Katie Yee Interview with Sunny's Journal | Sunny's Bookshop | Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar — *Photograph of Katie Yee by Shirley Cai*

At the start of Katie Yee’s debut, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar, the unnamed protagonist finds out that her husband is in love with another woman, Maggie. Shortly after this world-upending news, the protagonist finds out more devastating news: she has breast cancer. To cope with the new turmoil in her life, the protagonist leans on her best friend Darlene, stalks the other woman online, and starts sharing Chinese myths with her two kids as their bedtime stories. She even starts making lists in her head, such as a “Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual” for Maggie, even if she knows she’ll never actually give it to her. Most notably, she begins talking to her tumor – and she names the tumor, none other than, Maggie.

Despite the heavy subject matter, Maggie is deeply funny and, somehow, fun to read. This is mostly due to the narrator, who is strong and resilient in the face of heartbreak and, overall, someone that you want to root for. Further, Yee’s writing is compelling, entertaining, and full of so much heart. You will be sucked into the story of the protagonist – and the two Maggies in her life – and, by the time you finish, eager for more of Yee’s writing.

Below is my conversation with Katie, in which we discuss finding the right tone for Maggie, depicting the other woman, and much more.

Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee | Sunny's Bookshop | Sunny's Journal

Nikki: To start, how did you come up with the idea for Maggie?

Katie: Before this, I had considered myself a short story writer, so Maggie started out as a short story, or maybe two different short stories. Breast cancer runs in my family – my grandmother had it, my mother as well – so I think this is something that I'd been trying to write about and failing to write about for a long time. So much of the way I process the world has to do with writing and fictionalizing it. Then, with the divorce part of the story, the honest answer is I was probably going through some super minor heartbreak at the time and because I’m a scorpio and a very dramatic person, I was like, let me give this heartbreak to a character and let me up the stakes. So instead of minor heartbreak, it’s divorce and let’s fictionalize it and process it this way. And I think I made a narrator that is really resilient and funny, so I was like, well, when it rains it pours. Let’s see what happens when we bring all these elements together and that's where Maggie came from.

Nikki: I'm curious, since breast cancer runs in your family, did writing Maggie make you feel more connected to your family members’ experiences?

Katie: I think the experience of writing about it made me feel really grateful that I was able to be in the room with them – and I don’t just mean for novel writing research, which is its own thing. One of my favorite characters that I've ever written is the best friend character, Darlene, and she is a really good friend. She goes with the narrator to all of her appointments and, beyond the waiting room, just follows [the narrator] from room to room as she's meeting with doctors. And I think that I just feel really grateful to have been able to provide that kind of support.

Nikki: I was so fascinated by the theme of being an outsider. The narrator now feels outside of her family due to the divorce, as she is dealing with cancer which puts her outside of the norm of being generally healthy. What exactly about this theme were you hoping to explore with Maggie? And what drew you to this theme?

Katie: I think family is so interesting and fun to write about because it’s so complicated. As different members of a family grow and change and adapt, the family unit has to change shape to fit. I also think the familiarity of family can be a blessing and a curse. Like, my boyfriend and I have been dating for five years, for example, and I think it’s always fun when you can discover new things about someone that you've known for a long time – as long as those are good and not, like in the case of our narrator, something like an affair. I wanted to explore what happens when you kind of take the familiarity of family and play with it. I think the narrator really saw herself as part of a family. Back in college, I remember taking this psych class that was all about individualist culture versus collectivist culture. In America, it’s individualistic, you want to have your own identity, be your own self, be independent. But in a lot of Asian countries, there’s more of a collectivist culture – you’re part of a unit, you will blend, you will serve the family, you’ll do what's better for society, that kind of mentality. I was interested in playing with that, with our narrator [while] she’s realizing that she isn’t just a part of this family unit. [She’s realizing] that she can have her own story.

Nikki: One element of the story I loved was the inclusion of Chinese folklore and how she uses those myths for her kids’ bedtime stories. How did you decide which myths to include?

Katie: So many of them were what I remembered. Unlike the Greek myths, there aren’t a wealth of options to pick from, at least in my narrow experience. I really only have the myths that I grew up with. In doing research for this book, I was trying to find out more about Chinese myths and I was having a really hard time finding any kind of translated, English language collection or anything like that. So, a lot of the myth research for this book really happened when I went back to the neighborhood where I grew up, I would sit with my mom in a diner and be like, ‘Hey, do you remember that one story that you told me once? Could you tell it to me again?’ And a lot of those stories made their way into the book.

Nikki: So that element is very personal then, I love that.

Katie: Yeah and it’s so funny because I was talking to a friend of a friend – she had been DMing me on Instagram – and a tidbit of one of the myths came up. And she – who, I think, is also Chinese American – was like, ‘Wait, my family told this myth to me differently.’ And [she told me] their version. I just thought that was so interesting, how myths change depending on who's telling them and who's remembering what. I think my greatest hope for this book would be that other people are like, ‘Wait, I know that story but here's [how] my family told it.’

Nikki: How did you develop the tone of the story? I love that, at its core, this book is so humorous – and, in many ways, about humor – despite it centering on the heavy topics of cancer and divorce.

Katie: Thank you, that’s a relief [that it’s funny]. Dealing with such heavy subject matter, right away, I knew that I wanted to bring joy into the story. Mostly, when I'm writing short stories, my typical mode is to do something with magical realism. But when I started Maggie, I wanted to challenge myself, so I like, no magic, let’s see what happens when you’re restricted to the rules of the real world. I wanted to see what the characters might reach for instead and humor came in as the substitute for magic, which I think is fun and beautiful. I think that humor can accomplish so much that magic [can]. I do think that they can function similarly in a story, in terms of making things happen, in terms of changing the entire vibe of a scene. I also think so much of humor comes from awkwardness and, like, super small human interactions. So, a lot of the scenes that were really hard to write were also ripe for funny detail. Scenes in hospitals and doctor waiting rooms, those are weird liminal spaces. Like, the cups are really small, you don’t remember how to open the robes.

Nikki: The magazines are old.

Katie: They're so old! They’re, like, highlights from the year 2000. So yeah, I think giving voice to those moments of awkwardness, those really human details is also where some of the humor comes in, I hope. Also, I know from talking to my own mother – who, again, has experienced this – life doesn’t stop when you get a diagnosis like this. You still have kids to raise, you still have, in the case of our narrator, a divorce to go through. I wanted to give cancer its due in the story, but I also wanted to show that other things are still happening in life. And that includes bad things, like her divorce, but also really fun good moments, like going on long walks and getting margaritas with her best friend.

Nikki: The character, Maggie, is the other woman. In that regard, this book includes some tropes that we’re familiar with – she stalks her on the internet, she becomes somewhat fixated on her. But, at the same time, she kind of uses Maggie to cope with what’s going on by naming her cancer Maggie and talking to “Maggie” everyday. It was a more unique depiction of “the other woman” storyline, so I was curious if you intentionally wanted to subvert expectations or how you set out to frame this part of the narrative.

Katie: If you’re thinking about a story in a broad strokes way, then you’ve got your heroes and you’ve got your villains. I think, especially these days, we're so good at not vilifying the other woman – this is not her fault, she didn’t do this to you. If any character was the ‘villain,’ it would be Sam, her husband. So I think I wanted to be careful about not totally flattening Maggie. And I think so much of whether or not something is a comedy or a tragedy or a great love story has to do with the frame that you’re looking at. So, if you told this story from Maggie's perspective, it might be the greatest love story that’s ever happened.

Nikki: And you get a glimpse of that, when Maggie and the narrator meet.

Katie: Exactly! And someone said to me the other day, ‘The book is called Maggie, but you don’t get that much of Maggie in the book.’ That was intentional because it’s not about Maggie. The story is called Maggie but it’s not Maggie's story, it’s our narrator’s story.

Nikki: And the cancer is also called Maggie.

Katie: Right, the cancer is also Maggie. When she names her tumor after this other woman, this is her way of being like, ‘You have yours, I'll have mine.’ It’s a way for her to reclaim that she can have her own life.

Nikki: I really liked the decision not to name the narrator because she is figuring out her new identity, outside of her marriage and as a person with cancer. How did you come to that decision?

Katie: I went back and forth on that so much. Names are so hard, I'm really bad at names. In a very early draft, I didn't name anyone actually, but that got confusing – it was her always saying ‘my husband’ or ‘my best friend.’ And this is a preoccupation that our narrator has, as well. She has a hard time naming things, she has a hard time naming her children. I think, when you name something, you lay claim to it. With our narrator, in particular, I wanted her and her story to feel like she could belong to anyone. I thought that [naming her] would have made her too specifically mine.

Nikki: I loved the structure – no chapters, just short vignettes. How did you settle on this structure?

Katie: Have you read Chemistry by Weike Wang or Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill? These are the patron saints of my novel. Both of these books are more of a fragmented telling, not like a linear, beat-by-beat story. I read both of these, probably, in college and that was pretty groundbreaking to me. I wanted to evoke that structure because I think it mirrors the way it feels to be freefalling in grief, like [when] you’re going through something like that, there’s no landmarks. I wanted the experience of reading it to feel like you were really absorbed in the swirl of her mind – these lists, these things that she’s remembering to do for her children, I wanted you to be right there with her.

Nikki: What other books or authors inspired Maggie, if any?

Katie: Nora Ephron's Heartburn, it’s also really funny, also really heartbreaking, also a divorce story. [It was] definitely a huge influence, a good roadmap of how to be funny in the face of heartbreak and chaos. And the same thing with Left on Tenth, Delia Ephron’s memoir. It’s ruminating on loss, losing her sister Nora, also getting diagnosed with cancer. You will cry reading this, but there’s also so much heart and humor. Also, I think children’s books are such a fantastic roadmap for how to keep your head up and stay smiling in the face of really hard things. I feel like, when you're a kid that seems to be the moral of every children's book but, when as an adult, we lose that. So I wanted to bring that inspiration [into the book] too.

Nikki: That's so interesting. What are you working on next?

Katie: What a fun question. I don’t want to scare her away just yet and I'm hesitant to call it another novel, but it’s kind of feeling like it might be. This one is also ruminating on love and heartbreak in a different way – I feel like I will always be a little bit preoccupied with love. It’s a well of material to work with there. Yeah, I don't know much about it yet, but it will be another woman just trying to get through. The thing I will say, actually, is that my day job is [working] at the Brooklyn Museum, so I think I’ve gotta use all this knowledge about the secret doors behind the galleries and everything. I have to put that to good use.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.