Sidework - (Immigrant Writers) by Sasha Wol-Soon Hom (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Sasha Hom's Sidework is a lyric, page-turning novella about a homeless Korean adoptee and mother of four. During her busy Sunday shift waiting tables, her customers-- rock stars, locals, and the Grim Reaper himself-- bring her face to face with larger issues of motherhood, suicide, environmental degradation, death, and belonging.

In this thought-provoking and often humorous debut from award-winning author Sasha Hom, herself a Korean adoptee and mother of four, the protagonist loses her home when the intentional community/commune where she and her family used to live-- off-grid, in a canvas tent on three hundred acres-- is sold. Sidework takes place during a Sunday breakfast shift as the homeless hero waits tables at a popular ' Cash Only' diner tucked in the Redwoods, frequented by growers, rock stars, Dreamers, tycoons, and tourists alike. But with each order she takes, each interaction serves only to bring her closer to her ghosts. Unnamed and unknown, from far-off continents, they ask her what it means to be a good mother.

Intricately woven, lyric, and atmospherically layered, Hom's debut marries the mystic and mythic with the mundane while taking on issues of immigration, colonization, climate change, homophobia, motherhood, and adoption.

Review Quotes

In Sasha Hom's Sidework, the narrator--a homeless Korean American adoptee--is fearless and funny, surviving with her family under the grind of capitalism and extreme financial precarity. She navigates the vicissitudes at a cafe shift, with much humor and grace, in prose that's by turns lyrical and gritty. A stunning novella. -Vanessa Hua, author of Forbidden City Sidework is a gorgeous and wrenching ode to the work we do out of necessity and the work we do out of love. Over the course of a single shift in a California diner, a homeless mother of four navigates a motley crew of co-workers and customers and one very haunted supply room. With razor-sharp wit the narrator recounts the loss of her family's off-grid life in an intentional community and their search for a new home. Sasha Hom is an extraordinary chronicler of motherhood, work, grief, and what it means to live an ethical life. I loved this stunning, harrowing, and hilarious novella. -Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise Sidework is named for all of the work that holds your restaurant experience together, which you only really notice if it isn't done. Hom's novella is funny, it made me hungry for food, people, conversation-and it made me realize how much of contemporary American life isn't described by so much of our fiction. A tender and compelling lyric examination of a waitress life lived at the edges of other people's happiness, Hom's philosopher mother is just trying to make her life work out-and do her sidework. Sidework left me feeling more human rather than less. -Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Like a single drop of water on a leaf, Sasha Hom's Sidework holds the whole trembling world inside one morning's breakfast shift. Its unforgettable narrator is a mother of four living between the land and a supercenter parking lot, hustling for tips in one of America's richest counties. Her perspective peels back an intimate, life-or-death relationship with the fire-scarred Northern California forest, but like her, you'll find yourself more wary of the customers who believe they can order well-being off of a menu. Sidework is electric with subversive humor and the anxieties of motherhood and climate change--and Sasha Hom is a radical, rooted, thrilling new voice in literature. -Sarah Cypher, author of The Skin and Its Girl

About the Author

Sasha Wol-Soon Hom was born in Korea and adopted by a Chinese American family from Oakland, CA. She is the recipient of a Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series Award and a Brink Literary Journal Award for Hybrid Writing. She's received support from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Vermont Arts Council. Her work has appeared in The Millions, Kweli Journal, Exposition Review and elsewhere. She lives in Central Vermont in a yurt on a 600-acre land co-op with her partner, four children and a herd of goats.