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 \u201cproducts of conception\u201d following a miscarriage. Her heart raced. Suddenly, purring from the radio speakers came John Mayer\u2019s cheeseball jam, \u201cYour Body Is a Wonderland.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the verge of tears, she burst out laughing. \u201cThis sucks so much,\u201d she thought. \u201cBut it\u2019s also hilarious.\u201d<\/p>\n
She\u2019d written about this particular brand of cruelty from the universe before in the recently published short story, \u201cColors From Elsewhere,\u201d<\/a> a stirring pregnancy plot upended by the heroine\u2019s rainbow discharge and an acupuncturist\u2019s otherworldly diagnosis: She \u201cwas a literal alien\u201d who naturally can\u2019t reproduce. Suddenly, it all \u201cmade perfect sense.\u201d<\/p>\n Khong is no stranger to feeding life\u2019s great losses and unknowables through the processing plant of fiction.<\/p>\n \u201cIn real life, there are no answers,\u201d 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, \u201cMy Dear You,\u201d is out this month.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cFor most of my writing life, I thought that my goal was writing a perfect story,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t think of that as my job anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n She believes good art lies precisely in the knowledge of our own mortality. \u201cA.I. embodies hypotheticals I can only imagine for myself,\u201d she wrote for the Atlantic<\/a> in 2024. It\u2019s a paralyzing realization, she argued, being confronted with \u201cthe limits of our body and perspectives \u2014 the limits of our very lives.\u201d That is, until you use it to your advantage.<\/p>\n That space between the infinite and the inevitably finite bookends \u201cMy Dear You.\u201d It\u2019s a tender, bizarro reckoning with marriage, infertility and friendship, among life\u2019s other illusions. Ten stories written in as many years, the collection serves as a document of Khong\u2019s thirties, a time when circles shrink and choices narrow. \u201cThis book is about love in a lot of different ways,\u201d she said. It\u2019s also dedicated to her husband, Eli Horowitz.<\/p>\n Mostly, the book follows Asian American and Asian lives \u2014 both lived and unrealized \u2014 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\u2019s dated them all. God abandons the human race and lets people live out their days as the animal of their choice. \u201cThe Freshening,\u201d<\/a> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cMy Dear You: Stories\u201d by Rachel Khong<\/p>\n (Knopf)<\/p>\n 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 \u201clinger and linger,\u201d prompting her to often ask: What would I do? She recalled workshopping Khong\u2019s title story a decade ago with their longtime Bay Area writers group \u2014 about a newlywed who dies, goes to heaven and encounters her husband there again. \u201cI\u2019ve read that story maybe 20 times at this point,\u201d Kwon said, \u201cand it never loses its power.\u201d<\/p>\n Khong\u2019s editor, John Freeman, places her alongside West Coast peers like Charles Yu and Vauhini Vara, noting her sensitivity to the \u201cslippages and quick-silvery nature of technology and speculation.\u201d Genre-bending authors are often well-suited to making sense of the daily horrors and subtle corrosions. What sets Khong apart, he said, is \u201cher ability to have these emotional dramas situated within quite large philosophical and social questions. And that never to feel like homework \u2014 it feels like fun.\u201d<\/p>\n Her 2017 debut novel, \u201cGoodbye, Vitamin,\u201d 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<\/a> raved about the darkly comic novel, \u201cstartling in its spare beauty,\u201d and the quarter-life crisis treatment of a parent\u2019s Alzheimer\u2019s disease. Universal Pictures later snapped up the rights, with Constance Wu<\/a> attached to star (though the adaptation now sits in development hell.)<\/p>\n Her 2024 follow-up, \u201cReal Americans,\u201d sparked a 17-way bidding war for what this paper called \u201ca disorienting, masterful, shape-shifting novel about multiracial identity<\/a>.\u201d The sophomore novel marked the arrival of an intuitive stylist gifted at polyphonic prose. The bestseller also made her a full-time author.<\/p>\n The hallmark of the \u201cKhongian\u201d multiverse, according to her agent, Marya Spence, are the boundless souls contained within her characters\u2019 ordinary bodies. They are everyday folk poised on the sublime, a leap into the expanse just pages away. \u201cIt\u2019s Rachel in her purest form,\u201d she said of the new collection. \u201cTo experience all the emotional and tonal registers that she\u2019s capable of.\u201d<\/p>\n Khong, 40, has experienced her own tonal shifts these last few years. She and her husband moved from San Francisco to L.A.\u2019s Glassell Park neighborhood in 2023. With that came passing off the Ruby, her celebrated co-working space in the Mission District. She logged off<\/a> Instagram indefinitely two years ago. \u201cIt\u2019s been really good for the writing, but also for my mental health.\u201d<\/p>\n She\u2019s 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>, a teaching collective and writer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n She\u2019s still adjusting to L.A., finding beauty in the choices and life she\u2019s made. Even the ones made for her. Some even \u201cfeel interesting and generative and exciting instead of limiting and disappointing,\u201d she said, which \u201cemerged with writing this book.\u201d<\/p>\n Rachel Khong pets a rescue cat at Pasadena Humane.<\/p>\n (Caroline Brehman \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n Khong had suggested meeting at the animal shelter because it\u2019s a key setting for her short story \u201cTapetum Lucidum,\u201d named for the demon-like glow behind some animals\u2019 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\u2019s handsome Vietnamese vet \u2014 so vividly that he appears in her kitchen one day.<\/p>\n The couple struggles to conceive. \u201cWe 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\u2019t want one,\u201d Khong writes.<\/p>\n The specter of her crush never leaves. Then, a new arrival: her ex-boyfriend and their two would-be children. \u201dMore ghosts move in. Only she and Sheila can see them: more exes, more babies, whole generations that never existed. Her marriage becomes strained. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t that I wasn\u2019t myself,\u201d she writes. \u201cI was entirely myself \u2014 all myselves \u2014 and it was too much.\u201d Eventually, she learns to put up with the ghosts. All her infinite selves, all their pets\u2019 pets and lovers\u2019 lovers.<\/p>\n \u201cBut the cat stiffened and I stiffened whenever anybody moved, aware of all the possible lives being lived around us.\u201d<\/p>\n In reality, Khong has accepted the boundlessness. She\u2019s waiting for a photographer outside the shelter\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat are we going to value about our experience as human beings?\u201d she asks. \u201cAnd can we hang on to the part of us that is creaturely, a part of nature and in person?\u201d<\/p>\n Catch Rachel Khong at the L.A. Times Festival of Books<\/a> April 19 from 12-1 p.m. on the panel \u201cFrom the Terrible to the Beautiful to the Surreal: Short Stories with Long Shadows\u201d featuring Nora Lange, Elaine Hsieh Chou, Elizabeth Crane and Barbara DeMarco-Barrett. Tickets required<\/a>. <\/p>\n Rudi, an L.A. native, is a freelance art and culture writer. She\u2019s at work on her debut novel about a stuttering student journalist.<\/p>\n ![\""My](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1776082448_658_.jpeg\")
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