The first fight I had with my mother was petty. I, five or six years old and the angry one; her, annoyed and trying to complete a task outside the house. For a reason I can’t remember, she wouldn’t let me help. We went back and forth, and I thought I could win the fight by telling her that I wished I had a different mom. “Fine,” she replied coolly, “I’ll call CPS, they’ll pick you up tonight and bring you to a different mother.” Shocked, embarrassed, and completely unaware of the unreality of the situation, I took it back and stayed inside.

This moment often resurfaces when I consider the malleable confines of a parent-child relationship and its fated imperfections, its one (and only) saving grace being the supposed unconditional love and loyalty for one another that acts as insurance against the guaranteed hurtful digs and annoyances.

Jo Hamya tests the limits of this relationship in her second novel The Hypocrite. Pantheon, the book’s publisher, categorizes its genre as literary fiction, but in Hayma’s accurate portrayal of tension in its thrilling manipulation and calculated betrayal, the ascription feels almost incomplete.

The Hypocrite tells a story of young playwright Sophia, who is showing her new play based on a Sicilian vacation she took with her father a decade prior. Her father, a famous novelist whose work is now infamous—whose cultural presence has aged poorly and offends—attends the play unaware of its contents and the way he is portrayed. His witnessing its scenes unfold serves as a sort of temporal framework for the rest of the novel.

Between the memories of the vacation and the play’s performance, Sophia and her mother share a rigid lunch, recounting in detail the moral, paternal, and marital failures of her father, all the while subliminally criticizing one another. Readers time travel between the present and the past, between a London theater and a Sicilian beach town, explore a daughter’s perspective and memories that counter her father’s.

Hamya got the idea when she was doom-scrolling. “There was a tweet,” she recalls. “I just remember the tone of it having this particular 21st-century digital cadence that didn’t correspond to how you might talk about an ethical issue with your friends in person. I got this strange vision of a man watching a play about his life. And knowing that this play was going to be utterly and completely false to him—just so unrepresentative of how he saw himself as a person and unrepresentative of his memories—that maybe the events corresponded, but the meaning of the events would be completely different.”

To create the man that deserved psychological torture akin to Roman myth—and in turn the daughter that would conduct it— Hamya read books written by men she imagined her character to emulate, listened to songs and artists her characters might listen to, watched On the Rocks by Sofia Coppola. In the midst of writing two different versions of the manuscript, she was struck by The Healer by Guillermo Lorca while visiting Moco in Barcelona. It’s a painting of a young, delicate-looking girl in a well-decorated room, surrounded by fruits, dogs, cats, and predatory animals peering in from outside the window. She’s tormenting a gorilla—a look of total excruciation on its face—that does nothing to escape, sitting completely still.

“These characters are being so incredibly and exquisitely violent to one another,” Hamya explains of The Hypocrite, “but with the veneer of a novel, or a play, or a lunch in a restaurant setting. All these formalized modes through which they interact are so beautiful, but they’re so deadly. The first thing I noticed about that painting is the girl in the middle tending to that gorilla and that gorilla is howling in pain, but her face is so unresponsive to it.Which I think is how a lot of the characters in this book operate, hurting one another, damaging one another, but utterly unaware of the fact that they’re doing so.”

At 27, Hamya is in the same age range as her subject Sophia, and attests that the story is in no way representative of her family dynamic. “I’ve been very lucky,” she considers. “I think when I told [my family] that I wanted to do an English undergraduate degree, they had a slight amount of trepidation because it’s not necessarily the most lucrative option in the world to pursue, but I think it makes them happy to see me engaged and satisfied with the work I do.”

Hamya’s work expands throughout the modern literary field. She wrote her first book, Three Rooms, when she was 22, and it published when she was 24, of which she says, “I have tended to think of the writing that I am doing in this decade as sort of learning how to ride a bike with training wheels. I did have a few months after the publication of my first book, kind of cringing that you are basically an adult adolescent—your thoughts on sale for anyone to buy is a bit strange. But what can you do?”

She co-hosts The Booker Prize Podcast with James Walton, which interviews authors, revisits winning and nominated books, and details the crevices of the award. Atop her enrollment in a doctorate program for literary criticism, she freelances. “I have not been in the club,” she assures. She even suggests a small anxiety surrounding her successes, wondering if she’s traded a decade reputable for its carelessness and bohemia for an impressive resume. “Sometimes I feel like I might have really misused the majority of my twenties...When I look at my friends, they are partying way more than I do. They have a much more enjoyable weekend than I do, not working. I’m so jealous of them. I have a massive amount of doubt over whether doing all of this is necessarily the best use of my time.”

The contemporary literary scene requires this incessant ambition, Hamya explains, but doesn’t promise any kind of golden ticket to fame or wealth, despite its uncompromising commitment to itself. “It’s very hard to make a living off of just one line of work,” she shares. “I and other writers my age tend to do a lot of low-wage precarious gig work—reviewing books, or doing events, festivals. Advances for young, relatively unknown novelists—I mean, I’ve generally been paid more or less a living wage, sometimes slightly less for the books I’ve written...It’s fine when you’re young because you expect to be a little bit adrift, trying things out. But part of me does wonder, when I hit early to mid-thirties, how I’m going to level this all out into a sustainable long-term life.”

It’s bemusing to hear someone so perceptibly succeeding at the forefront of their passion skeptical about themselves or their drive. Perhaps, though, the moment we do allow ourselves to feel comfortable in any pursuit is the same moment we begin to fade into ourselves. Perhaps, like that parent-child relationship, perfection is not judged by the actual appearance of things, but by the commitment one makes to return—unscathed and unexhausted—to what needs tending to.

Photographed by Makiyo Lio

Styled by Georgia Webb

Written by Franchesca Baratta 

Hair: Reve Ryu

Makeup: Marisol Steward

Location: One Hundred Shoreditch