Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays

Durga Chew-Bose

Feb 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Emily Woo Zeller

About this audiobook

An entirely original portrait of a young writer shutting out the din in order to find her own voice. On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer's Diary with the words "too much and not the mood." She was describing how tired she was of correcting her own writing, of the "cramming in and the cutting out" to please other readers, wondering if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying. The character of that sentiment, the attitude of it, inspired Durga Chew-Bose to write and collect her own work. The result is a lyrical and piercingly insightful collection of essays and her own brand of essay-meets-prose poetry about identity and culture. Inspired by Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Lydia Davis's short prose, and Vivian Gornick's exploration of interior life, Chew-Bose captures the inner restlessness that keeps her always on the brink of creative expression. Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today.

About the author

Durga Chew-Bose is a Montreal-born writer. Her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, Filmmaker, the New Inquiry, and the Guardian, among other publications. She is the author of Too Much and Not the Mood.

Emily Woo Zeller's multilingual, multicultural framework led to a natural fit as an audiobook narrator. While she specializes in Asian American narratives, Emily's work spans a broad spectrum, including young adult fiction. She won an AudioFile Earphones Award for her narration of Gulp by Mary Roach.