Activities of Daily Living

A Novel

288 pages

English language

Published Feb. 13, 2022 by Norton & Company Limited, W. W..

ISBN:
978-0-393-88112-7
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(3 reviews)

“From the making of art to the making of families, Lisa Hsiao Chen makes us realize the great beauty and courage found in everyday acts of care, work, endurance, and survival. Weaving between one daughter and her father, one artist and his work, Activities of Daily Living becomes a beguiling and brilliant meditation on what it means to live and die.”

— Viet Thanh Nguygen, Pulitizer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and The Committed

A lucid and moving debut novel on the interconnection between work and life, loneliness and kinship, and the projects that occupy our time.

1 edition

Activities of Daily Living

I didn't like this book quite as much as I thought I would. There is no doubt that Chen is an inventive writer. It helps to know a bit about Tehching Hsieh before starting the novel. There are plenty of beautifully wrought and insightful sentences. A favorite of mine, speaking of art museum wall signage: "Knowing which materials an artist used and the artwork's precise dimensions is like reading a sign pointed at a complicated person that says 'brain.'" The story weaves together the narrator's exploration of Hseih and her attempts to care for her declining father on the other side of the country. Hseih's work, with its close attention to time, space, and action, meshes with the everyday life of the narrator. I'm glad I read the book, and I hope you read it too, but I can't say that it ever really grabbed me.

Review of 'Activities of Daily Living' on 'Goodreads'

Well damn. I’m gonna have to come back and edit this with a longer review because… I think this is one of the best contemporary books I have ever read. Everyone talks about Jennifer Eagan’s Goon Squad but I think this is that for the rest of us. For normal people. Not wealthy or famous people.

(From here on I’m probably spoiling the book. It at least if you continue reading, my experience will color yours).


There’s a lot about art theory but in the end the book is about the spectrum between the two ways we can spend time: wasting it or doing “projects”. The problem, as the protagonist discovers through caring for her aging farther, is that, at the end of it all, it starts to look like there isn’t much of a difference between those two extremes. There is no spectrum. There is no dichotomy. I mean. …

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