Jen Sookfong Lee explores the powerful impact of popular culture in memoir Superfan
Nikky Manfredi | CBC Radio | Posted: January 13, 2023 4:09 PM | Last Updated: April 1, 2023
Jen Sookfong Lee's memoir Superfan begins with the line "I was born in 1976 into a noisy house in East Vancouver where there were never enough bathrooms, privacy or salt and vinegar chips to go around."
There was, however, television, music, celebrity — popular art.
Superfan is a memoir-in-pieces that uses one woman's life-long love affair with pop culture as a revelatory lens to explore family, identity, belonging, grief and the power of female rage.
Lee is a Vancouver-born novelist and broadcast personality. In 2009, she championed Brian Francis's novel Fruit on Canada Reads. She is also a former The Next Chapter columnist.
She is the author of the novel The Conjoined, the nonfiction book Gentleman of the Shade and the poetry collection The Shadow List.
You write about how this book is kind of like a mixtape. How did the idea come to you?
What happened was I was in one of those arguments that we get into at parties, or with our friends and family, and we were arguing about something. It could have been something quite vacuous — might have been the Kardashians or Love is Blind or something like that.
I found myself passionately advocating for this kind of "low culture" pop culture thing that I really enjoyed. It occurred to me that there was something there to write about. Particularly, when we look at pop culture moments in time and how they connect to our own lives and and our own little traumas or joys or challenges.
You treat so-called "high culture" and "low culture" — popular culture — with equal respect. How do you see that interplay between the two?
It's one of the most fascinating arbitrary designations of our time. These categories don't mean a whole lot. The classic example is Shakespeare plays, right?
In their day, they were popular culture. Now we look at it as high literary stuff.
When we look at how high and low culture interact, so much of what happens in popular culture does get reflected back to us in literature or visual art or the things that we think of as having high artistic merit.
If somebody like Kim Kardashian is dealing with body image, style and how people perceive women, somebody like artist Cindy Sherman is probably also grappling with those exact same issues. It's just the medium is different.
In the beginning of the book, you say, "Beginning in childhood, I started losing people." What were the losses that you experienced?
My first real loss was when my father was diagnosed with cancer. I was about eight years old. He was sick and in and out of hospital for about four to five years — until he passed away when I was 12. That was the first big loss.
After that, my mother was understandably grieving my father's death, and she fell into a very deep depression, which lasted almost the entirety of my high school years.
During that time, my older sisters started moving out, one-by-one, which was almost a bigger loss in some ways, because my sisters and I had always been a bit of a team. We always had each other's backs. When they started to leave, it felt incredibly lonely for me as a child and then as a teenager.
You talk about how your mother is dealing with grief after your father dies, but also about the two-headed monster of anxiety and depression. For solace, you and your sister Penny turned to a television show called The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. What did that program give you?
Bob Ross is famous for a number of different things, including his perm and also his voice. It's so soothing. I listen to it now and I always immediately feel very sleepy and warm inside.
His paintings were exactly what we needed in those very dark years. - Jen Sookfong Lee on finding comfort in The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross
In the aftermath of my father's death, there were no men in our house at this point. Bob Ross very much played a sort of male, not quite an authority, because Bob Ross, I think, would be the first to say that he's not an authority figure, but he was so reassuring.
I'm sure everyone remembers the sorts of things he would say, like, "In this world, everything is okay." That kind of kindness and empathy, even if it's just for the people watching his show or just for the trees.
His paintings were exactly what we needed in those very dark years.
One of the lines you quote from Bob Ross is, "You make the decisions." In this world, he's talking about painting, but when did you realize that your writing gave you the ability to make decisions and to quote from him again, "to bend rivers," if necessary?
I was probably about 16 when I really realized that every decision I made as a writer was mine alone, and that nobody else was sitting beside me writing those words. It was just me and I think it's the reason I'm still a writer, right?
Everything I do on the page is mine, under my control one hundred per cent. That is not true of anything else in life.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview produced by Lisa Mathews, Shelagh Rogers and Jacqueline Kirke.