{"id":20153,"date":"2025-07-25T03:33:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T03:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/20153\/"},"modified":"2025-07-25T03:33:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T03:33:12","slug":"with-her-new-book-maggie-or-a-man-and-a-woman-walk-into-a-bar-katie-yee-slyly-updates-the-divorce-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/20153\/","title":{"rendered":"With Her New Book, \u2018Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar,\u2019 Katie Yee Slyly Updates the Divorce Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Katie Yee\u2019s 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\u2019s unnamed Chinese American protagonist has been left for by her partner, Samuel (whom she memorably describes as having \u201cskin that loosely resembles pale shrimp gaining pink over the stove\u201d), and the name that said protagonist gives to her tumor after discovering that she has breast cancer<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While none of this may sound very funny, Yee manages to spin genuine laughs\u2014not to mention a thoughtful meditation on the meanings of health, love, family, loyalty, and identity\u2014out of her protagonist\u2019s pain.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Vogue: How does it feel to see your book out in the world?<\/p>\n

Katie Yee: It feels pretty surreal. The whole publishing process is such a wild ride. I\u2019ve had galleys for a while, but it feels so wonderfully strange to see the book in other people\u2019s hands. I got a text from a friend the other day that was like, \u201cI saw someone reading your book across the train platform,\u201d and I was so excited.<\/p>\n

What came to you first as you were writing: Maggie the person or Maggie the tumor?<\/p>\n

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\u2019t until I thought about it later that I was like, There\u2019s a narrator in one that\u2019s really funny and resilient, and I want to see what might happen if we make these plotlines converge.<\/p>\n

I was so struck by the narrator\u2019s Guide to My Husband: A User\u2019s Manual. What was that like to put together?<\/p>\n

That was really fun. There\u2019s 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, \u201cThing one: I have a dog. Thing two: I live in Brooklyn. Thing three\u2026.\u201d Over the course of a really long list, it\u2019s so interesting to see what recurring questions or themes or arcs arrive. Putting together the user\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019re allergic to. Where does that go? That\u2019s what I was getting at there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Katie Yee\u2019s debut novel, Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar, the titular…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20154,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134,20991,20992,1672],"class_list":{"0":"post-20153","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-splitscreenimagerightinset","13":"tag-storytypeinterview","14":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}