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In Katie Yee’s debut novel, Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar, the titular Maggie is two things at once: the white woman Yee’s unnamed Chinese American protagonist has been left for by her partner, Samuel (whom she memorably describes as having “skin that loosely resembles pale shrimp gaining pink over the stove”), and the name that said protagonist gives to her tumor after discovering that she has breast cancer.
While none of this may sound very funny, Yee manages to spin genuine laughs—not to mention a thoughtful meditation on the meanings of health, love, family, loyalty, and identity—out of her protagonist’s pain.
This week, Vogue spoke to Yee about knitting her novel together from two short stories, hanging onto seemingly useless information about exes, taking inspiration from Chinese folklore passed down from her mother and grandmother, and the strangeness of only wanting to read something that mirrors your experience. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Vogue: How does it feel to see your book out in the world?
Katie Yee: It feels pretty surreal. The whole publishing process is such a wild ride. I’ve had galleys for a while, but it feels so wonderfully strange to see the book in other people’s hands. I got a text from a friend the other day that was like, “I saw someone reading your book across the train platform,” and I was so excited.
What came to you first as you were writing: Maggie the person or Maggie the tumor?
The novel started out as a short story that just kept getting bigger and bigger and rolling away from me. At a separate point, these were two different short stories that grew parallel lives. It wasn’t until I thought about it later that I was like, There’s a narrator in one that’s really funny and resilient, and I want to see what might happen if we make these plotlines converge.
I was so struck by the narrator’s Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual. What was that like to put together?
That was really fun. There’s this incredible book called 2500 Random Things About Me Too by Matias Viegener that I read in an experimental-fiction class in college, and the whole thing was a riff off whatever Facebook trend was happening at the time, where the writer was just listing, “Thing one: I have a dog. Thing two: I live in Brooklyn. Thing three….” Over the course of a really long list, it’s so interesting to see what recurring questions or themes or arcs arrive. Putting together the user’s manual was a little bit like doing that. I was really caught up in the question of what to do when you break up with someone or when someone’s no longer in your life but you have all this information about them and know all these granular details about really weird things, like what they’re allergic to. Where does that go? That’s what I was getting at there.
On that note, do you have any favorite art about the end of a relationship?
I was inspired by a lot of the divorce novels that have predated me. I’m thinking about Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation and Weike Wang’s Chemistry. The latter is about a lot of things, so I don’t know that I would even call it a divorce novel, but it was definitely a big influence on the structure of my book. Have you read Megan Hunter’s The Harpy? It’s this really incredible divorce novel that I highly recommend if you’re into that genre. This woman finds out that her husband is having an affair, and they strike an interesting fairy-tale deal where she’s allowed to hurt him three times. Would recommend. These are just a couple of the divorce stories that I love—and also Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, of course.
Of course!
It’s a classic.
I was so curious about the role of Chinese folklore in your book. Can you talk a little bit about how you integrated that?
I grew up hearing a lot of the myths that made their way into the book, so a lot of them come straight from the mouths of my mother and grandmother. I was very lucky growing up; my parents were always reading me bedtime stories. But my absolute favorite ones were the ones that my mom would tell me from memory. She was a classics major in college, so I grew up with a lot of Greek myths—the PG ones—and there was just something lovely about my mom telling me these stories not from a book but from her own memory. That always felt really special.
Is there anyone or any group that you particularly hope this book makes it to?
Over the course of the past year, I’ve been in some rooms where I’m telling people what the book is about—and this has happened a couple of times, so I’m not calling a specific person out—but there will be one straight man in the group who says to me, “Oh, I don’t think that this book is for me.” I’m very interested in that, not because I’m insulted at all, but because I’m interested in: Why not? Is it because you don’t feel that this book will be marketed to you? That you’re not interested in a woman’s perspective of divorce or motherhood? Is it something about the Chinese folklore that’s not speaking to you? The joy of reading books for me is to get to know other worlds. I want to look into other people’s thought processes and to learn something new. My bookshelf would look very sad if I only read books that mirrored my experience in a one-to-one way. This book is for anyone who has gone through a hard time, had a best friend help them through something, or wants to laugh while they cry.
