Souvankham Thammavongsa
Author of PICK A COLOUR
Photo by: Steph Martyniuk
In Souvankham Thammavonga’s debut novel Pick a Colour, a single day in a nail salon unfolds into a wondrous and confronting portrait of interiority.
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The salon is Ning’s world; she is queen of its compact universe, her body attuned to the vibrations of its procedure. At work she goes by Susan, the name of the salon where employees don identical uniforms, hairdos, and name tags, providing straight-forward service—“just the basics”—while appearing interchangeable to customers, though in reality they are anything but. A former boxer in her early forties, Ning owns and lives above Susan’s, running the salon like a well-oiled machine. ​​
But as she contemplates the behaviours of customers, co-workers, and passersby, Ning keeps those in her sphere at arms-length; her power lies in a discreet, cyclopedic observation of the happenings and habits of those around her.
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“Looking at the two of us, them sitting on a chair above me, and me down low, you’d think I am not in charge. But I am. I know everything about them, whether or not they tell me. You look at something long enough and you begin to see everything in its details.”
A propulsive and transcendent reverie on perception, privilege, regret, and devotion, Pick a Colour examines what it means to be engaged with oneself and the world at large.
Girls on the Page​
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I love the opening: “Everyone is ugly. I should know. I look at people all day.” When in the writing process did those sentences arrive, and how did you know that they would be the perfect jumping-off point for the novel?
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Souvankham Thammavongsa
Very early on. Right away we know we are in the presence of someone who is in charge and confident. There is nothing pitiful and sad and powerless about her. It’s incredibly striking because it dismantles so quickly assumptions we make or have seen portrayed.
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I’d love to hear about your first draft. What did writing it feel like, how long did it take to complete, where did you work on it, and when did everything feel like it was clicking into place?
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I wrote the novel after I finished writing my story collection, How to Pronounce Knife, and I finished the first draft in six weeks. I just tried to get it all down in one sitting and it’s been interesting to hear from readers who do read it in one sitting. It is like they mirrored what I did, but on the other side.
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I set the terms of the novel very quickly for myself: one voice, one room, one day. Once I got that down it was very easy to stay focused and not veer off into things that I would have to scale back.
Pick a Colour takes place across a single day. How did you determine that this timeline would best service the story you were telling, and did you always plan on structuring the novel this way?​
I was seeing a lot of writers like me were publishing long novels that span generations, geographies, and time. They all seemed in the service of answering the question “where are you from?” I don’t want to serve that question because to answer it means you have to agree you are not from here or that you don’t belong in a way. We shouldn’t be made to tell only one kind of story and only in one way—the art we make is made the lesser for it. I purposely chose the structure of a single day. I also made sure it wasn’t built out of plot, that it wasn’t going to answer so easily “what happens.” For a debut novel, this structure of a single day is also quite difficult to pull off because it is so unforgiving. You can’t fill it with fluff. While this is my first novel, it is not my first time writing. I come from writing poetry and I can make two sentences feel like a lifetime.
Ning is a fervent observer of the world both inside and beyond her nail salon. We catch glimpses into her world—the apartment above the salon, her relationship with her mother, her past as a boxer, a missing ring finger—but never the full story. Can you share what the challenges and joys of this economical approach to developing a character like Ning were?​
When we meet people are we ever given the full story? It’s a bit much to tell someone everything all at once. She is also a deeply unreliable narrator. When she talks to her clients the things she reports back about them are things that serve her sense of the world or the decisions she’s made in her life. Is she as tough as she says or is that just a front? All she is voice and talk and sound. And with just an attention to sound I have made it carry an entire novel. It is claustrophobic, but also so propulsive.
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“While this is my first novel, it is not my first time writing. I come from writing poetry and I can make two sentences feel like a lifetime.”
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—Souvankham Thammavongsa
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Pick a Colour is your debut novel—you’ve also published four books of poetry, as well as the award-winning story collection, How to Pronounce Knife. How does your background in poetry inform your fiction, and what can (or can’t) be carried from one genre to the other?
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My poetry attends to small ordinary things like oranges, pears, tangerines, grasshoppers, the snow. It insists that these small details are the drama. The novel is built of small ordinary moments like the washing of hands and feet, the opening and closing of doors, the sweeping of floors. I hold these small acts to be meaningful, to be the story in and of itself. If we can value these small, quiet, ordinary acts they move us forward in life. The big pops and bangs of a life sound great, but some of us don’t get to have those moments. A life is still valuable if you don’t get them.
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When did you first fall in love with literature? Which authors and books have inspired you most?
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For as long as I can remember I have wanted to be a writer. It was this or bust. For this novel, I went to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It is a short novel, too, and as I was reading about what you can do with that length I noticed what he does with sound. I didn’t know how to describe sound on a page—how we can hear things from a distant or close up or just a few seats away from us. Sound is always happening all around, but we filter these sounds. My ear works this way, but I didn’t know how to make a page work this way too so I looked for this mechanic in The Great Gatsby and watched how sound moved in a room, in a conversation with two people, or a group of five. That novel had a lot of talk in it because people were moving in and out of parties very much like the salon. We take in a group and then we have private conversations and listen to ones a few seats away. I didn’t want to make the description of sound to feel boring or perfunctory and in that novel it shows narratively directing a reader can be written with incredible beauty and meaning. And I wanted to do that too.​
Pick a Colour examines the power dynamics that exist within a nail salon—the instances of privilege, sexism, racism, as well as the micro and macro aggressions that occur. Before or during your writing, did you talk to any nail technicians about their experiences in this regard? I’m also wondering if you’ve heard from anyone who works in this industry since the book has been published and what their impressions were?
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I made it all up. I don’t lean on a real life experience, except maybe from my own observations of being a client at a nail salon. I have heard from someone who grew up working in the industry—her mom and dad owned a nail salon and she worked there too. She said, “effortlessly so fucking funny.”
There is a wonderfully propulsive current that ushers the reader through the novel, as though we’re veterans of the salon working through our thousandth shift, as well as experiencing it for the first time (like the character Noi, whose first day it is). The rhythms—an unexpected walk-in, lunch time, a smoke break—are so true to life. Can you talk about maintaining that flow of a single day as you wrote?
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I do make a reader feel like they ARE a nail salon worker. If you’ve never been to one, if you know nothing about that world it does not matter. You suddenly worry that you might not have the shade of red that a client is asking for, you worry about getting the job done in twenty minutes, you worry that you don’t run out of lotions, creams—supplies. That’s what’s so beautiful about literature. You are made to care about something you did not know you could ever care about. And then when you close the book you are returned to your own life, but a little different. Now when you see a nail salon, you suddenly find yourself whispering for no reason “pick a colour.”
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What happens to your characters when you complete a project—do you find that they continue to live in your mind, or once a piece is published and out in the world is that it?
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I miss the voice I made live. She was my minute, my hour, my day. When I finished the novel I weeped because I felt so alone.
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What have you enjoyed most about the writing and publishing process of Pick a Colour?
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That I set such difficult terms for myself and I achieved it. Even if no one knows that. I hide how mechanical I am. The simplicity, the ease a reader has—I made it that way. It isn’t just a novel that is serviceable. It is doing something really interesting with language and form, voice, plot, narrative shape. I was for many years writing poetry—doing good and careful and meaningful work—and to write a novel now it is like Bob Dylan going electric.
Souvankham Thammavongsa is the author of four poetry books, and the story collection
How to Pronounce Knife, winner of the 2020 Giller prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and Granta.
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To buy a copy of Pick a Colour, consider supporting one of Souvankham’s favorite bookstores: Upstart & Crow, A Different Drummer, McNally Robinson,
King’s Co-op Bookstore, and Yu & Me Books.
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Interview by Emma Leokadia Walkiewicz
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