Taste Test
What is “good taste” anyway? Allow your favorite actor, musician, celebrity, or comedian to let you in on what they’re watching, reading, and consuming.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve watched with quiet fascination as my friendships with women have divided themselves into two buckets: those that feel simple and those that do not. It’s not that the “simple” friendships don’t require work so much as the complicated ones start to look and feel like unrequited obsessions. This is also the nature of the central friendship that powers Ling Ling Huang’s sophomore novel, Immaculate Conception, which was just released May 13. After Natural Beauty — her debut novel that took a scalpel to the wellness industry — Huang’s second major work of fiction is also harrowing, this time in its exploration of all-consuming relationships between women. Enka, the narrator, meets Mathilde at a private arts conservatory, and their dynamic quickly snowballs into a bond that is intimate, hyper-physical, and codependent: “We sweated so much in her muggy room that I collected a small cup of our commingled fluids to use for watercoloring,” Enka says of the hot summer days she spent with her friend. A savant among their cohort, Mathilde’s art career begins to take off and Enka, a technology artist, soon finds envy poisoning her mind. Once mired in beauty, their connection begins to rot.
Tackling class, technology, and the fetishization of the artist, Huang pokes and prods at the patriarchal structures that often render female friendship exhausting, if not untenable. More tenderly, she wonders why we continue to love those who hurt us, and at what point that love morphs into something more gruesome. Below, the author speaks about the “exorcism” of writing Immaculate Conception, wanting to wear your characters’ skin, and the adoration inherent in the jealousy we harbor.
While I was reading the book, before you had published an essay detailing the origins of the novel, I remember thinking there was something so Ferrante-esque in the way Enka and Mathilde bounce off one another — as if Enka can only understand herself in relation to Mathilde. I was going to ask if that was intentional, but sure enough, you were reading the Neapolitan novels when the incident that inspired Immaculate Conception took place, right?
I didn’t know until I started writing it that it was going to be a novel and that I had so much processing to do for that chapter of my life. A month or two after the affair happened [Editor’s note: Her college boyfriend cheated on her with her best friend.], I graduated and immediately packed a suitcase and moved to New York. I thought that I was healing by running away from everything.
But I feel really fortunate to have found those books when I did. It’s amazing to even be spoken about in the same breath as Ferrante and her writing. I look up to what she’s done so much, and the Neapolitan novels had such a huge influence on this book, but also that time in my life. I’m sure if I hadn’t encountered that series, I wouldn’t have tried to be friends with my best friend after everything happened. It really changed the fundamental nature of all of my relationships with women.
Days of Abandonment is one of my favorite books, as well. I read that at the beginning of the affair, because I just felt like something was so off, and I couldn’t figure out why they were both acting so bizarre. I remember reading the first page of that book and thinking, There’s something that’s completely impenetrable about them. I’m not getting answers. That affair then plunged me into this huge relapse of an eating disorder that I had been working on for years. It was a really difficult time, and I started writing this book as an empathy exercise, as well as an exorcism.
There are clear elements of this book that are auto-fictional, but can you explain the choice to write in first person? Why did you want readers to see Enka’s interior world?
I actually wrote it all in third person first, but I didn’t feel like it was as impactful. The same thing has happened with almost everything that I work on: I feel like I need the distance to get the story and the structure. But then, as a reader, I feel like I’m not close enough, and I really wanted to be closer. I want to wear their skin, especially for this one. It was also therapeutic to try to be Enka — to try to understand where some of her choices came from.
You’re a concert violinist, as well as a writer. How does your background as a classically trained musician inform your approach to fiction?
I like to say I’m a small-muscle athlete. I think that writing and music really inform each other. Whenever I’m stuck writing, I go and practice violin, and it kind of unspools my mind, and vice versa. I think of them as translating each other. I started writing because there were so many amazing pieces of music I was working on where I couldn’t tell the feeling that I was getting. As I was trying to figure out my own feelings, that blossomed into writing fiction. I usually have a scaffold or some kind of structure or piece that I think of for different sections of writing, so that I can stay consistent.
What was your “scaffold” or playlist for Immaculate Conception?
For both books I’ve written now, I’ve listened to a lot of Prokofiev, especially his Cinderella ballet, because there are these pristine, soaring melodies on top of these dark bass undercurrents. For the art world, and for the beauty world, you have this veneer that’s really glamorous, and then when you dig deeper, things are so ugly. There’s also this wry humor to Prokofiev’s music. It’s a little caustic, but his melodies are also genuinely earnest. I strive for that in my writing — that mixture of tone. For Immaculate Conception, I also listened to a lot of Beach House, which is not classical, but was also very informative. There were a lot of soundtracks I listened to, as well. I love the Midsommar soundtrack.
A Florence Pugh horror film? That checks out.
Midsommar and Shrek were the two biggest influences for Natural Beauty.
Shrek?
Yes, Shrek! It’s so subversive when Fiona turns into an ogre at the end instead of him becoming a human. It’s taken me decades to process that.
And how long ago did you actually sit down to work with this seed of an idea?
I sold my book Natural Beauty in February 2022. I had such imposter syndrome about it that I immediately decided I needed to write something else. I wanted to challenge myself not to write about music, actually, because I wasn’t sure if I could write something that wasn’t related to music or to family. I was really interested in performance art at the time, and there’s a great series called “Studio Conversations.” So I was reading about the processes of early New York artists, and … I think I finally started to process things from my past more deeply. That’s when the seed was planted, about three years ago.
Body horror is a huge theme in Natural Beauty. Less so in Immaculate Conception, but it’s certainly there. I’m thinking of when Enka digs her nails into her skin so hard that she makes herself bleed, or the scene with Mathilde, covered in lesions — all of it is grotesque and also impactful. Were you thinking about body horror again when you started writing this book? Or, if not, why do you think it continues to pop up in your work?
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Actually, I wasn’t even thinking about body horror in Natural Beauty. But I think if you’re writing about women’s bodies, especially in this country, what we’re subjected to and what we are made to subject ourselves to is really horrific, so I feel like it’s a natural thing to happen. I do watch a lot of body horror, so it makes sense that it would also occur in my work. But I also find writing physicality and repressed emotions to be really grounding for the character and for myself. Growing up, I was so divorced from my feelings that I wouldn’t even know my own opinions. And I take so long to process anything that just moving my body or touching it — reminding myself that I am corporeal in some way and not a collection of someone else’s ideas or thoughts, or even my own ideas or thoughts — has been really productive for me. Maybe that’s why.
That’s interesting, because a lot of the fiction writers I know struggle with the embodiment piece. They can write a rambling six-page monologue no problem, but forget to remind themselves that a character might be moving their hands at the same time. While you’re writing, are you thinking about where a character is physically in space, or is that something that you have to go back and add in?
I think I’ve had to add that in, but in the same way that I have to add myself in to my body. Violin is not an ergonomic thing. If you’re playing for eight to ten hours a day for years, you’re contorted. My scapula is a lot thicker on one side. My fingers are not the same length. It has permanently reshaped my body, and a lot of that has required that I repress physical feeling. So now I’m an adult, and I’m trying to reacquaint myself with my body, and to remind myself that actually, it’s not okay to be in pain. I teach violin and I’m trying to make sure that we’re not ignoring our bodies and figuring out how to approach the instrument in a way that’s holistic.
You just had your first child. Were you pregnant while writing the book?
I was pregnant while editing this book, yes. Before having a child, I would go hours without remembering to eat or drink water or take care of myself. Like, the dog would be the only reason I would walk outside.
There’s a moment in the book where Mathilde makes her great return to the art world. Enka is jealous, of course, but she’s also underwhelmed that Matilde chooses motherhood as the medium for her art. She says, “It was a cliché, domesticity as spectacle, motherhood as artistic practice.” How have you had to grapple with your own ideas of motherhood and making art, both as a musician and a writer?
Everything I wrote about motherhood in the book happened before I became a mother. I’m not one of those people who’s always wanted to be a mom, and until it happened, I couldn’t really imagine it. Even when I was pregnant, it was just like, Okay, I guess it’s happening … we’re doing this.
I worked really hard to write a bunch of other projects at once because I didn’t know if I was going to be able to work. I just didn’t know what it was going to look like, but I’ve been shocked by how much I love this child. It’s really crazy. I’ve found that balance is difficult, but it’s manageable, and I still find time to be fulfilled by writing and practicing and playing. It obviously takes a lot more organizing ahead of time, but I’m shocked by how fulfilled I feel being a mother and just doing nothing except watching my baby get a ball to her mouth. God, that sounds so boring. Before I’d be like, Oh, seems like it’d be really boring. When actually it’s so joyful.
If this is technically your fiction pre-motherhood, then I’m really excited to see how you make sense of it all in your work moving forward.
That’s been the other exciting thing. Motherhood is so inspiring. There is so much literal material all the time. And of course, you go through so much brain death during pregnancy, I thought I was never going to recover from this. Like, I’d read the same sentence three times and then had to put it away. The brain fog was really intense for me, but thankfully it’s not been so bad postpartum.
I love hearing about how people actually write their books — the day-to-day drudgery of it all. What did your typical writing day look like?
I’m not very regimented. It’s kind of like with violin. If you have free time, you should probably be practicing or writing. I have found that I’m someone who writes a lot on walks, so I really love walking and hiking. I also play with orchestras still, so especially during rehearsals, I’m writing in my head. I wish I had a quill and parchment, but I really love writing in my Notes App.
What fragrances are on your vanity right now?
I really like the Brain Dead perfumes, like shroom cola. I do have to shout out DS+Durga’s Bowmakers, which does actually smell like a violin shop, and I love that. I collect vintage DS+Durga, too. They had all of these Scottish Highlands perfumes that they haven’t sold for many years now, but I have a few bottles that I love sniffing, but shroom cola is probably the one that I have spritzed most recently.
What are your Letterboxd four favorites?
Okay, well, Oldboy forever. My favorite movie about motherhood is probably Petite Maman. I feel like I shouldn’t have Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich, so if I’m gonna have to choose, I’ll go with Eternal Sunshine. And then nobody is talking enough about how Charlotte Le Bon made this incredible movie, Falcon Lake. I think that movie is incredible. It really stayed with me for months. I’m not interviewing you, but I want to know yours.
Mine is so girly in a totally unsurprising way, but fine. Showgirls, obviously. But I’m a Cheerleader with Natasha Lyonne. I think Black Swan has to be in there. And my fourth one is Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy.
Oh my God, I cried my eyes out to that film.
Yeah, I just love the self-inflicted pain of that film and that final shower scene is so brutal. Plus, the soundtrack by Dustin Halloran.
Dustin Halloran! I used to listen to that soundtrack all the time. I don’t know if you’ve seen Celeste and Jesse Forever, but that made me cry almost as much as Like Crazy.
Yes. Nobody warned me. It’s Andy Samberg. I was like, What are you doing in this movie? Why am I sobbing?
Exactly. A perfect movie.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
