Heavy snow and difficult travel expected again, heaviest snow in southern Minnesota

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

Sophia, a 20-something playwright, has invited her father, a famous and provocative British novelist, to come see her new work. As the play begins, he is shocked to realize he recognizes the set. It’s a replica of the kitchen in his vacation home near Sicily. Then the lead actor saunters onstage wearing the author’s favorite shirt and proceeds to have loud sex with a woman he just picked up at a bar. The audience roars. The author is undone. 

At the same moment, Sophia is having lunch with her mother at a nearby cafe and fretting over what her father will think of the play. Her mother, the writer’s ex-wife, is both sympathetic and cavalier, weary of dealing with self-absorbed artists and yet unable to abandon her martyrdom. 

Hamya’s novel is a bracing, complex and uncompromising look at the generation conflicts in our present age. She joins MPR News host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about “The Hypocrite” and so much more — including our current cancel culture, how to write a play within a novel and why she took pains to avoid writing actual sex scenes in her book. 

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on 

for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Arts and Culture

The Thread® - Books and Literary News

Shows

Big Books & Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller

Host

Author

Jo Hamya’s new novel centers on a young woman who writes a searing play about father, a once-celebrated author who was also an absent and self-absorbed parent.

Jo Hamya ambushes everyone in ‘The Hypocrite’

Go Deeper.

Like this?