Art Is Everything
A Novel

Yxta Maya Murray (Author)

9780810142923

Paperback / softback, published 30 January 2021

376 pages, 17 black & white images
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.325 kg

“In Amanda Ruiz, Yxta Maya Murray has created a character that is fresh and sassy and unlike any I’ve encountered in recent fiction. Through inventive and stylized prose rife with wit and intelligence, we witness her triumphs and heartbreaks just as Amanda is on the verge of a major creative breakthrough while her personal life begins to unravel. What results is a portrait of an artist whose tenacity and passion fill the pages of this ebullient novel, penned by a gifted writer whose imagination knows no limits.” —Alex Espinoza, author of Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime

In her funny, idiosyncratic, and propulsive new novel, Art Is Everything, Yxta Maya Murray offers us a portrait of a Chicana artist as a woman on the margins. L.A. native Amanda Ruiz is a successful performance artist who is madly in love with her girlfriend, a wealthy and pragmatic actuary named Xochitl. Everything seems under control: Amanda's grumpy father is living peacefully in Koreatown; Amanda is about to enjoy a residency at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and, once she gets her NEA, she's going to film a groundbreaking auto-critical documentary in Mexico.

But then everything starts to fall apart when Xochitl's biological clock begins beeping, Amanda's father dies, and she endures a sexual assault. What happens to an artist when her emotional support vanishes along with her feelings of safety and her finances? Written as a series of web posts, Instagram essays, Snapchat freakouts, rejected Yelp reviews, Facebook screeds, and SmugMug streams-of-consciousness that merge volcanic confession with eagle-eyed art criticism, Art Is Everything shows us the painful but joyous development of a mid-career artist whose world implodesust as she has a breakthrough.