Radical

Radical is Xiaolu Guo's memoir of a year she spent in New York as a visiting professor. She left her child and partner behind in London in the autumn of 2019, and the experience unsettled her sense of who she was as a woman, a partner, a mother and an artist. Guo is the NBCC award-winning author of Nine Continents. The book looks at what it means to live apart from loved ones across oceans and languages. Guo writes about feeling like an outsider and the strong wish to connect with others, along with the pressures of desire, obligation and selfhood that came with that struggle. The text moves between forms: part memoir, part lexicon, part love letter. It expresses her fascination with Western culture alongside a longing for Eastern landscapes, and it tries to capture the in-between space where those two worlds meet. Guo is a Chinese-born novelist and filmmaker who writes in English.