Larissa Pham Books in Order

Larissa Pham was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up there with an early interest in both drawing and stories. She has said that, as soon as she could write, she was making poems and little books, while art was already part of how she paid attention to the world.

At Yale University, she studied painting and art history, earning bachelor's degrees in studio art and history of art in 2014. Art school also gave her a practical lesson: she could paint, but writing seemed to be the medium in which she had more to say. She later earned an MFA in fiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

The two practices have stayed connected.

Pham's early literary work included Fantasian, a 2016 erotic novella about sex, power, class, and a fraught encounter between two young women. It established concerns that would return in different forms: desire, self-invention, the uneasy pull of intimacy, and the ways people use stories to understand themselves.

Her first full-length book, Pop Song, arrived in 2021. It is a memoir in essays that brings together personal experience, art history, music, travel, and cultural criticism. The book follows questions of love and loss through paintings, songs, long distances, and difficult memories, with stops that range from Taos to Shanghai. Readers who like essay collections that move freely between a private moment and a larger idea will find plenty to sit with here.

For Pham, art isn't decoration around a story. It is part of the argument.

That interest carries into her first novel, Discipline. The book centers on Christine, a writer on tour for a novel shaped by her past relationship with a former painting professor. When he makes contact, Christine has to reckon with what happened, what she put on the page, and who gets to control the story. It is a tense, contained novel about memory, power, art-making, and the gap between lived experience and fiction.

Alongside her books, Pham has written essays and criticism on gender, race, sex, visual culture, identity, art history, and the internet. Her work often returns to the overlap between looking and being looked at, especially when love, ambition, or unequal power enters the picture. She is also interested in how people carry pain without letting it become the whole account of who they are.

Pham lives and works in New York. She has taught creative writing and nonfiction, and she is an Assistant Professor of Writing at The New School. She still paints and makes work across forms, treating writing and visual art less as separate lanes than as connected ways of asking questions.