On the Shelf
My Dear You: Stories
By Rachel Khong
Knopf: 240 pages, $29
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The author Rachel Khong lay on the operating table in her hospital gown, awaiting a dilation and curettage (D&C) to remove the so-called “products of conception” following a miscarriage. Her heart raced. Suddenly, purring from the radio speakers came John Mayer’s cheeseball jam, “Your Body Is a Wonderland.”
On the verge of tears, she burst out laughing. “This sucks so much,” she thought. “But it’s also hilarious.”
She’d written about this particular brand of cruelty from the universe before in the recently published short story, “Colors From Elsewhere,” a stirring pregnancy plot upended by the heroine’s rainbow discharge and an acupuncturist’s otherworldly diagnosis: She “was a literal alien” who naturally can’t reproduce. Suddenly, it all “made perfect sense.”
Khong is no stranger to feeding life’s great losses and unknowables through the processing plant of fiction.
“In real life, there are no answers,” she said on a sticky 99-degree Wednesday in February at the Pasadena Humane shelter. She slipped treats to the dogs languishing under Palm Springs-style misting dispensers while volunteers read to them. Looking up with a gleaming, wide grin as if to catch her next words, Khong is deceptively calm for a bestselling author whose third book, “My Dear You,” is out this month.
While the book arrives at a moment when LLMs pose an existential threat to authors (among others) Khong is finding solace in human imperfections, especially her own. “For most of my writing life, I thought that my goal was writing a perfect story,” she said. “I don’t think of that as my job anymore.”
She believes good art lies precisely in the knowledge of our own mortality. “A.I. embodies hypotheticals I can only imagine for myself,” she wrote for the Atlantic in 2024. It’s a paralyzing realization, she argued, being confronted with “the limits of our body and perspectives — the limits of our very lives.” That is, until you use it to your advantage.
That space between the infinite and the inevitably finite bookends “My Dear You.” It’s a tender, bizarro reckoning with marriage, infertility and friendship, among life’s other illusions. Ten stories written in as many years, the collection serves as a document of Khong’s thirties, a time when circles shrink and choices narrow. “This book is about love in a lot of different ways,” she said. It’s also dedicated to her husband, Eli Horowitz.
Mostly, the book follows Asian American and Asian lives — both lived and unrealized — through high-concept, fantastical left turns. A factory worker training an A.I. sex doll grows attached to her product. Twenty-one Asian women perform an elaborate revenge fantasy against the white man who’s dated them all. God abandons the human race and lets people live out their days as the animal of their choice. “The Freshening,” about a government-assisted drug that has everyone seeing their own race and gender, has already been optioned by Ali Wong and Adam McKay, from writer-director Cathy Yan.
“My Dear You: Stories” by Rachel Khong
(Knopf)
Those close to Khong marvel at the long half-life of her short stories. The novelist R.O. Kwon admires her ability to construct situations that “linger and linger,” prompting her to often ask: What would I do? She recalled workshopping Khong’s title story a decade ago with their longtime Bay Area writers group — about a newlywed who dies, goes to heaven and encounters her husband there again. “I’ve read that story maybe 20 times at this point,” Kwon said, “and it never loses its power.”
Khong’s editor, John Freeman, places her alongside West Coast peers like Charles Yu and Vauhini Vara, noting her sensitivity to the “slippages and quick-silvery nature of technology and speculation.” Genre-bending authors are often well-suited to making sense of the daily horrors and subtle corrosions. What sets Khong apart, he said, is “her ability to have these emotional dramas situated within quite large philosophical and social questions. And that never to feel like homework — it feels like fun.”
Her 2017 debut novel, “Goodbye, Vitamin,” was an instant sensation. She wrote it while in grad school, working restaurant jobs and editing the quarterly food magazine Lucky Peach. The New York Times raved about the darkly comic novel, “startling in its spare beauty,” and the quarter-life crisis treatment of a parent’s Alzheimer’s disease. Universal Pictures later snapped up the rights, with Constance Wu attached to star (though the adaptation now sits in development hell.)
Her 2024 follow-up, “Real Americans,” sparked a 17-way bidding war for what this paper called “a disorienting, masterful, shape-shifting novel about multiracial identity.” The sophomore novel marked the arrival of an intuitive stylist gifted at polyphonic prose. The bestseller also made her a full-time author.
The hallmark of the “Khongian” multiverse, according to her agent, Marya Spence, are the boundless souls contained within her characters’ ordinary bodies. They are everyday folk poised on the sublime, a leap into the expanse just pages away. “It’s Rachel in her purest form,” she said of the new collection. “To experience all the emotional and tonal registers that she’s capable of.”
Khong, 40, has experienced her own tonal shifts these last few years. She and her husband moved from San Francisco to L.A.’s Glassell Park neighborhood in 2023. With that came passing off the Ruby, her celebrated co-working space in the Mission District. She logged off Instagram indefinitely two years ago. “It’s been really good for the writing, but also for my mental health.”
She’s working on her third novel, on Malaysia, where she was born before emigrating at age 2. She also runs a 12-month novel generator through the Dream Side, a teaching collective and writer’s retreat she formed with Meng Jin, Susanna Kwan and Shruti Swamy. In May, she leaves for a three-month residency with the prestigious Picador Professorship in Germany.
She’s still adjusting to L.A., finding beauty in the choices and life she’s made. Even the ones made for her. Some even “feel interesting and generative and exciting instead of limiting and disappointing,” she said, which “emerged with writing this book.”
Rachel Khong pets a rescue cat at Pasadena Humane.
(Caroline Brehman / For The Times)
Khong had suggested meeting at the animal shelter because it’s a key setting for her short story “Tapetum Lucidum,” named for the demon-like glow behind some animals’ superior night vision. In it, a husband and wife adopt a cat, Sheila, who develops an unnerving disposition come nightfall. (The real-life muse behind the premise: her tortoiseshell cat named Bunny from the San Francisco SPCA.) The narrator begins fantasizing about Sheila’s handsome Vietnamese vet — so vividly that he appears in her kitchen one day.
The couple struggles to conceive. “We tried to have a baby and we tried to have a baby and when my parents and sister and friends asked I pretended I didn’t want one,” Khong writes.
The specter of her crush never leaves. Then, a new arrival: her ex-boyfriend and their two would-be children. ”More ghosts move in. Only she and Sheila can see them: more exes, more babies, whole generations that never existed. Her marriage becomes strained. “It wasn’t that I wasn’t myself,” she writes. “I was entirely myself — all myselves — and it was too much.” Eventually, she learns to put up with the ghosts. All her infinite selves, all their pets’ pets and lovers’ lovers.
“But the cat stiffened and I stiffened whenever anybody moved, aware of all the possible lives being lived around us.”
In reality, Khong has accepted the boundlessness. She’s waiting for a photographer outside the shelter’s cartoon-style play center. Cats slip in and out of their miniature palazzo, vanishing and reappearing as if through unseen doors. Khong watches them and wonders what will separate us from them in the future.
“What are we going to value about our experience as human beings?” she asks. “And can we hang on to the part of us that is creaturely, a part of nature and in person?”
Catch Rachel Khong at the L.A. Times Festival of Books April 19 from 12-1 p.m. on the panel “From the Terrible to the Beautiful to the Surreal: Short Stories with Long Shadows” featuring Nora Lange, Elaine Hsieh Chou, Elizabeth Crane and Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. Tickets required.
Rudi, an L.A. native, is a freelance art and culture writer. She’s at work on her debut novel about a stuttering student journalist.