probing writing style. “I don’t want [my students to write] traditional first-person narrative essays,” she says. “I want them to run before they can walk.” The class celebrates the kinds of writing – list-making, letter-writing, etc – that sustain and inform an enduring creative life.

  Durga Chew-Bose: 'Women have been edited since we were little girls'
  Read more
  The title comes from a line in Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary that Chew-Bose once underlined and Instagrammed; Woolf was frustrated with the pressure she felt to adjust her writing for her readers. Before Chew-Bose signed her book deal, an editor friend remarked that it should be the name of her first book. “I just liked the sequence of words,” Chew-Bose says. “Doesn’t it sound like a jazz album?”

  In consolidating these essays – five of which were previously published – into book form, “there was no map or blueprint,” she says. “There was no big box in my room full of papers and journals and quotes and napkins with scribbles on them. There was no list that I was checking off.” If she is taken by someone or some object while walking or at the movies, she usually writes a note in her phone and emails it to herself. “I don’t really believe in writing as catharsis, but so much of it for me is trying to make sense of why I’m drawn to things. I love overthinking what turns me on.”

  After living away from her parents for the past 13 years, she moved back to Montreal – where they both live – while writing this book. “There’s a certain type of adult who really romanticises proximity to parents, and I’m one of those people,” she says, adding that she views her collection as a gift to her mother. “I hope that it makes [my family] feel closer to me,” she says. “No matter how close you are to your family, you still don’t know how your daughter interprets the world.”

  While some of the book touches on growing up as a first-generation kid in a predominately white neighbourhood, in others she expresses her feeling of displacement living in the US as a Canadian. “I felt strained living in the US for so long,” she says. “I felt temporary [in New York], and the temporariness of it was bubbling over for me.” She came to appreciate privileges she had previously taken for granted, like universal healthcare: “It changes who you are as a person, to grow up in a country where you don’t have to prove to the world you’re human to deserve those things.”

  As Chew-Bose explains, the practice of writing requires “leaving the world behind, so you can hold fast to what’s strange inside, what’s unlit.” It follows then that the writer, perhaps like the reader, enjoys a certain degree of solitude and introspection. “Most of the women in my life are half-present because part of us is elsewhere. Whether it’s for self-preservation, or to get through the day, or [the nature of] being an introvert with a social life, we’re never 100% there.” In writing this book, she wanted to capture “that life that you’re living alongside your life”.

  Too Much and Not the Mood
  Photograph: PR
  “When you’re on a deadline or reviewing a book or something, depending on the publication, there’s a voice you have to write, and for a specific readership. But with a book, it was really about becoming myself, or at least writing without the noise of expectation and audience,” she explains. “I write to four or five people my life and that’s it.”

  Some readers will find that Chew-Bose relies on the descriptive power of her prose to the detriment of a narrative thrust, but this is only a problem if you’re a reader that finds plot-averse writing to be befuddling, or her lyrical style overwrought. But for some other readers, including myself, it is a delight to slip into someone else’s busy mind, take a look around, and find profound resonances.

  “My writing often starts somewhere and goes to seven other places and then comes back,” Chew-Bose explains. “I like non-endings that feel final.”

  Too Much and Not the Mood is published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Durga Chew-Bose is appearing at Sydney writers’ festival in May 2017

Chew-Bose, Durga: TOO MUCH AND
NOT THE MOOD
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Chew-Bose, Durga TOO MUCH AND NOT THE MOOD Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction)
$15.00 4, 11 ISBN: 978-0-374-53595-7
A debut collection of personal essays from a Montreal-born writer.Chew-Bose is fascinated by life and
especially by her response to it. She loves movies, painting, her skin, her name, the sound of her voice, her
heart, and just about anything that occurs to her. Her debut is a work of self-examination and memoir, a
young writer's songs of herself. She opens the collection with the ambitious, lengthy "Heart Museum,"
which begins as a rumination on the physical and emotional durability of the heart and quickly sidetracks
into a hyper-referential stream-of-consciousness stroll through every subject that strikes her fancy, from
cinematography to old boyfriends to random family memories to writing. Possibly taking her cue from
Chris Marker's great documentary Sans Soleil, Chew-Bose seems bent on creating an essay that charts a
surprising and compelling course despite having no obvious destination. Instead, it becomes an increasingly
fetishistic ramble that flies off on various tangents. "Groping through the dark is, in large part, what writing
consists of anyway," she offers at one point, perhaps by way of explanation. "Working through and feeling
around the shadows of an idea. Getting pricked. Cursing purity. Threshing out. Scuffing up and peeling
away. Feral rearranging. Letting form ferment." The trend toward navel-gazing continues in the subsequent
essays, but some also profit from a sharper, more direct focus, especially when the author addresses what it
means--as a young woman from an Indian family growing up in mostly white Canada--to come to terms
with cultural identity: "Nothing will make you fit in less than trying, constantly, to fit in: portioning your
name, straightening your hair, developing a love-hate fascination to white moms whose pantries were
stocked differently than yours, who touched your hair, admiring 'how thick' it was." Chew-Bose is an
intense observer and cataloger of sensations, but this type of literary impressionism, where self-discovery
becomes self-absorption, wears thin.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Chew-Bose, Durga: TOO MUCH AND NOT THE MOOD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482911526/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d3488cd4. Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
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Too Much and Not the Mood
Poornima Apte
Booklist.
113.14 (Mar. 15, 2017): p16.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Too Much and Not the Mood.
By Durga Chew-Bose.
Apr. 2017. 240p. Farrar, paper, $15 (9780374535957). 800.
Chew-Bose's writings about her journey on the rocky road of assimilation to a self-assured identity as a
Canadian-born daughter of Indian immigrants could easily have meandered off into trite and oft-repeated
narratives about being brown in North America. But this sharp and astute debut essay collection reveals a
young author who is wise beyond her years and whose keen eye moves beyond tired tropes about identity
struggles. In the essay "Part of a Greater Pattern," a brilliantly eloquent piece about childhood and comingof-age,
Chew-Bose remembers her father's proclivity for "assessing," for being "moored to logistics." It's a
keen insight because what she does in this collection is not far removed from what her parent once did; she
too is an expert assessor--of moods, of situations, of her own writing, and her relationships. The book's title
is taken from one of Virginia Woolf's diary entries, which ended with "too much and not the mood," a
suggestion that perhaps her writing was trying a little too hard. If that were Chew-Bose's concern, she need
not worry. Her ample talent and keenly observed essays will surely win her followers, especially at a time
and place when authenticity is a rare and much-valued currency.--Poornima Apte
YA: YAs reading at a high level will enjoy Chew-Bose's precise take on youth, both its glories and
tribulations, while also appreciating her literary turns of phrase. PA.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Apte, Poornima. "Too Much and Not the Mood." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2017, p. 16. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490998399/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f384a0f8.
Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490998399

"Chew-Bose, Durga: TOO MUCH AND NOT THE MOOD." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A482911526/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 Jan. 2018. Apte, Poornima. "Too Much and Not the Mood." Booklist, 15 Mar. 2017, p. 16. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490998399/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 27 Jan. 2018.

• Slate
  http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2017/04/durga_chew_bose_s_too_much_and_not_the_mood_reviewed.html
  Word count: 1890

  The Anti-Polemicist
  Durga Chew-Bose’s dense, meticulous writing on identity politics feels like a corrective for our current political moment.
  By Ismail Muhammad
  Natalie Matthews-Ramo
  Natalie Matthews-Ramo

  Durga Chew-Bose has become a leading voice in the millennial intelligentsia by writing what’s been described as the antithesis to today’s “churned-out ‘hot takes.’ ” In a time when so many writers bend to the internet economy’s demand for easy reading, Chew-Bose rose to prominence with dense, meticulous essays on identity politics and culture that rewarded sustained attention and patience. Essays like “Since Living Alone”—a lyrical piece originally published on the Hairpin that examines solitude’s value—revealed a voice that stretched language to convey what it feels like to experience the world and homed in on everyday life’s mundane details to reveal their fundamental strangeness. She merges the political, personal, and aesthetic into a panoramic account of contemporary life and the vagaries of gender and racial identity.

  That in-depth exploration of identity continues in her debut essay collection, Too Much and Not the Mood. “There’s strength in one’s miniaturization,” she writes early on. “Smallness can make you feel extra porous. Extra ambitious.” Across 14 playful and peripatetic essays that touch on everything from the pleasure of watching movies in the summertime to the alienation of being a lone adolescent brown girl in a throng of white girls, Chew-Bose shows us what such ambitious porousness might look like. Her strange, challenging, and sometimes frustrating prose is personal but only in the most attenuated sense.

  It’s not that this collection is apolitical—it’s just interested in the nuance of experience that many essays on race and gender often forget to account for.

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  I say attenuated because these essays don’t start from the presumption of a stable self. Rather, they narrate how experience is always intercepting and disrupting that I—especially when it belongs to a woman of color whose attempts to formulate a self in language are always subject to refraction through the minds and comforts of others. If we’re to go by the lyrical fleetness of Chew-Bose’s prose, though, that refraction or double consciousness rarely feels like a burden. The book converts miniaturization into an unexpected aesthetic opportunity, a lens that refracts one’s self in the most blissful ways possible. The result is a book that substitutes a giddy openness in place of the stark political polemics that characterize so many contemporary essays on gender and race. In “Upspeak,” an essay about the gender politics of her own “childlike” voice, she seems to lose her train of thought, digressing from an image of sleeping puppies to Al Pacino’s puppy-dog eyes in The Godfather to the ecstasy young Pacino inspires in her. What you expect to be a somber personal essay about gender politics takes a detour into astute and warm film criticism.

  It’s not that this collection is apolitical—it’s just interested in the nuance of experience that many essays on race and gender so often forget to account for. Chew-Bose’s language, for example, excels when communicating the sense of dislocation—always close at hand—inherent in being a person of color. In one essay, she recalls her adolescence among older white girls, writing that white girls “knew nothing, or so it seemed, about the prickling and pining so innate to me, about deeply honed unease.” For these girls—seemingly unburdened by alienation, perfectly at ease in the world—participating in the world means being its focal point. If these girls are society’s pivot, Chew-Bose places herself off in the periphery, slyly spying on neighbors through holes in fences, an audience to the world but rarely a participant. She is “born accommodating,” as she writes in “D as In,” an essay about being continually misnamed. For her, being born accommodating means living with a sense that one does not own oneself, that you must always make space for others and find contentment being a spectator.

  Judging by Chew-Bose’s prose, though, there seems to be so much pleasure in spectating that it’s easy to wonder why you’d want to be anywhere but the stands. Too Much makes looking seem extravagant, and in Chew-Bose’s hands looking is a tool for cultivating intimacy with the world. Recounting a scene from The Godfather Part II when Vito Corleone gives Carmela a pear, she writes that “He gently places the gift on their table while she busies herself in the kitchen, and in those few seconds I’ve always been taken by what I can only describe as the privacy of kindness. Those moments leading up to—that anticipate—the testimony of kindness.” This is the kind of close reading that opens up new dimensions of experience, that looks at the world a little cockeyed in order to peel back the layers we’ve become inured to and confront us with everything we’ve missed. Most importantly, it’s not a kind of looking available to those who have grown accustomed to thinking of the world as theirs. Chew-Bose’s status as spectator results in prose that feels Emersonian, like inhabiting a massive and insatiably curious eyeball that roves incessantly over its surroundings, finding in them the same aesthetic pleasure normally reserved for a darkened movie theater. Perhaps this is why Chew-Bose’s most enduring pleasure seems to be film, where there’s no need to do anything more than looking.

  Or maybe Zora Neale Hurston is a more apt precedent. Like Hurston, Chew-Bose’s prose is itinerant, restless, completely uninterested in settling into anything resembling argument. Instead, it proceeds via associative logic, making an art out of diversion and tangent and inviting us to wander as she observes and questions. Her writing wants to retrain our attention on the various textures and pleasures that comprise lived experience.

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  “Heart Museum,” the 93-page essay that opens the collection, moves laterally through successive memories and observations tenuously related by nothing more than Chew-Bose’s penchant for attentive close reading and peculiar, clarifying observations. Reflecting on what it feels like to listen to a “perhaps not great, but good” album for the first time, she begins to unspool all the ways in which that album can infect your life, only to pivot quickly to how film can achieve the same infective quality, only to pivot again to a gloss on The Borrowers, Mary Norton’s series for children.

  Such restlessness models a form of inquiry that makes its point via approximation rather than precision. Chew-Bose’s writing is asymptotic that way. It’s always inching toward meaning without finding it, more interested in capturing what experience feels like than interpreting it. In that sense, her most obvious predecessors are Chris Kraus and Maggie Nelson. Like those writers, she’d rather explore the resonances between ostensibly disparate phenomena than proffer meaning. The most exhilarating aspect of Nelson’s The Argonauts is the way stray bits of critical theory and poetry—a little bit of Judith Butler here, a little bit of Roland Barthes there—pockmark its surface but are never forced into interpretation. Nelson seldom bothers to explicate those excerpts’ relation to one another and instead allows their echoes to bounce off each other so that they entangle readers in their web. Chew-Bose opts for something similar, using a succession of examples or case studies to gradually articulate a way of experiencing the world that privileges openness, a willingness to affect and be affected by other people—even when it might not feel good.

  This is a form that turns the vulnerability inherent in being a woman of color into strength and constructs connections between things that we rarely think of as connected. In the tantalizing “Some Things I Cannot Unhear,” for example, she moves from the staccato trembling of James Baldwin’s voice during an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show to Nina Simone claiming her breasts on “Ain’t Got No” to Allen Iverson indignantly uttering the word practice, and it’s difficult not to hear her building up to an ultimately unspoken assertion of the black voice’s power to reorganize how we perceive the world. Chew-Bose borrows some of this power for herself. Her webs encourage us to be in a more loving, attentive relationship with the world around us than maybe we’re used to these days. It’s an ambitious project, one that wants to register what it feels like to experience the world rather than flattening it out into meaning.

  170327_BOOKS_Cover-too-much
  This itinerancy makes Too Much a disorienting and challenging read. That disorientation doesn’t always feel worthwhile. Chew-Bose’s arabesque prose is sometimes lyrical to a fault. At one point, she tries to capture the synesthesia of encountering a memory in the smell of a shirt her father once wore to a jazz club: “The shirt smells like paint drying and the sound of [Charles] Mingus’s hard bop, and while it smells like none of those things, it does.” Sentences like that feel exhausting to read because they seem ornamental more than anything, as if lyricism’s primary purpose is to provide the thinnest veneer of a narrative throughline on which these essays can hang. I often found myself pausing in the middle of an essay to wonder, What exactly am I reading about? This problem is more peculiar to the collection’s longer essays. In shorter pieces like the aforementioned “Some Things I Cannot Unhear,” there’s no need to justify a 93-page run time; we’re left to delight in how the author re-enchants the world by paying close attention.

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  Chew-Bose has various names for the people who find themselves in this state of enchantment, this condition of being “torn-between” multiple continents, histories, and cultures. At one point she deems herself a member of the nook people, “Those of us who retreat in order to cubicle our flame. Who collect sea glass. Who value a deep pants pocket. Who are our own understudies and may as well have shadowboxes for brains.” Being a nook person means dedicating oneself to a certain orientation toward the world, a wild-eyed and acquisitive fascination with a world that isn’t yours, that raises the eye above the I.

  Because of these essays’ interest in texture rather than polemic, it’s difficult to imagine a book that contradicts our political moment more strongly than Too Much and Not the Mood. That title, drawn from Virginia Woolf’s frustration with her readers’ tastes, also spells out Chew-Bose’s relationship to the age of Trump. In a moment when public discourse has narrowed so that there seems to be little space for anything more than polemic, her essays feel affectively—and refreshingly—inconsistent with the modes of reading and writing we’ve grown accustomed to. Her irrepressible interest in the world can’t be subsumed into a politics. The dissonance Chew-Bose brings to the table has never felt more necessary.

  ---

  Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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