Violet Kupersmith
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Violet Kupersmith, only 25, calls herself “a baby author” and finds it surreal to see a volume of her work in the local library. In April, Random House’s Spiegel & Grau imprint published the Doylestown native’s first book, The Frangipani Hotel, a collection of short stories based on traditional Vietnamese ghost stories. The book, drawn from her own heritage, has received excellent reviews and active commentary in the blogosphere. In fact, says the author, “I stopped reading my Goodreads page because I was obsessing over it!”
Kupersmith’s mother left Vietnam when she was 13, and the author has returned to the country numerous times to visit, including on a Fulbright Fellowship to teach and to research the Mekong Delta. In her writing, Kupersmith treats her cultural legacy with respect and a touch of irreverence. For example, when a girl asks her grandmother for her story of leaving Vietnam so she can use it a school assignment, she says it will help her more than her father’s story: “That’ll get me a B if I’m lucky. But your boat-person story? Jackpot. Communists! Thai pirates! Starvation! That’s an A-plus story.”
A book-launch party for The Frangipani Hotel was held at the Doylestown Bookshop, which Kupersmith said felt like a homecoming. “I grew up there and spent all my allowance there. I saw all the authors they had there for signings when I was a junior writer growing up.”
The party drew a big crowd, and her book sold out. “All my people came and also a lot of strangers showed up,” she says, “and my mom made spring rolls!”
Kupersmith is currently writing a novel, which keeps her out of circulation. “I can be a bit of a recluse. Writing is a lonely job that you’re just sort of doing by yourself in your sweatpants in front of your computer.”
The novel follows two Vietnamese brothers and their dealings with the spirit world. One brother is a Saigon policeman looking for his missing fiancée. The other is a Hanoi low-life running an illegal cobra hunt in the mountain highlands.
Kupersmith has a network of local writer friends with whom she sometimes exchanges work. “You need a community, otherwise you’ll go crazy as a writer making up stories and talking to made-up people in your head all day. You get into novel writing, you forget to shower — you need someone to phone you and say, ‘Are you alive? Come out and talk about something not related to your Vietnamese ghost stories!’”
Lately, she’s been back and forth to New York City for book parties. In comparison, she really appreciates what Philly has to offer. “As a book town, I think we have even cooler literary credentials that inform the scene today. We can claim Ben Franklin, Edgar Allan Poe and Doylestown has James Michener. [Philly’s] a young city now, and I think it is infinitely more badassed than New York!”
