The plot of The Hypocrite sounds like the setup to a joke: a middle-aged novelist walks into a play about an out-of-touch writer only to discover the show is about him. The kicker? The theatrical work at the center of Jo Hamya’s provocative second novel was written by the novelist’s estranged 20-something daughter. Her inspiration for the show was the Sicilian getaway she took with her father a decade earlier in which she spent much of her time reluctantly helping him finish his misogynistic novel-in-progress. (The book, like the rest of his catalog, did not age well in the MeToo era.) Ultimately, Hamya’s sharp follow-up to her 2021 debut, Three Rooms, does so much more than lambast a bad dad. It offers shrewd analysis of dysfunctional families, generational differences, and how time has a way of making hypocrites of us all.
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