BOTTOM OF THE ICEBERG
by Sharon Chang
Sharon Chang’s life could easily be mistaken for a fable about the things money and success can’t buy. Yet Bottom of the Iceberg is much more than that. Rebelling against all of her external identities—artist, designer, entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist—Chang embarks on a poetic journey of self-exploration as she chronicles the highs and lows that shaped her character.
Through a disjointed childhood and rollercoaster adult life, profound love and loss led her to question what our collective future holds as the world we have known is steadily dying. At this shared existential crossroad, Chang spins out the story into a future we may have yet to live, but one she has fully embodied. The result is a fascinating future memoir that offers the gift of a compass to navigate a world in desperate need of healing and regeneration.
"I listen to jazz ballads when I'm sad, to go into the sadness. It's so helpful to know others have felt heartache and found a way to muddle through and make something beautiful out of it all. That's how I felt reading this book. It's a gift of candor and a guide for path-making and pivoting and making lemonade."
— Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
"To anyone that meanders through this book's welcoming arches, touching its textured surfaces, here's a warning you should heed: it'll be difficult to leave. It'll be difficult to put this book down, to get on with the world as you once knew it. Sharon 'architects' a story that is at once immediate, biographical, cosmic, intimate, troubling, visionary, futural, and ancestral. In her life's undulating flows, in the speculative unfolding of her playful characters, in the bold reconceptualization of time written into her concept of 'future architecture', Bottom of the Iceberg pauses the sun in the sky, bending spacetime to consider the gravity of a single life as a future ecology. It feels like home."
— Bayo Akomolafe
"Part memoir, part work of visionary art and architecture, Sharon Chang's Bottom of the Iceberg lays out a compelling path for addressing humanity's most complex challenges by connecting more deeply with ourselves and with each other. Don't miss this revelatory exploration of what so often lies just out of sight in our busy lives--the transformative domain at the intersection of personal growth, systems change and the better future our world so urgently needs us to build."
— Alex Johnston
— Ayana Elizabeth Johnson
"To anyone that meanders through this book's welcoming arches, touching its textured surfaces, here's a warning you should heed: it'll be difficult to leave. It'll be difficult to put this book down, to get on with the world as you once knew it. Sharon 'architects' a story that is at once immediate, biographical, cosmic, intimate, troubling, visionary, futural, and ancestral. In her life's undulating flows, in the speculative unfolding of her playful characters, in the bold reconceptualization of time written into her concept of 'future architecture', Bottom of the Iceberg pauses the sun in the sky, bending spacetime to consider the gravity of a single life as a future ecology. It feels like home."
— Bayo Akomolafe
"Part memoir, part work of visionary art and architecture, Sharon Chang's Bottom of the Iceberg lays out a compelling path for addressing humanity's most complex challenges by connecting more deeply with ourselves and with each other. Don't miss this revelatory exploration of what so often lies just out of sight in our busy lives--the transformative domain at the intersection of personal growth, systems change and the better future our world so urgently needs us to build."
— Alex Johnston