Art Is Everything

Amanda Ruiz is a Los Angeles native and a successful performance artist, and she is deeply in love with her girlfriend Xochitl, a wealthy, pragmatic actuary. Life looks well in hand. Amanda's grumpy father is settled in Koreatown. She is about to take up a residency at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and once her NEA grant comes through she plans to film a groundbreaking autocritical documentary in Mexico.

Then things unravel. Xochitl's biological clock starts to sound, Amanda's father dies, and Amanda survives a sexual assault. The novel asks what becomes of an artist when her emotional support, her sense of safety and her finances all disappear together.

Yxta Maya Murray tells the story through a series of web posts, Instagram essays, Snapchat freakouts, rejected Yelp reviews, Facebook screeds and SmugMug streams of consciousness. These mix raw confession with sharp art criticism. The result is a portrait of a Chicana artist on the margins and a mid-career artist whose world collapses just as she reaches a breakthrough.