Sidework

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