"How bonkers the writing process is..."
A conversation with novelist Rachel Khong, part 2
When I started this newsletter, I wanted to make space for other voices to join me here. Whenever I can, I get on Zoom with someone whose work and mind I admire, transcribe our conversation, and then bring it to you. This week and last, that someone is the writer Rachel Khong. Rachel’s second novel Real Americans will be published by Knopf on April 30, 2024. I predict it’s going to be BIG.
You can read Part 1 of our conversation here. I speak for both myself and Rachel when I say how happy we are that you enjoyed it, and that a good number of you preordered Real Americans! All book links below are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, FYI.
I have a feeling you’ll enjoy Part 2 just as much, for its own reasons.
Molly Wizenberg: In an interview about Goodbye, Vitamin, you said that memory is “incredibly crappy material to work with,” that “it leads us to believe that certain things were maybe worse than they were, or that things were better than they were and now we long for them.” Your narrator’s father had Alzheimer’s, so the problem of memory is at the very heart of the story.
When it comes to Real Americans, the story is preoccupied with a different problem: the relationship between choice and luck. In the prologue, a character wonders about her life, “What has she chosen, and what has chosen her?” Later, we see her reflecting on this same problem: “What if we could guide inheritance — make it less about the luck of the draw?” I’m so interested in these questions: what in life do we actually choose, versus what is chosen for us, whether by genetics, or choices our parents made, or something else. At what point in writing did you start to figure out the “aboutness” of this book?
Rachel Khong: First off, I don’t think I know the “aboutness” until, honestly, I’m having this conversation with you.
I think memory is a preoccupation in both books. They’re about people who can’t quite see eye to eye, usually parents and their children, because each has experienced things that the other has not experienced. There’s this disconnect — in their memories, in part. With Goodbye, Vitamin, I was interested in the fact that your parents remember so much about you that you don’t remember about yourself or about them. And you will never know who they were when they were younger. You’re both constrained by that. That’s part of what Real Americans is about, too. It’s about how we can’t fully understand the people we love, because there’s so much context that we’re missing. We can communicate a lot of it, but there’s still so much lived experience that you just can’t know because you haven’t lived it. I took that problem and ran with it in this book, and it became this question: What do we choose? Or, How much agency do we have over our own lives?
RK: Being a person alive today, we’re given this illusion of choice. You can just order stuff online and have it shipped to you. You can choose whether you buy an organic bell pepper or pesticide-y one. It seems like you have all these choices. But at the same time, I think we also feel so bereft of choice. We feel like there are these powers and structures that we have no control over but are dictating our lives. We can protest a war and nothing will happen, because the people in charge aren’t listening to us. I think people have felt that throughout history, but I think I feel it especially now, as a person alive now. I mean, I don’t have anything to compare it to — this is just the time I’m living in — but it’s so interesting to me. What do we actually have control over, and where do we go with that?
How do we become who we are? There are a lot of things that we don’t get to choose, that the system sort of rigs for or against us. We have to make do with how we look, for the most part. But with the options you’re given, what kind of choices are you going to make? That’s what makes you who you are. It’s this combination of things we choose, things we don’t choose — like the families we’re born to — and also decisions that we actually make. It’s such a juicy question to wrestle with.
MW: And you approach it in a multifaceted way. Not only are these characters faced with juicy choices and juicy conflicts, but there’s also this science part of the book, where biotech comes in to offer its own answer to the question.
MW: I’m curious, too, about the sort of magical element of this story, too. There’s this quirky thing that happens with time: all three of the main characters experience instances of time getting stuck or stopping. How did you decide to have a magical element in a story that is otherwise grounded in real-seeming life, in history and science?
RK: The book was always about science, and I did a lot of research and reading into that. But from the beginning, I knew that these characters would experience this weird time quirk. I didn’t know how, though. At first I thought it might be a scientific thing. For a long time, I didn’t know if the book was about physics or biology — physics and time, or biology and DNA. It’s so crazy now to think that I didn’t know for a couple years, but I really didn't!
I knew from the beginning that it had to be about time, because time is something that I think about so much — I mean, [in Part 1] we talked about this timer, and my circle system. I think about time constantly, the way that we measure it, the way that as you get older you have this worry that time is running out. I knew that time would be crucial to the book because [the book’s narrators] all have this same quirk, though they each experience it in different ways. I wanted to grapple with capitalist ideas of what we should be doing with our time, what is the most productive use of our time.
But the magic aspect came very randomly. Four years into writing this book, I still didn’t know what the time thing was about. I didn’t know what the blips were. They were happening throughout the book, but I didn’t know what they were.
MW: That’s so weird.
RK: I know. It's so weird to think that this is the way that this book got written. I just knew that these characters were experiencing this. I struggled so hard to come up with an explanation that related to science. But then I stepped back and realized, Oh, it’s magic. I’m still working through why it has to be there. But it’s an important counterpoint to the scientific way of thinking, to this sort of certainty in human dominion over the earth. The scientific worldview is like, oh, we can figure all this out. We can observe, and do experiments, and we can control nature. That’s exciting. It’s exciting to have gene editing technologies and to cure terrible diseases. But something is lost when we don’t acknowledge that there’s something fundamentally mysterious to being a human being, and to being a creature that’s living on the earth. The magic is [in the story] to insist on the fact that there’s unknowability to being alive.
MW: Listening to you talk about how these time blips started happening without your knowing why, it occurs to me that you had to have such dogged faith! You’re like, Okay, I’m writing this book. I don’t know what it’s about, but time keeps stopping for my main characters. And you have to just keep showing up at your desk and waiting for the story to reveal the reason why the blips are happening. I want to know how it feels to have that faith.
RK: Talking with you about it, it’s so clear how bonkers the whole process is. We write down a sentence and see where it leads. I know other people work differently, but for me, I really don’t know what’s in the future. I’m writing to find out what’s happening.
You know, I said [in Part 1] that I’m this person who likes checking things off the list and feeling accomplished, feeling in control. As a writer, you both are and aren’t in control. You’re putting down words on a page, and you can make them exactly as you want them, to the best of your ability. But there’s also this mystery. It really does feel like this mystical thing, where you’re just showing up and you’re like, Hopefully you’ve got something for me, because otherwise, I don’t know. It’s uncomfortable to not know what’s happening. And there’s nothing more satisfying than getting through that darkness. To have pulled it off.
Weirdly, when I’m talking about this, I feel like I can’t take all the credit, because I do feel a little like there is something mystical, like a disembodied muse or something, out there. I don’t want to take full credit or blame for this book. [Laughs.]
There’s an engagement with mystery that is missing from the way we live now, right? Our world is so empirical, so fact-based. Getting to dip into the mystery every day is really satisfying, even when it sucks.
MW: I often feel resistant to the idea of magic playing a role in writing. There’s this mystical language that we often hear used around writing — the magic of creativity, or whatever. Thinking that way feels unhelpful to me; I mean, magic is not an element of craft. But the truth is, I know exactly what you mean. There’s something absolutely wild about the human brain and language, how they work on one another. On a really good writing day, I feel like I’m an instrument that’s played by language.
RK: I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between a novelist — I mean a human novelist — and an AI novelist. The fact that we have these limited bodies, these bodies that are one day going to die, and we can only sit in front of a computer or at a notebook for a certain number of hours before it’s too exhausting. I’m not a machine. I have to get up. I have to take breaks. I think that’s related to what we're capable of writing — the fact that we're limited, that we can’t remember everything perfectly, that we’re not just riffing on every text we’ve read. We’re actually making our brains, in some way that I don’t actually understand because I know nothing about neuroscience. But our brains choose to remember what they remember. And that informs the rest of our lives — both what we make and how we exist in the world. We’re making meaning by pulling from places and people and texts and art, but it’s such a mystery, all of it.
MW: It’s such a pleasure to talk with you.
RK: Oh, you too.
MW: I have a couple more things that I want to ask you, though I only have childcare for 11 more minutes. First, I loved your acknowledgements. I loved that quote you included from your friend Aku Ammah-Tagoe: “I want to be less afraid of friends’ judgment, and more enthralled by their perspectives.”
RK: I love that too.
MW: Tell me about the role that other writers play in your work. I know you’re part of, or have been part of, a writing group.
RK: With this book, especially, it was so important to me to have community around it, and to, like Aku was saying, not worry about being judged. [Worrying about being judged] is my default, honestly. [I wanted] to be more open and interested in what my friends have to say. To operate more from a place of openness and less from a place of fear.
With novels, I have to keep them pretty close for a long time, because I’m figuring out what they’re even about. It’s a fragile situation. You don’t want to let in too many voices. So I didn’t show this book to anyone until, I don’t know, maybe the tenth draft. But then I sent it to a lot of people, got a lot of feedback. I have a writing group who I’d share short stories with, and with this novel, I emailed my writing group and said, “Guys, can you just read this whole novel?” They all agreed to read it, and their feedback was so valuable. My friends are so talented. I want to know what they think.
It’s so generous, when your friends are willing to read your work. That American myth, right, that you’re an individual, that we’re all just going about our lives alone — it’s a myth. Other people are so important.
It’s a real project for me, learning how to not be so afraid of what people think. To just ask. That’s a perspective that I want to take, going forward. With my first book, I was so afraid to show anybody that I didn’t even show my husband until the book had been sold. I think an edit had even been done! I had been working on it in secret for so long, and it felt so vulnerable. I’m ready to let that go now. I mean, yes, this book is something that I’ve worked really fucking hard on, and I will be crushed if you hate it. I understand that not everybody is going to like it, but I also understand that some people will. It’ll really mean something to some people, and that’s what matters to me — that the book finds those people. I think everyone has had that feeling of a book coming to you when you needed it most. If this book can find people in that moment, cool.
MW: Last question: are there particular books, from any point in your life, that helped you believe that Real Americans was possible? Maybe this is a hard question. I can never remember what I’ve read, not even what I’ve read recently…
RK: Okay, yeah, this is a hard question. [Laughs.] Well, when we were talking earlier about immersiveness and propulsiveness, I was thinking about Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series. And I read A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki, while writing this book, and I thought, Okay, she’s doing this similarly weird thing! This can happen for me. I also read a lot of Ishiguro, like Never Let Me Go and some of his earlier work, melding science fiction and real characters, that thing he does so well. It was very helpful.
MW: I cannot wait for people to read this book. What you said about why you wrote it, about wanting to be immersed — it’s going to do that for people. It’s going to bring them so much pleasure. And it’s going to make them think. That’s a gorgeous thing. Thank you.
RK: Thank you.