Jessie Tu

Tell me.

Hi, how are you?

It is, yeah.

I mean, anyone who struggles with loneliness has an excess of desires and I think when one finds oneself in that position...

they can put themselves into risky situations.

And I think it's to a degree women suffer from this on a different level than men.

Oh, absolutely.

I think writing about music has always been a struggle of mine.

I mean, music is there because words are insufficient.

But I tried to do it justice through this character of Jenna.

And, you know, the classical music world is also very hard to write about.

Classical music generally, you know, opera and symphonies, they're so excruciatingly hard to describe using at least, you know, the English language.

But it's such an interesting intersection, especially when it comes to

big, chunky, canonic works of classical music and, you know, how that intersects with the English language.

I think I did the mistake of reading Gia Tolentino's review of it in The New Yorker before I embarked on reading the novel.

And so I had this very heightened, exaggerated sense of what it might do to me.

And not just her review, but a lot of other reviews I read from American publications were extraordinary in their praise of the work and how they described it as this very psychologically intense experience reading it.

And I went into it thinking that I might go through some sort of psychotic episode by reading it.

But I think because of that extraordinarily heightened sense of expectation, it inevitably didn't reach those heights for me.

And so my experience of it was affected by that preconceived ideas.