No Guts, No Glory
Deep Read #52 with Creative Director and Author, Lydia Pang
After a brief absence, DEEP READ resumes with an interview with Lydia Pang: self-described “Frankenstein, misfit Creative Director”, co-founder of sister agencies MØRNING and EVENING, and now author of a memoir titled ‘Eat Bitter: A Story about Guts and Food’, which came out just last week.
Listen to Deep Read #52 on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify
Eat Bitter takes its name from a Chinese idiom, meaning to endure hardship before sweetness arrives. It’s a phrase Lydia grew up hearing but only really reckoned with in her thirties, when she was navigating fertility issues, relationship struggles, and burnout induced by over a decade of working herself into the ground. The book uses food – eight recipes, eight chapters – as a vessel for intimate stories of hardship and loss. It also traces her Hakka heritage –a people historically defined by displacement and resilience for whom the instinct to ‘eat bitter’ runs deep.
What I found most interesting about talking to Lydia wasn’t the vulnerability itself (although she is remarkably honest), but the intelligence she brings to examining how that vulnerability was so long suppressed. She knows exactly how branding works because she’s forged a career doing it for some of the biggest companies in the world. Turning that same scrutiny on herself, and then publishing the results, takes nerve – and yes, a lot of guts.
We talked about the mythology of New York - a place where we both spent a formative chunk of our careers - about the tension between creative purity and commercial survival, and about what it means to write a book like no-one’s reading.
Lydia is sharp, funny, and quick as a whip and I really enjoyed our conversation. I hope you do, too.
Thank you for reading,
Phoebe
LYDIA PANG: Deep Reading List
“I remember these things clearly because that was how my mother loved you, not through white lies and constant verbal affirmation, but in subtle observations of what brought you joy, pocketed away to make you feel comforted and cared for without even realising it.”
Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner
“Life is such a strange thing, she thinks, once she has stopped laughing. Even after certain things have happened to them, no matter how awful the experience, people still go on eating and drinking, going to the toilet and washing themselves – living, in other words. And sometimes they even laugh out loud. And they probably have these same thoughts, too, and when they do it must make them cheerlessly recall all the sadness they'd briefly managed to forget.”
The Vegetarian, Han Kang
“But this was no good, this line of thought. This was the thinking that had kept every woman from her greatness. There did not have to be an answer to the question why; everything important started out mysterious and this mystery was like a great sea you had to be brave enough to cross. How many times had I turned back at the first ripple of self-doubt? You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new. So far each thing I had done in Monrovia was guided by a version of me that had never been in charge before. A nitwit? A madwoman? Probably. But my more seasoned parts just had to be patient, hold their tongues - their many and sharp tongues - and give this new girl a chance.”
All Fours, Miranda July
Love <3