We were both on the periphery of the Iowa Writers Workshop - me visiting Alice Miller, a graduate of the Institute of Modern Letters attending on a Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship (the year before Eleanor Catton did the same), and she scoping out the place in mid-summer before starting there in the fall. She was in a royal blue dress that would’ve made more sense in an actual Yacht Club and no one was talking to her, something I noticed because no one was talking to me either. I first met Zhang in 2007 at the Yacht Club, a basement dive bar in Iowa City, about 1000 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Writing this article is making me queasy. Suddenly, letting me write her Instagram captions seemed like a really dumb idea. Instead of feeling excited for her, I felt a spike of anxiety - no face-kini can protect you from that level of exposure. Padma Lakshmi served Chnese food at Zhang’s book launch after party. The book of short stories, which the New Yorker called “astounding”, has quotes from Dunham and Miranda July on the cover. She’s the author of Sour Heart, the first title published by Lena Dunham’s new imprint, Lenny, at Random House.
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