My Child, the Algorithm
An Alternatively Intelligent Book of Love
by Hannah Silva
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Pub Date Aug 27 2024 | Archive Date Jul 24 2024
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Description
My Child, the Algorithm describes encounters between a single parent, a curious, verbal toddler, and a language-producing algorithm. Like a male seahorse, Hannah Silva carried a baby made from her partner's egg. But when she gave birth, her partner left, and Hannah found herself navigating life alone with her child, surviving on United Kingdom universal credit, humor, and buckets of imagination.
As she navigates friendship, dating, and life as a queer parent in London, Hannah begins cowriting with an open-source language model, a precursor to ChatGPT, feeding the algorithm language and receiving language in return. Through her interactions with her toddler and the algorithm, expressions of humor, play, and insight begin to emerge. With the help and disruption of these unreliable narrators, Hannah deconstructs her story and constructs a new one, unraveling what she has been taught to want, finding alternative ways of thinking, loving, and parenting today.
Advance Praise
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR MY CHILD, THE ALGORITHM
“My Child, the Algorithm redoes what autobiography is. Funny, inventive, and moving, it raises the stakes for the rest of us writers.”
—Isabel Waidner, author of Sterling Karat Gold
“Hannah breaks all the rules in order to refresh our minds. No writer I know in drama is as brave or as vulnerable. She talks to another hinterland of the mind. She writes like she is climbing a mountain naked… An important new talent.”
—Fiona Shaw
“Curious, queer, whip-smart, hilarious, and tender. Just read it. Hannah Silva is my favorite male seahorse.” —Gail McConnell
“A bold and inventive meditation on the complexities of motherhood. I loved it.”
—Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch
“A work worthy to stand beside classics of queer parenting by Maggie Nelson and Gail McConnell, Silva’s book asks all the right questions about art, family and love, with clarity, invention, and passion.”
—Joanna Walsh, author of Girl Online: A User Manual
“Hannah Silva’s writing is searing, sharp, moving, and alive to the inanities and absurdities of her worlds. With a poet’s ear and a truly poetic eye and playwright’s feel for all life’s dramas her talent is one to treasure and audio drama’s rarest of pleasures.”
—David Eldridge, dramatist and screenwriter
“Hannah Silva lets bodies and rooms be the waxing and waning things of space and line they also are, instead of maneuverable substance. How beautiful—this is amazing work.”
—Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo
“A brilliant, surprising, funny, moving, unexpected, unique work of genius.”
—Nadia Molinari
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781593767808 |
| PRICE | $16.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 272 |
