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Activities of Daily Living
How do we take stock of a life—by what means, and by what measure? This is the question that preoccupies Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant in her late thirties. In the off-hours from her day job, Alice struggles to create a project about the enigmatic downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his monumental, yearlong 1980s performance pieces. Meanwhile, she becomes the caretaker for her aging stepfather, a Vietnam vet whose dream of making traditional Chinese furniture dissolved in alcoholism and dementia.
As Alice roots deeper into Hsieh’s radical use of time—in one piece, the artist confined himself to a cell for a year; in the next, he punched a time clock every hour, on the hour, for a year—and his mysterious disappearance from the art world, her project starts metabolizing events from her own life. She wanders from subway rides to street protests, loses touch with a friend, and tenderly observes her father’s slow decline.
Moving between present-day and 1980s New York City, with detours to Silicon Valley and the Venice Biennale, this vivid debut announces Lisa Hsiao Chen as an audacious new talent. Activities of Daily Living is a lucid, intimate examination of the creative life and the passage of time.
As Alice roots deeper into Hsieh’s radical use of time—in one piece, the artist confined himself to a cell for a year; in the next, he punched a time clock every hour, on the hour, for a year—and his mysterious disappearance from the art world, her project starts metabolizing events from her own life. She wanders from subway rides to street protests, loses touch with a friend, and tenderly observes her father’s slow decline.
Moving between present-day and 1980s New York City, with detours to Silicon Valley and the Venice Biennale, this vivid debut announces Lisa Hsiao Chen as an audacious new talent. Activities of Daily Living is a lucid, intimate examination of the creative life and the passage of time.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published April 12, 2022
103 people are currently reading
6772 people want to read
About the author
Lisa Hsiao Chen
2 books35 followersBorn in Taipei, Lisa Hsiao Chen received a 2018 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and was previously an emerging fiction fellow at the Center for Fiction and a resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her poetry collection Mouth was published by Kaya Press in 2007.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 188 reviews
May 6, 2023
New York City and art… two topics that never bore me. In this novel specifically, we peek into the world of performance art, a form of art I didn’t really much think about until I learned of Marina Abramovic's work. To be clear, however, the main focus of this book is the process of aging and its effect on an elderly, ailing father’s daughter. I chose this book for the setting and the art, but what ended up hitting hard was this particular theme. Trying to decide how to care for a parent with multiple health issues, one who can no longer assume the independent tasks of daily living, is a topic I’ve been dealing with for some time now, but most especially in the past two weeks. This book arrived in my life at a strange time. I’m not sure I would have deliberately chosen this now. The main character also has a very sick cat, which happens to have the exact same problem as my own at this moment. Coincidental? Probably. Fortuitous? I’m not really certain about that. Uncomfortable? Most definitely.
“By the time she and the Father had entered each other’s lives, she was already three years old. As a stepparent, he never had to wipe her ass clean of shit. As his daughter, she’d probably have the resources not to have to wipe his ass, either. At least she hoped.”
This book doesn’t shy away from the hard truth. It most certainly steers clear of sentimentalism. Taking care of a loved one in ill health and especially one that is reaching end of life is not something everyone is equipped to do – both physically and emotionally. It can reveal truths about ourselves that we may not like. This is something that Alice is struggling with in this book. She’s also doing research on a 1980s performance artist named Tehching Hsieh. His most famous pieces were year-long and included living in a cage, living on the streets of NYC, and being tied to a rope with another performance artist he did not know personally. All of these dealt with the passing of time in some form or another. This all then becomes part of Alice’s musings about time and aging. What meaning does her father's life have when it's reduced to the very basics of human existence? What significance does her own life contain? She's "wasting" it away on unfinished projects. I was fascinated by the way author Lisa Hsiao Chen tied these elements together.
“Wasting time only has a negative connotation when we accept the narrow idea that time is money: wasted time is wasted money and therefore must be inefficient. But what if we were to adopt a different understanding of production and time? What if wasting time were not negative at all, but the very essence of what it means to be creative and live a life? The production of such a life would have nothing to do with commodity.”
This is the sort of book that grows on the reader even more after finishing. While reading this, I felt the storytelling aspect was perhaps worth three stars. It’s a bit disjointed. I didn’t necessarily feel any connection to the characters. However, it’s full of ideas that made me really think for a long time afterwards. I’m still thinking about it nearly every day, perhaps because it struck a personal chord, but also due to the fact that I think Chen has a brilliant mind. So most definitely a four-star worthy book after so much contemplation. It may not resonate with everyone, but if there’s a piece of this that intrigues you, then why not give it a try? I’d line up for whatever Chen might come up with next. Here are a few more quotes I found worth sharing:
“As individuals, we each have our own ideas of what it is we want to do. We struggle because we want our freedom. Yet we can’t go on in life without other people. So we become each other’s cage.”
“When life is reduced to its minimum, time emerges.”
“Try not to mourn the future too quickly. It’s too dangerous a form of time travel.”
“Life is a life sentence. Life is passing time. Life is free thinking.”
“By the time she and the Father had entered each other’s lives, she was already three years old. As a stepparent, he never had to wipe her ass clean of shit. As his daughter, she’d probably have the resources not to have to wipe his ass, either. At least she hoped.”
This book doesn’t shy away from the hard truth. It most certainly steers clear of sentimentalism. Taking care of a loved one in ill health and especially one that is reaching end of life is not something everyone is equipped to do – both physically and emotionally. It can reveal truths about ourselves that we may not like. This is something that Alice is struggling with in this book. She’s also doing research on a 1980s performance artist named Tehching Hsieh. His most famous pieces were year-long and included living in a cage, living on the streets of NYC, and being tied to a rope with another performance artist he did not know personally. All of these dealt with the passing of time in some form or another. This all then becomes part of Alice’s musings about time and aging. What meaning does her father's life have when it's reduced to the very basics of human existence? What significance does her own life contain? She's "wasting" it away on unfinished projects. I was fascinated by the way author Lisa Hsiao Chen tied these elements together.
“Wasting time only has a negative connotation when we accept the narrow idea that time is money: wasted time is wasted money and therefore must be inefficient. But what if we were to adopt a different understanding of production and time? What if wasting time were not negative at all, but the very essence of what it means to be creative and live a life? The production of such a life would have nothing to do with commodity.”
This is the sort of book that grows on the reader even more after finishing. While reading this, I felt the storytelling aspect was perhaps worth three stars. It’s a bit disjointed. I didn’t necessarily feel any connection to the characters. However, it’s full of ideas that made me really think for a long time afterwards. I’m still thinking about it nearly every day, perhaps because it struck a personal chord, but also due to the fact that I think Chen has a brilliant mind. So most definitely a four-star worthy book after so much contemplation. It may not resonate with everyone, but if there’s a piece of this that intrigues you, then why not give it a try? I’d line up for whatever Chen might come up with next. Here are a few more quotes I found worth sharing:
“As individuals, we each have our own ideas of what it is we want to do. We struggle because we want our freedom. Yet we can’t go on in life without other people. So we become each other’s cage.”
“When life is reduced to its minimum, time emerges.”
“Try not to mourn the future too quickly. It’s too dangerous a form of time travel.”
“Life is a life sentence. Life is passing time. Life is free thinking.”
August 14, 2023
This is a promising debut novel from Lisa Hsiao Chen. Chen takes as her inspiration the performance artist Tehching Hsieh, known for a series of durational pieces beginning in the late 1970s. The novel weaves together several strands. The principal story, plot-wise, follows Chen's narrator as she cares for her father who has been diagnosed with dementia. The other strand explores Hsieh's work and exists as a hybrid of fiction and non-fiction. While reading this, I kept hoping Chen would take things in a more experimental direction, perhaps taking more cues from Hsieh's methods. Ultimately, this turned into a more traditional novel than it could have been.
April 11, 2022
If only one knew the value of a day.
The story follows Alice, and her concern over The Father, her rapidly declining elderly stepfather, AND her fixation on The Artist, Tehching Hsieh, a man whose performance pieces mostly involved denying himself human comforts - sleep, shelter, privacy, reading, and even creating art.
The Father's world is shrinking. He suffers from expressive aphasia, meaning that he understands what is being said to him, and knows what he wants to say in response; he just can't get the words out. He is shuffled from care home to care home as his faculties decline. Alice's concern over his well being, and her interest in The Artist lead her to develop her own projects.
Before he left Taiwan for New York, The Artist painted a portrait of his father as the old man lay on his deathbed.
Alice was afraid that if she didn't put The Father inside a project, he would disappear from all time.
I seem to have loved this one far more than many other readers, so I assume it struck a chord with me; I loved everything about the book. Though I have a degree in art, I had to google The Artist. Discovering that he was not fictional really threw me for a loop. I can't imagine "performing" some of his pieces - living in a cage or outdoors for a year. (Waves of admiration for his sacrifices are doing battle with the part of my brain that's screaming, "What the fuck was he thinking?") I'm also rapidly approaching that time of my life when I worry about becoming that burdensome, aging parent who not only requires constant care, but loses memory, and adopts a whole new personality. I did file away this little tidbit by Simone DeBeauvior to keep for future inspiration:
Beauvior was evangelical in her belief that irrelevance in old age and its attendant terrors could be spared by inhabiting projects. Having projects, she insisted, was even more important that having one's health!
Indeed, Chen quotes from so many sources there should really be a bibliography at the end of the book.
This was a beautifully written tale of life, and time, and the choices we make - definitely one of my favorites so far this year.
Without our memories we could be anyone, or no one.
The story follows Alice, and her concern over The Father, her rapidly declining elderly stepfather, AND her fixation on The Artist, Tehching Hsieh, a man whose performance pieces mostly involved denying himself human comforts - sleep, shelter, privacy, reading, and even creating art.
The Father's world is shrinking. He suffers from expressive aphasia, meaning that he understands what is being said to him, and knows what he wants to say in response; he just can't get the words out. He is shuffled from care home to care home as his faculties decline. Alice's concern over his well being, and her interest in The Artist lead her to develop her own projects.
Before he left Taiwan for New York, The Artist painted a portrait of his father as the old man lay on his deathbed.
Alice was afraid that if she didn't put The Father inside a project, he would disappear from all time.
I seem to have loved this one far more than many other readers, so I assume it struck a chord with me; I loved everything about the book. Though I have a degree in art, I had to google The Artist. Discovering that he was not fictional really threw me for a loop. I can't imagine "performing" some of his pieces - living in a cage or outdoors for a year. (Waves of admiration for his sacrifices are doing battle with the part of my brain that's screaming, "What the fuck was he thinking?") I'm also rapidly approaching that time of my life when I worry about becoming that burdensome, aging parent who not only requires constant care, but loses memory, and adopts a whole new personality. I did file away this little tidbit by Simone DeBeauvior to keep for future inspiration:
Beauvior was evangelical in her belief that irrelevance in old age and its attendant terrors could be spared by inhabiting projects. Having projects, she insisted, was even more important that having one's health!
Indeed, Chen quotes from so many sources there should really be a bibliography at the end of the book.
This was a beautifully written tale of life, and time, and the choices we make - definitely one of my favorites so far this year.
Without our memories we could be anyone, or no one.
January 10, 2022
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, I appreciated the uniqueness of this book’s structure, where the entire story essentially followed the main character Alice as she went through various “activities of daily living” that included becoming a caretaker for her stepfather as well as working on a project about reclusive artist Tehching Hsieh. Each chapter consisted of seemingly random snippets into Alice’s life, interspersed with various tidbits about the Artist (as that is what he is referred to throughout the story), though the details ended up melding together to the point that it becomes difficult to tell whose life — Alice’s or the Artist’s — was being described.
Having said all that, the unique structure was also what made this a difficult read for me — the narrative seemed to lean toward the philosophical and abstract, with the story also going off on so many different tangents that it made the main arc hard to follow. To be honest, even after finishing this, I found it hard to describe what the story was about. There was tons of “name-dropping” — references to famous people from the literary, art, and philosophy worlds as well as historical places and events, which in itself wasn’t a problem, but then the author, Lisa Hsaio Chen, would follow those references with details that would go on for pages, only circling back to the current situation at hand near the end of the chapter. While Chen never makes any connection outright between all the random people / places / events that get brought up throughout the story and the things going on in Alice’s life, my guess is that, in structuring the story this way, perhaps Chen was expecting us to see the parallels and make the connection ourselves. Nothing wrong with that technically, but it just made for an exhausting read that I had neither the time or patience for at the moment.
The other thing that made this a frustrating reading experience for me was the inconsistency of the writing, which made parts of the story hard to follow. In addition to more grammatical and sentence structure issues than I would’ve preferred (I mean, I understand that this is an ARC, but still), there were also times when the author would insert new characters into the story without introducing them or wait until several pages in to introduce them— this was frustrating in the sense that it was both distracting and it broke the flow of the story, as I had to flip back to previous sections of the book to see if I perhaps missed a reference somewhere.
Going into this book, I really wanted to like it and while I found the premise interesting, plus the concept of the story had a lot of potential, the execution unfortunately didn’t really work for me. There wasn’t much of a plot to speak of, which is usually fine as long as the characters are well-drawn, but in this case, I couldn’t seem to connect to any of the characters either.
With all that said though, there were some elements that were done well and held my interest (hence I didn’t rate this as low as I probably would have normally), it’s just that I wasn’t expecting for it to be so tedious and require so much patience. Of course, it could just be me — since this one doesn’t publish until April, I would suggest waiting for a few more reviews to come out first to get a a more well-rounded opinion before deciding whether to pick this one up.
Received ARC from W.W. Norton Company via BookBrowse First Impressions program
Having said all that, the unique structure was also what made this a difficult read for me — the narrative seemed to lean toward the philosophical and abstract, with the story also going off on so many different tangents that it made the main arc hard to follow. To be honest, even after finishing this, I found it hard to describe what the story was about. There was tons of “name-dropping” — references to famous people from the literary, art, and philosophy worlds as well as historical places and events, which in itself wasn’t a problem, but then the author, Lisa Hsaio Chen, would follow those references with details that would go on for pages, only circling back to the current situation at hand near the end of the chapter. While Chen never makes any connection outright between all the random people / places / events that get brought up throughout the story and the things going on in Alice’s life, my guess is that, in structuring the story this way, perhaps Chen was expecting us to see the parallels and make the connection ourselves. Nothing wrong with that technically, but it just made for an exhausting read that I had neither the time or patience for at the moment.
The other thing that made this a frustrating reading experience for me was the inconsistency of the writing, which made parts of the story hard to follow. In addition to more grammatical and sentence structure issues than I would’ve preferred (I mean, I understand that this is an ARC, but still), there were also times when the author would insert new characters into the story without introducing them or wait until several pages in to introduce them— this was frustrating in the sense that it was both distracting and it broke the flow of the story, as I had to flip back to previous sections of the book to see if I perhaps missed a reference somewhere.
Going into this book, I really wanted to like it and while I found the premise interesting, plus the concept of the story had a lot of potential, the execution unfortunately didn’t really work for me. There wasn’t much of a plot to speak of, which is usually fine as long as the characters are well-drawn, but in this case, I couldn’t seem to connect to any of the characters either.
With all that said though, there were some elements that were done well and held my interest (hence I didn’t rate this as low as I probably would have normally), it’s just that I wasn’t expecting for it to be so tedious and require so much patience. Of course, it could just be me — since this one doesn’t publish until April, I would suggest waiting for a few more reviews to come out first to get a a more well-rounded opinion before deciding whether to pick this one up.
Received ARC from W.W. Norton Company via BookBrowse First Impressions program
Read
December 3, 2025I was excited, after I got this book from the library, to see its only blurb was authored by Annelise Chen, author of the truly wonderful "Clam Down". I was never bored while reading it, but I was also never anxious to pick it up in the evening. Eventually I decided to go look for something more my style.
December 23, 2022
This book is a meditation on the intersections of life and time – how we pass time, spend time, waste time, and consume time through activities of daily living. There are two main storylines. Narrator Alice analyzes the life of performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his “projects.” He believes that performance art seems acceptable to others only if it is called a project or an experiment. Alice and her sister are arranging care for their stepfather, who is declining mentally due to dementia. These two storylines are woven together in an almost mesmerizing way.
It is told in a fluid stream-of-consciousness style and is not for anyone looking for a straightforward story. The timelines are constantly shifting, and random characters enter the narrative without introduction or context. Alice and her sister deal with their stepfather’s gradual decline, and these sections are heart-wrenching.
The parts related to Hsieh’s performance art are not directly connected to the family drama; however, his one-year performances highlight the passage of time and how it is intricately tied to the living of a life. It seems to be pointing out how the everyday activities contain the most meaningful moments, and this observation informs the relationship between Alice and her stepfather. I found it unusual and creative, bordering on philosophical. I am not sure exactly why this book works, but it certainly worked for me.
It is told in a fluid stream-of-consciousness style and is not for anyone looking for a straightforward story. The timelines are constantly shifting, and random characters enter the narrative without introduction or context. Alice and her sister deal with their stepfather’s gradual decline, and these sections are heart-wrenching.
The parts related to Hsieh’s performance art are not directly connected to the family drama; however, his one-year performances highlight the passage of time and how it is intricately tied to the living of a life. It seems to be pointing out how the everyday activities contain the most meaningful moments, and this observation informs the relationship between Alice and her stepfather. I found it unusual and creative, bordering on philosophical. I am not sure exactly why this book works, but it certainly worked for me.
December 30, 2022
i was going over my highlights to write this review, and the ones from the beginning of the book — even though i started reading less than a week ago — felt eerily foreign to me somehow, kind of like when you read old writing and shake your head at what you were saying, because at that point in time you were a different person and had no idea what you were about to embark on.
weird but true! — i think that means this book changed me?
there’s an uncanny synchronicity with this book, in that it addresses almost every single question that i’ve been thinking about lately. life as performance, performance and authenticity, time and meaning-making, the quotidian “activities of daily living” vs having a project vs having a capital-p Project, work as legacy and/or determinate of the person. and for right now, the end of the year — what’s so special about a year?
i really liked the ~art discourse~, and the references to and engagement with other artists and theorists. hopper, sontag, erneaux, deleuze, de beauvoir and sarte are ones i know just enough to recognize the names (and fool myself into thinking i have some deeper context for the discussion); others i didn’t recognize (shklovsky, levé, goffman, bishop berkeley) but had a good time reading about nonetheless. none of the theory/ intertextual stuff felt contrived or artificial, which i think is hard to do!
also it’s funny (“the tension in the room dissipated like a fart”) and beautiful (“the drizzle lashed into rain,” “the will of a man stitching himself into time”) and just really on the nose (“Doesn’t every Chinese person not from China have a project for a trip to China?”, “…women difficult to trace because they took their husbands’ names and all the other ways women with or without projects become unsearchable.”)
maybe it’s a little earnest but i liked that.
Try not to mourn the future too quickly. It’s too dangerous a form of time travel.
Was it Rancière who said it is the artist who turns the ordinary into the extraordinary? Because in the Artist’s work, the line between art and life has completely eroded: to live is to perform; to perform is to live. What does it mean, then, in our post-factual moment, to keep a promise to oneself and others about a Life Practice, to perform an act of faith that seems so alien at a time when deceit and disappointment have become the forces that govern the laws of life?
Alice liked to imagine him quickened by the feeling of burrowing into a project, returning to it day after day, grooming it, feeding it, worrying and bleeding it, as he slipped into that fugue state when it’s just you and the project, a project that no one is waiting for or cares about other than you.
weird but true! — i think that means this book changed me?
there’s an uncanny synchronicity with this book, in that it addresses almost every single question that i’ve been thinking about lately. life as performance, performance and authenticity, time and meaning-making, the quotidian “activities of daily living” vs having a project vs having a capital-p Project, work as legacy and/or determinate of the person. and for right now, the end of the year — what’s so special about a year?
i really liked the ~art discourse~, and the references to and engagement with other artists and theorists. hopper, sontag, erneaux, deleuze, de beauvoir and sarte are ones i know just enough to recognize the names (and fool myself into thinking i have some deeper context for the discussion); others i didn’t recognize (shklovsky, levé, goffman, bishop berkeley) but had a good time reading about nonetheless. none of the theory/ intertextual stuff felt contrived or artificial, which i think is hard to do!
also it’s funny (“the tension in the room dissipated like a fart”) and beautiful (“the drizzle lashed into rain,” “the will of a man stitching himself into time”) and just really on the nose (“Doesn’t every Chinese person not from China have a project for a trip to China?”, “…women difficult to trace because they took their husbands’ names and all the other ways women with or without projects become unsearchable.”)
maybe it’s a little earnest but i liked that.
Try not to mourn the future too quickly. It’s too dangerous a form of time travel.
Was it Rancière who said it is the artist who turns the ordinary into the extraordinary? Because in the Artist’s work, the line between art and life has completely eroded: to live is to perform; to perform is to live. What does it mean, then, in our post-factual moment, to keep a promise to oneself and others about a Life Practice, to perform an act of faith that seems so alien at a time when deceit and disappointment have become the forces that govern the laws of life?
Alice liked to imagine him quickened by the feeling of burrowing into a project, returning to it day after day, grooming it, feeding it, worrying and bleeding it, as he slipped into that fugue state when it’s just you and the project, a project that no one is waiting for or cares about other than you.
July 14, 2022
Two short passages from Activities of Daily Living:
*
"The Father was a melancholic. It is the tendency of the melancholic to be faithless to people, as Sontag wrote of Walter Benjamin, that famous melancholic of history. This faithlessness in humanity correlates to the melancholic’s generalized, despondent surrender to catastrophe. What the melancholic is faithful to are things: that’s what makes him such an enthusiastic collector. (Benjamin was a collector of books, toys, postcards, and other graphic ephemera.) Melancholics, Sontag argues, also make the best addicts, “for the true addictive experience is always a solitary one.”"
*
"In her twenties, like many hetero women in their twenties, Alice had had her share of bad men and good reasons to be rid of them. They were bad because, like her, they were callow, thoughtless, and young, or because she had limited experience navigating the neuroses of bad older men who were more experienced at being bad and convincing her they were good. Or, as was more likely the case, they were better at making her believe that she was the bad one. In the case of good men who were somehow not the right men – the reasons being more complicated and harder to explain – she found herself thinking that what she really ought to be doing was focusing more on projects."
*
[Also, I regularly found myself wondering if Tehching Hsieh would ever read this book and what he might think of it.]
*
*
"The Father was a melancholic. It is the tendency of the melancholic to be faithless to people, as Sontag wrote of Walter Benjamin, that famous melancholic of history. This faithlessness in humanity correlates to the melancholic’s generalized, despondent surrender to catastrophe. What the melancholic is faithful to are things: that’s what makes him such an enthusiastic collector. (Benjamin was a collector of books, toys, postcards, and other graphic ephemera.) Melancholics, Sontag argues, also make the best addicts, “for the true addictive experience is always a solitary one.”"
*
"In her twenties, like many hetero women in their twenties, Alice had had her share of bad men and good reasons to be rid of them. They were bad because, like her, they were callow, thoughtless, and young, or because she had limited experience navigating the neuroses of bad older men who were more experienced at being bad and convincing her they were good. Or, as was more likely the case, they were better at making her believe that she was the bad one. In the case of good men who were somehow not the right men – the reasons being more complicated and harder to explain – she found herself thinking that what she really ought to be doing was focusing more on projects."
*
[Also, I regularly found myself wondering if Tehching Hsieh would ever read this book and what he might think of it.]
*
February 9, 2022
The profound conceptual artworks of Tehching Hsieh are set next to the discomfiting trial of witnessing a parent’s end-of-life. Lisa Hsiao Chen forges perfect chapters with bullseye endings, wears her vast reading lightly, plucks heartstrings, and lights up your brain. A "project" about exceptional and quotidian endurances woven together via wise and ingenious bricolage.
March 7, 2026
I remember first reading this in 2023 and not being particularly impressed—I can't remember why. But in the last 3-ish years, I've found myself returning to quotes from Chen's book, recalling little moments in the protagonist's life: trying to work on her Project; failing to get very far; wondering if there even is a Project taking shape or if it's just an illusory ambition that will never be realized; finding herself drawn to particular figures (especially the performance artist Tehching Hsieh) and not knowing why:
I also love these very simple 2 sentences, where the protagonist reflects on her life versus her sister's life, and how they each handle the stress of caring for their elderly, infirm father:
It takes time to realize what will be significant to you; it's not always obvious when it happens. Now that some time has passed, I'm realizing that this novel had a large hand in shaping how I have thought about art, writing, aging, and death over the past few years.
Alice was one who had been given to projects. Experimental film shorts…wayward “hypertexts.” More than a few projects, yes…[which] lay forsaken…[or] in perpetual pre-project formation; others, more developed yet stalled, were walled up in folders on her laptop. And yet a new project was stirring, showing signs of life, her project about the Artist. She didn’t yet know what form it would take, only that she would work with the same raw material that he had: time.
I also love these very simple 2 sentences, where the protagonist reflects on her life versus her sister's life, and how they each handle the stress of caring for their elderly, infirm father:
She didn’t have what Alice had, what Alice always had when confronted with an ordeal: the possibility that the experience would prove useful for a project. She could endure anything as long as it could be bent, in recollection, to her design, the mercenary impulse as coping mechanism.
It takes time to realize what will be significant to you; it's not always obvious when it happens. Now that some time has passed, I'm realizing that this novel had a large hand in shaping how I have thought about art, writing, aging, and death over the past few years.
February 28, 2023
I loved this book. I read it in 3 sittings, which is rare for me. Between those sittings, I found myself thinking a lot about Alice and her father, and I was eager to get back into it. It moved me in ways I was really not expecting. It made me reflect a lot on my own father, who taught me the art of the project when I was young and who spent much of the past two years caring for his own dying dad. Now the book is over, my grandpa is dead, and I am thinking about my next project.
September 21, 2022
Really made me think about projects and the role and meaning they can have in everyday life.
December 19, 2025
as far as subject matter goes this book might be engineered in a lab for me to like it (new york city, chinese woman, complicated relationship with an aging family member, ruminations on capitalism and migration and incarceration)
the storytelling definitely could’ve been tightened up but some very lasting ideas and i liked it!
the storytelling definitely could’ve been tightened up but some very lasting ideas and i liked it!
March 1, 2026
I loved this. For the writing and also the content. Granted it might be striking a tone with me, feeling uncreative and always looking for a new project to abandon. But seriously, I wish I had this in physical form and not only read in bed, falling asleep every other pragraph.
June 19, 2022
Book of the year, easily, handily, and it's criminal that more people aren't talking about it.
January 21, 2022
Quite a unique book that is difficult to describe! It's also an interesting blend of fiction and fact. There are two stories going on, the slow death of the Father and his step-daughter's life which revolves around projects and an interest in art as a performance. Much of what is mentioned here really exists. The author cites famous and not so famous authors, yet this is fiction, not a research piece. I am in awe of the amount of reading she must have put in to be able to write such a book. And though I can't say that I've ever had any interest in performance art, it works well as a vehicle for the author's characters.
The Father's dementia hit a little close to home for me as my mother had the same disease. The descriptions of his last years of life are not easy to read. Yet, they are poignant.
I think some readers will struggle with this book, but it can be read on different levels, i.e. for the story or as an intellectual exercise, or even as an introduction to art. It's one of those books that you immediately want to re-read after finishing it so that you can absorb even more of it. I predict that there are many readers who will love this book.
The Father's dementia hit a little close to home for me as my mother had the same disease. The descriptions of his last years of life are not easy to read. Yet, they are poignant.
I think some readers will struggle with this book, but it can be read on different levels, i.e. for the story or as an intellectual exercise, or even as an introduction to art. It's one of those books that you immediately want to re-read after finishing it so that you can absorb even more of it. I predict that there are many readers who will love this book.
January 18, 2024
I couldn't get into this one. In a lot of ways, this book reminds me of Jenny O'Dell's "Saving Time," but as a fiction. This book is obsessed with time: understanding it, and obscuring it. But what could be a very powerful story of an older, single woman grasping at a sense of purpose via a project involving a performance artist she admires while caring for her father ailing with dementia, it is instead a thin narrative watered down by a glut of references to art, film, books, history, psychology, and politics. It reads a lot like a story of free-association, with no clear central idea or theme, making it impossible to grasp onto much of anything, really. I'm sure it was deliberate, a comment on time itself, but I didn't enjoy the experience of reading it enough to want to meditate any more on that.
April 9, 2022
This is a story about loneliness and its relationship to how we spend our time. Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant in her late 30s, works for her day job as a video editor, but is most engaged by her side project about a performance artist from the 1980s. As Alice seeks to better understand her subject, she reflects on the intersections of his work with her own life, including as she assumes greater caretaking responsibilities for her ailing and largely isolated stepfather. Combining both the proasic stories of daily life, including working and caregiving, and the provocative, including questions about the nature of identity and what constitutes art, this is an innovative exploration of the passage of time. Reflective, unconventional, imaginative.
Recommended!
Recommended!
August 26, 2022
if I had to pick one, my favorite part about this book was watching how time is understood in parallel through two distinct and intimate parts of Alice’s life—the caretaking of The Father who is becoming unable to track the passage of time, and embarking on a Project about The Artist whose work challenges the notions of how we chose to understand and experience time. quite meta, but unpretentiously so.
at some point, Alice reflects that “her only real idea about time was that it passes and that this is sad.” perhaps after all, there is not a more apt of a revelation to be had. I’ll be holding this book close for a long time.
at some point, Alice reflects that “her only real idea about time was that it passes and that this is sad.” perhaps after all, there is not a more apt of a revelation to be had. I’ll be holding this book close for a long time.
March 18, 2022
I really enjoyed this debut novel by Lisa Hsiao Chen, it touches on a few different characters and maybe the author’s own voice, but the overall theme is time and how it is perceived. The author presents us with different scenarios; an artist doing a year long project, a father with Alzheimer’s, institutions, the immigration experience. Time passes differently for everyone depending on their situation. Activities in Daily Living is harder to describe than it is to read, but I liked the exploration and ideas put forth.
February 28, 2022
Got ARC for this book, opinions my own
The vibe of this book reminds me of Olivia Laing's Lonely City book if it were fiction and told by a taiwanese American woman dealing with grief and death as she watched her father's health condition slowly deteriorate as she worked on The Project. The book reads like a series of snippets and musings, i quite liked it's sense of place and how it brought NYC to life.
I'm very curious on any other works Lisa Hsiao Chen has to offer.
The vibe of this book reminds me of Olivia Laing's Lonely City book if it were fiction and told by a taiwanese American woman dealing with grief and death as she watched her father's health condition slowly deteriorate as she worked on The Project. The book reads like a series of snippets and musings, i quite liked it's sense of place and how it brought NYC to life.
I'm very curious on any other works Lisa Hsiao Chen has to offer.
August 9, 2025
meditative and formally interesting!
ETA in 2025: i came back to this book because i needed to think about art. this book does that and so much else; it is a nearly perfect book so i'm bumping it up from a 4 to a 5.
ETA in 2025: i came back to this book because i needed to think about art. this book does that and so much else; it is a nearly perfect book so i'm bumping it up from a 4 to a 5.
Read
May 2, 2022My first encounter with dementia in literature came reasonably early. I was in my twenties and remember, with a strange clarity, that Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday had just been published. I hated it. Mostly for its politics and narrator, a middle-class neurosurgeon named Henry Perowne. In one scene Perowne wanders through London. Protests against the Iraq war delay him. He feels inclined to adjudicate, to judge. Although his skepticism around aspects of the rallies were prescient — he notes the sublimated narcissism of a protestor’s sign that declares “Not In My Name” — the relative ease of his life felt a little too engineered.
What moved me then — and still, I think, remain the novel’s highlight — were the narrator’s reflections on caring for his mother. In the novel, Perowne’s mother has begun to suffer from dementia. He catalogs the details of her existence as if he had always done so; as if to neglect this ritual — to not attend to the ordinary elements of her existence — would only confirm her disappearance. Familiarity and attention become the twin poles that orient and place her solidly within his life. I remembered long nights when, as a child, I waited for the peculiar thrill of hearing, as if it were a recording, the click of heels on floorboard that meant that my mother had returned from work. This sound signaled the possibility of our empty house filling, slowly, with her human presence, and conveyed something specific, as well: not joy, exactly, but a sense of someone arriving, of someone the world might otherwise have forgotten.
McEwan’s novel returned me to these memories, showing me what it might mean to lose this most intimate person — a person who has preceded you — and watch them succumb to something that will strip them, irreversibly, of everything. Contending with this loss, Perowne and the reader ask themselves a simple question: Who is this person vanishing before our eyes? Literature about dementia illuminates the infirm with unusual clarity, even as characters begin to lose themselves.
Alice, the Taiwanese American woman at the center of Lisa Hsiao Chen’s debut novel, Activities of Daily Living, is in her late thirties. She has moved to California from New York City to care for a man known throughout the novel only as “the Father”: an archetypal moniker, the kind of name or symbol a person might grow into. Which makes sense; he is, in fact, not a blood relative, but her white stepfather, a retired carpenter, and Vietnam vet. The Father, we learn, has developed dementia. Assisted in caring for him by her sister, Amy, Alice is also working on “The Project,” an artwork that gleans inspiration from the performance pieces of the reclusive Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh, referred to throughout as “the Artist.” (A recurring theme of the novel is the idea that a person’s activity or role defines their identity.)
Detail slowly accumulates around the Father, notably aspects of Hsieh’s biography, which serve as a through line for the novel. In addition to Hsieh’s own life and career, we are given the biographies and backstories of various writers and thinkers: potted philosophical histories, anecdotes, comparisons, drawings-upon. These act like the backing of a mirror, allowing the reflection of the Father’s life — and of Alice’s — to appear. It’s a kind of aggrandizing gesture, but then, no life makes sense without someone to attend to its details. These do not simply accrue, someone must collect them, and the Father and the Artist are no exception. This need, an act of care, is also predicated on the gradual winnowing of the Father’s existence: as detail is subtracted from his life, it requires additions, the daily activity of others. In the process, Chen considers: What does a life consist of? How does it look, how does it feel, how does it move? And what, finally, does it become, when placed under duress, under constraint?
Read on: https://astra-mag.com/articles/time-i...
What moved me then — and still, I think, remain the novel’s highlight — were the narrator’s reflections on caring for his mother. In the novel, Perowne’s mother has begun to suffer from dementia. He catalogs the details of her existence as if he had always done so; as if to neglect this ritual — to not attend to the ordinary elements of her existence — would only confirm her disappearance. Familiarity and attention become the twin poles that orient and place her solidly within his life. I remembered long nights when, as a child, I waited for the peculiar thrill of hearing, as if it were a recording, the click of heels on floorboard that meant that my mother had returned from work. This sound signaled the possibility of our empty house filling, slowly, with her human presence, and conveyed something specific, as well: not joy, exactly, but a sense of someone arriving, of someone the world might otherwise have forgotten.
McEwan’s novel returned me to these memories, showing me what it might mean to lose this most intimate person — a person who has preceded you — and watch them succumb to something that will strip them, irreversibly, of everything. Contending with this loss, Perowne and the reader ask themselves a simple question: Who is this person vanishing before our eyes? Literature about dementia illuminates the infirm with unusual clarity, even as characters begin to lose themselves.
Alice, the Taiwanese American woman at the center of Lisa Hsiao Chen’s debut novel, Activities of Daily Living, is in her late thirties. She has moved to California from New York City to care for a man known throughout the novel only as “the Father”: an archetypal moniker, the kind of name or symbol a person might grow into. Which makes sense; he is, in fact, not a blood relative, but her white stepfather, a retired carpenter, and Vietnam vet. The Father, we learn, has developed dementia. Assisted in caring for him by her sister, Amy, Alice is also working on “The Project,” an artwork that gleans inspiration from the performance pieces of the reclusive Taiwanese artist Tehching Hsieh, referred to throughout as “the Artist.” (A recurring theme of the novel is the idea that a person’s activity or role defines their identity.)
Detail slowly accumulates around the Father, notably aspects of Hsieh’s biography, which serve as a through line for the novel. In addition to Hsieh’s own life and career, we are given the biographies and backstories of various writers and thinkers: potted philosophical histories, anecdotes, comparisons, drawings-upon. These act like the backing of a mirror, allowing the reflection of the Father’s life — and of Alice’s — to appear. It’s a kind of aggrandizing gesture, but then, no life makes sense without someone to attend to its details. These do not simply accrue, someone must collect them, and the Father and the Artist are no exception. This need, an act of care, is also predicated on the gradual winnowing of the Father’s existence: as detail is subtracted from his life, it requires additions, the daily activity of others. In the process, Chen considers: What does a life consist of? How does it look, how does it feel, how does it move? And what, finally, does it become, when placed under duress, under constraint?
Read on: https://astra-mag.com/articles/time-i...
March 19, 2026
4.5 😊
i love reading books i know nothing about!! I found this in a reply to the "asian americans cant write interesting novels" twitter Discourse from around a month ago and was in for a pleasant surprise - this asian american CAN WRITE! I will admit, somewhat ironically, a lot of the book is kinda boring. Chen alternates between writing about her Father's slow decline due to dementia and meandering essays about performance artist Tehching Hsieh and various topics related to China, death, art, and the importance of having a Project. The structure is a little frustrating but i do think this is one of the most thought provoking books ive ever read.
Here comes my second admission. Despite deeply enjoying the book and how Chen explored its themes, I think i'd have a hard time recommending this to most people. This feels like maybe I just picked it up at the right Moment In My Life where I too am questioning How We Live. Some might argue, this is the central question of what Life IS, but idk as a highly goal oriented person who used to be extremely busy with various projects at all times, I've found myself in the ruttiest of ruts and searching aimlessly for some project by which i can attach these curdling emotions to. Chen's exploration of this through Beauvoir, Warhol, Sontag, etc. was deeply, to the core of my being, relatable.
On the other hand, I did find much of the Father sections strangely detached. There's an obvious destination that it'll arrive to and I do think there are some moments that tug at the heart strings but I was only engaged as a vehicle for Chen's observations. Is that her intention? I'm not sure.
I think every piece of art that tries to juggle two sides like this will inevitably find audiences drawn more to one side than the other. The Father passages read as a drawn out grieving, I think you can't help but imagine yourself in that miserable situation but then you zoom out a little and the title takes on a different meaning. It all comes together in startling contrast to how Hsieh chose to live his life through performance art that most people would also consider miserable. That parallelism is the novel's central conceit and it's so fascinating to me how Chen chooses subjects and references that navigate in and around that while never truly facing it head on. Can our emotions really be processed through an all encompassing capital P - Project?
Regardless, this is a stunningly impressive debut - throughout the entire thing I was impressed by Chen's curiosity and intention to explore tangents that illuminate her subject from different angles. I'm definitely looking forward to whatever she writes next.
i love reading books i know nothing about!! I found this in a reply to the "asian americans cant write interesting novels" twitter Discourse from around a month ago and was in for a pleasant surprise - this asian american CAN WRITE! I will admit, somewhat ironically, a lot of the book is kinda boring. Chen alternates between writing about her Father's slow decline due to dementia and meandering essays about performance artist Tehching Hsieh and various topics related to China, death, art, and the importance of having a Project. The structure is a little frustrating but i do think this is one of the most thought provoking books ive ever read.
Here comes my second admission. Despite deeply enjoying the book and how Chen explored its themes, I think i'd have a hard time recommending this to most people. This feels like maybe I just picked it up at the right Moment In My Life where I too am questioning How We Live. Some might argue, this is the central question of what Life IS, but idk as a highly goal oriented person who used to be extremely busy with various projects at all times, I've found myself in the ruttiest of ruts and searching aimlessly for some project by which i can attach these curdling emotions to. Chen's exploration of this through Beauvoir, Warhol, Sontag, etc. was deeply, to the core of my being, relatable.
On the other hand, I did find much of the Father sections strangely detached. There's an obvious destination that it'll arrive to and I do think there are some moments that tug at the heart strings but I was only engaged as a vehicle for Chen's observations. Is that her intention? I'm not sure.
I think every piece of art that tries to juggle two sides like this will inevitably find audiences drawn more to one side than the other. The Father passages read as a drawn out grieving, I think you can't help but imagine yourself in that miserable situation but then you zoom out a little and the title takes on a different meaning. It all comes together in startling contrast to how Hsieh chose to live his life through performance art that most people would also consider miserable. That parallelism is the novel's central conceit and it's so fascinating to me how Chen chooses subjects and references that navigate in and around that while never truly facing it head on. Can our emotions really be processed through an all encompassing capital P - Project?
Regardless, this is a stunningly impressive debut - throughout the entire thing I was impressed by Chen's curiosity and intention to explore tangents that illuminate her subject from different angles. I'm definitely looking forward to whatever she writes next.
February 11, 2025
i'm fascinated by these novels that aren't traditionally plotted novels at all but are instead nearly nonfiction (the artist is actually real and the author has spent half the book reflecting on his work) -- and i am def copying this from some nyt review -- "strung together with the least bit of narrative tension". the vignettes are so beautiful and thoughtful i think they are autobiographical? if not cheers lisa youre fuckin good.
my main critique: you can reason and intellectualize life and death to the moon; you can find life meaning within your projects. but it feels like alice is barely alive in spite of how much she thinks about life. i missed emotionality, and i judged how alice lives. she barely seems to take control over her life. but i think i am like her mother, unable to waste time, always on some self improvement gig to feel i'm spending it "wisely".
my main critique: you can reason and intellectualize life and death to the moon; you can find life meaning within your projects. but it feels like alice is barely alive in spite of how much she thinks about life. i missed emotionality, and i judged how alice lives. she barely seems to take control over her life. but i think i am like her mother, unable to waste time, always on some self improvement gig to feel i'm spending it "wisely".
May 31, 2022
An unconventional, quiet and discursive novel, that proves itself intelligent, and increasingly compelling despite its diffused structure, minimal narrative tension, and disinterest in much plot or character development. It is, at its most basic, about the raw materials of life, the ordinary stuff of living, time, and how we use it, how we fill it, via projects, art and otherwise, and how it passes inexorably until death. Alice, 39, a freelance video editor in NYC, lives alone with her cat, has a sister, divorced parents, her mother and her stepfather since she was three, referred to as the Father, who is ill and declining in the Bay Area, and she hopes this newest project of hers might actually go somewhere - she's researching Tehching Hsieh, a real artist, known for his high-endurance “One Year Performances” in the 1970s. After arriving undocumented in New York from Taiwan in 1974, when he was 24, and spending years working menial jobs, Hsieh entered the art scene by locking himself in a wooden cage inside his Hudson Street apartment for a full year. In subsequent performances, he spent a year punching a clock every hour on the hour, another living outdoors without entering a single building, another tied to the (also real) performance artist Linda Montano by an eight-foot rope. His final piece was announced as a 13-year epic. At its conclusion, he called a press conference and released a four-word statement: “I kept myself alive.” Alice dives into Hsieh’s world, collecting ruminations from other writers and artists, curating all this esoterica on time, on art, on the nature of projects, though the project, throughout the novel, remains unclear to her. What provides some arc to the novel (and to Alice's project) is the mental and physical decline of the Father, that has Alice flying back and forth from NY to the Bay Area. Intriguing and interesting.
October 5, 2022
4 until around page 200 then 5 after; some really compelling passages on time, wasting time, and finding purpose / meaning in projects that can feel like time sinks, all consuming, and meaningless aside from the fact that they are a project
I worry about wasting time frequently so the part about waste being a proxy of creativity / a lived life was reassuring though I don’t think it’ll change how I feel; time is not just money it’s experiences and it’s just passing and I am Not Doing The Things
Also that not every project needs to be known to be worthwhile
Maybe I just want the permission to bop for a month or two and waste my time in ways that will make me happy
I worry about wasting time frequently so the part about waste being a proxy of creativity / a lived life was reassuring though I don’t think it’ll change how I feel; time is not just money it’s experiences and it’s just passing and I am Not Doing The Things
Also that not every project needs to be known to be worthwhile
Maybe I just want the permission to bop for a month or two and waste my time in ways that will make me happy
February 22, 2023
this is such a cheesy conclusion to come to after this book but it inspired me to make more art… basically need constant projects for things to be meaningful (but is living a project in and of itself???)
“alice, for one, was starting to think her only subject was time, and however she might construct provocations around this subject, her only real idea about time was that it passes and that this is sad.”
also biased bc author and i are tocayas hehe
“alice, for one, was starting to think her only subject was time, and however she might construct provocations around this subject, her only real idea about time was that it passes and that this is sad.”
also biased bc author and i are tocayas hehe
August 4, 2024
Felt such immense kinship with Lisa Hsiao Chen’s concerns and observations about time, daughterhood, artmaking, one corner of Brooklyn, and being “shit people”…somehow all the artists and theorists were ones I had read over the past few months, which is no objective measure of artistic merit, but made me feel all the more uncannily seen. Thank you for this Project, LHC.
November 3, 2022
i have never highlighted so many sentences in a book ever
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