"The feeling that you’re tumbling forward with each sentence"

A conversation with novelist Rachel Khong, part 1

When I started this newsletter, I wanted to make space for other voices to join me here. So whenever I can, I get on Zoom with someone whose work and mind I admire, and then I transcribe our conversation, which always takes longer than I think it will, and then I bring it to you. Today that someone is the writer Rachel Khong.

I hereby predict that we’re all going to hear and say Rachel’s name a lot in 2024. Her second novel, Real Americans, will be published by Knopf on April 30, and it has been named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by New York Magazine, Today, TIME, LitHub, Kirkus (where it received a coveted star), The Rumpus, and the list goes on. Kirkus calls it “a sweeping exploration of choice, chance, class, race, and genetic engineering in three generations of a Chinese American family. . . . Bold, thoughtful, and delicate at once, addressing life’s biggest questions through artfully crafted scenes and characters.”

I got to read an early copy, and the morning after I finished it, I was still so spellbound that it took me a full twenty minutes to compose a dumb Instagram caption about it. In the interest of not wasting another twenty minutes, I shall now quote myself:

I cannot remember the last time I fell so hard and so fast into a story, or the last time a book held my attention so steadily through every one of its 400 pages. Rachel Khong, this is me shouting it from the rooftops: 📣 REAL AMERICANS IS ASTONISHING 📣 . . . . [W]hat a ride this story is. Three generations of characters and the shrouded and mysterious history that both knits them together and holds them apart — it’s brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. ALSO, nobody writes a better sentence than Rachel Khong. (Rachel, OMG, Lily’s shrimp-cocktail inner monologue at the holiday party — I love you?)

As you’ll see below, we discuss shrimp cocktail at length.

photo by Andria Lo

Rachel Khong’s debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction. It was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR; O, The Oprah Magazine; Vogue; and Esquire. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Cut, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and Tin House. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco's Mission District. She lives in California.

The conversation that follows took place on Zoom on February 7, 2024. It has been edited for clarity and brevity, and I’ve broken it into two parts, the second of which I’ll release next week. All book links are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, like this one:

And to Rachel: thank you.

Molly Wizenberg: Thank you so much for joining me.

Rachel Khong: Thank you so much for doing this. I'm so excited. Also — it's my very first interview about this book. 

MW: Oh my god! Really? I guess we are, like, two and a half months out from your pub date…

RK: We’re two and a half months out, and I’m just so grateful that this is my first interview, because you’re going to help me figure out what I’m gonna say about this book. [Laughs.]

MW: I love this book so much. The whole world is going to love this thing.

RK: Thank you.

MW: I’ve had a lot of fun over the past few days, reading interviews with you from back when Goodbye, Vitamin came out. I noticed that people were constantly asking you about food, even though you were promoting a novel, because you’d previously been a food writer and editor. People always do that to me, too. Of course I love food and have loved writing about it, and of course I’m grateful that my food writing resonated and still resonates, but — what I’m trying to say is, Rachel, I do not want this to be a conversation about food. But, uhhhhhhhh, it happens that the first thing I want to talk about in Real Americans is a passage involving food. [Laughs.] 

But! I bring it up because of how you’ve written it. It’s beguilingly straightforward at the sentence level, but each sentence is just perfect. Not only does the narrator’s consciousness come through in a way that’s quirky and delightful, but I just — this is where I really fell head-first into the story. This book is so propulsive, and this specific spot is where I first thought, I don’t want to stop reading. I love this passage so much that I’ve been teaching it, too. I know it’s kind of a no-no, too, teaching from an uncorrected proof of a book —

RK: I give you my blessing.

MW: So this is from page 10. Lily, the narrator of Part 1, is at her company holiday party. She’s about to meet a crucial character, but first we have this little moment. [MW then proceeds to read the paragraph aloud to RK, as though RK has never encountered it before?! God.]

MW: That is exactly what it’s like to be at a cocktail party eating shrimp cocktail. When you’re writing a scene like this, say – a scene where an important character is going to enter the story but hasn’t quite yet – what guides you as you’re writing from sentence to sentence, deciding what the narrator is going to do, beat by beat?

RK: I love that you brought up that paragraph, because I recently was at a cocktail party and had shoved a shrimp cocktail in my face, and then somebody said hello, and I still had the tail sticking out of my mouth —

MW: Too much flesh.

RK: Too much flesh.

[Both laugh.]

RK: I actually really like shrimp cocktail, despite the fleshiness. This is a thought I borrowed from my husband, who finds them too fleshy. 

I love what you said about the sentences. It’s so gratifying to hear, because I really do think a lot about the sentences. I mean, this is not a book that is “sentencey.” You know what I'm talking about, right — when writers are really working the shit out of every single sentence? I was brought up that way in writing classes, to really pay attention to the sentence. To make every one as dazzling and amazing as possible. But I realized, growing older, that the reading experiences I was drawn to weren’t necessarily that way. Craft went into every sentence in this book, but I wanted the reading experience to be pleasurable: for the sentences to have a feeling of flow, of effortlessness. 

And that propulsion that you’re talking about: that’s what I really wanted to do, going into this book. I didn't really know what I was writing about at all, but I started this in December of 2016, which you can remember was a dark time. And I remember thinking, I want to write something that just sort of swallows you. That’s what I wanted to be reading — not necessarily something escapist, but something that would really immerse you in its world. I wanted a distraction from what was going on in real life. And the sentences serve that. The feeling that you’re tumbling forward with each sentence. That’s what I was going for.

MW: It’s a total pleasure. The details you notice, the way you bring them into the story — it feels true to the experience of having a human brain and moving through the world with it. You create characters who are very smart but also a little bit lost, and that’s so relatable. I was especially interested in the way Lily changes over the course of Part 1. She’s utterly transformed by her romantic relationship, and that transformation is both fast-paced and believable.

RK: What you’re saying about characters, I think about that a lot. What is the character actually thinking about, day to day? With my first novel, well, it’s a sad story — the father has Alzheimer’s; the narrator has been through a breakup — but there’s got to be humor too, because that’s how I experience life. I guess I can think of a handful of moments of pure sadness, but often the sadness is cut with some levity. And happy moments, like a book coming out, can be clouded by fear, vulnerability, disappointment. No emotion is so clean. And we cycle through so many emotions in a single day. I love to see that reflected in fiction, because that's truest to my lived experience.

And a detail like the shrimp cocktail thing, it doesn't actually serve the story. It’s not essential to the plot that [Lily] has this complicated relationship with shrimp cocktail. But we understand people through their very specific reactions to things. And you and I, we care about food, so food is something I’m often thinking about. Shrimp cocktail is something I have personally reflected on on multiple occasions, especially in these lulls during parties, right? It’s important to me not only to have this be a story that's hitting these plot points and getting you from point A to point B, but also to have these full characters who think the way we think and have minds that wander to strange places.

MW: Goodbye, Vitamin is written in the style of a diary. I read somewhere that you wrote it that way because it felt most doable to you, that you didn’t really know how to write a novel, but you know how to write paragraphs. When you started writing Real Americans, did you know you were taking on a project of a more ambitious scale? Did you enter into it with different goals, now that you knew you could write a novel? Had the goalposts moved?

RK: I did know that this book was going to be very different from Goodbye, Vitamin. I knew I wanted it to be longer. I wanted it to be this super immersive book that sort of sucked you away from the world for a while. So it was going to have to be a completely different project from Goodbye, Vitamin, which you can read in one sitting. I guess you could read Real Americans in one sitting, if you have truly nothing else to do, if you just spend the whole day reading, but it’s not really that kind of book. It’s twice as long.

MW: It’s an expansive story.

RK: If I had started out knowing how huge a project it would wind up being, I would have panicked and fainted and never finished it. I sort of tricked myself. The character Lily came to me first. She’s similar to Ruth, the narrator of my first novel, in that she’s a younger Asian American woman. That felt manageable to me, starting with a familiar voice, a voice that connected with you really quickly. That’s how I tricked myself — like, hey, I can do this. Later, when the other characters came in, it was like, Oh, I can do this, too. But then putting it all together was its own project and its own mess. 

Can you remind me of the second question?

MW: Did the goalposts move for you? Like, for instance, I wrote my first book as though it were a series of blog posts, because that was all I knew how to do. I wrote these short chapters, each of which ended with a recipe. It’s like I kept popping up out of the story to get air, because I couldn’t stay under any longer. But with my second book, I wanted to stay in the story for longer stretches. That meant longer chapters, a different rhythm. With Real Americans, did you have different aspirations in terms of structure and complexity?

RK: I definitely did. That’s what makes the work interesting, personally speaking: trying to move those goalposts. How am I changing and evolving, both as a writer and a person? I started writing this book with the full knowledge that I didn't know how to finish it. In 2016, I was not the person who could have finished it. I had to live all of those years in between.

Moving the goalposts was externally motivated, too. When your work is out in the world, people have all sorts of things to say about it. Some people love the diary form. Some people hate it. Some people saw the marketing [for Goodbye, Vitamin, which described the book as funny], and they were like, this book isn’t funny! It’s frustrating to have these expectations projected onto a thing you created. So I both wanted to evolve as a person, as a writer, and there was also a tiny petty part of me that wanted to prove that I could do something different.

I wrote Goodbye, Vitamin in a very different phase of life. I started it in grad school. I was working in restaurants. I was at Lucky Peach. I worked on it very haphazardly, in small snatches of time. The form of the novel reflects that: it’s more episodic and scattered. Writing Real Americans was a daily habit and process. I was an adult when I wrote Goodbye, Vitamin, but Real Americans feels to me like my first adult book. I sat down every day and worked on it, whether it was going well or poorly. The first book felt like a series of flings. This book was a marriage. Sometimes it made me frustrated and annoyed, but other times it was really rewarding, and magical too.

MW: How did you track your progress? Are you the kind of person who sits down and writes from 8am to 1pm? Do you write a thousand words a day?

RK: I love this question. I'm such a nerd about these things. Writing is hard because you're working for so long on a thing that nobody is providing you external validation for. I went from working this job at a magazine where people were emailing me constantly. I had the impression that emails were what made me important. But it was just the opposite.

The work that is important is the work that you really care about, the work that you really want to do. But it often doesn’t feel good while you’re doing it because nobody is telling you, I want this from you. In fact, for years, nobody says anything. It takes years and years of no validation.

I’m a person who, from childhood, for better or worse, cared about gold stars. I cared about accomplishing things to prove that I could. Even as an adult, I love to-do lists. I love checking things off. So I realized that I needed to make writing a thing that I did daily, that I checked off my list, in order to feel at least personally accomplished. So I write every day. Eight to one seems like so many hours to me! I can't do that many hours! But I write every day. I have this system that I developed for myself, which is that I draw a circle. I can show you.

MW: Oh yes, please.

RK: It's so nerdy, but I draw this circle —

MW: Can I take a screenshot?

RK: This is embarrassing —

I’ll tell you what’s embarrassing: my face up there

RK: Okay, let me see what I wrote. Well yeah, I wrote, Wasn't great today! [Laughs.] You can take the screenshot, but it was like, Wasn't great today…

MW: What does the circle mean?

RK: The circles are sections, like wedges of pie. Normally, I divide the circles into six sections, and each represents a half hour of writing. My friend Chanel¹ just gave me this timer, which is amazing.²

It’s called a TIME TIMER

MW: It looks like something out of a ‘50s kitchen.

RK: I set it to half an hour, and it’s this visual tool that helps me mark time. It’s totally silent, though it also has an alarm you can turn on. So I use a timer, and then I fill in a wedge of the circle for each half hour that I write. And once the circle is complete, then I've done my work for the day, and whether or not the writing has gone badly or gone well, whatever, at least I've filled in my circle. I can watch these circles fill up the page and know that I’m doing my work. I have notebooks full of these circles.

MW: So you're aiming for two hours? 

RK: Usually it's three hours. This was a month where I was easing back into writing. Sometimes I just do one hour, and then I divide the circle in half. When I'm really trying to get a lot of work done, I divide it into more wedges. It’s adaptable to whatever amount of work you want to do. [Pauses.] It’s so strange to talk about a book when it’s done. You almost have this amnesia about how it all got done. For me, it’s in these circles.

Another thing I did was, well, halfway into writing the book I read an interview with Ruth Ozeki, a writer I love, and she talked about keeping a process journal. It’s basically a journal of what you’ve worked on each day, or what you’re thinking about or want to keep in mind going forward. I think she formats it like a blog, so the most recent entry is at the top. Once I started doing it, I was kicking myself for not doing it earlier. It’s so helpful to have a record of what you’re thinking about while you’re working on a project. Even being able to look at the journal before going on a walk, or a hike — then you’re out there and you’re thinking, and when you’re done, you’re really excited to get back to your work. I do a lot of my writing while just walking.

MW: I sometimes take a walk and just talk my way into a piece of writing as I go, dictating into the Notes app. It’s such a good feeling, then, coming back to my desk and having some words already in place — and I managed to get a walk, too.

1. Chanel Miller, author of Know My Name, who also happens to have a new book coming out this April, which you should also preorder. Preorders are vital to the life of a book.

2. Of course I had to buy one myself, and it IS very pleasing