With Her New Book, ‘Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar,' Katie Yee Slyly Updates the Divorce Novel

Vogue

6 days ago

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 useless-seeming 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 own 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. I feel like 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?
Oh, that's a great question. The novel started out as a short story that just kept getting bigger and bigger and rolling away from me. I think at a separate point, these were two different short stories that kind of grew parallel lives. It wasn't until I was really thinking about it later that I was like, There's a narrator in one that's really funny and resilient, and I kind of want to see what might happen if we make these plot lines 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 want to say I read in an experimental fiction class in college, and the whole thing was a riff off of whatever Facebook trend was happening at the time, where the writer was just listing, you know, 'Thing one: I have a dog. Thing two: I live in Brooklyn. Thing three…' And then, over the course of a really long list, it's so interesting to see what recurring questions or themes or arcs kind of arrive. I think putting together the user's manual was a little bit like doing that. I was really caught up in the question of, what do you do when you when you break up with someone, or when someone's no longer in your life, but you have all of this information about them and you know all these granular details about really weird things, like what they're allergic to? Where does that go? That's kind of what I was getting at there.