Shiny New Objects: An Interview with Rachel Khong
Interview conducted by James Davis
I first met Rachel Khong in August 2008. We had both just moved to Gainesville, Florida, to study in the MFA program at the University of Florida, she in fiction, I in poetry. The “Yale” next to her name in our First-Year Welcome Packet intimidated me, but my fear dissipated the instant she sent me an email with the subject line “are you going” and a body that read, simply, “karaoke-bowling?” And karaoke-bowling we went, at the aptly named Alley Gatorz. Over the next three years, we would read, eat, drink, play, and work together on what would become our first books. Rachel was not only one of the most talented writers in our cohort; she was also one of the friendliest, funniest, and most welcoming. She cooked me the best eggplant parmesan I’ve ever had. I count my three years in Gainesville among the best of my life largely due to her proximity. She lifted those around her. I have cherished our friendship ever since.
We’re both in new cities (she in Los Angeles, I in Denton, Texas) as her second novel, Real Americans, awaits publication on April 30. To tell the truth, I was such a fan of her debut, Goodbye, Vitamin, that I was a bit dubious of the newcomer. But I was not disappointed. The tone of RA is different from that of GV, but Rachel’s tenderness, humor, wisdom, and inexhaustible curiosity about human behavior are more evident than ever before. RA seems to do what a second novel should, showcasing the author’s established talents while raising the stakes. As I work on my second book, I was eager to ask Rachel some questions about hers.
James Davis: You and Knopf were kind enough to send me a proof of Real Americans in the fall, and one of the first things I messaged you when I got it in the mail was, “It’s so big!” Your response was, “It was even bigger,” and then the see-no-evil monkey emoji. How big was it? Could you talk a little bit about the winnowing?
Rachel Khong: The book was 150,000 words at the time I went on submission with it and my editor bought it. If I hadn’t cut anything, that would have been 100 more pages! There are even more deleted pages beyond that. When I began this novel I knew that I wanted it to be longer than my first; I wanted the challenge of writing a book that felt immersive, that sustained your attention. With my first book I was interested in writing a book that you could experience in one sitting, and with this one I wanted to write something that you had to put down and be excited about coming back to. When I’m writing I don’t know where I’m going; I don’t work from an outline, or have a plan. So a lot of what I wrote was just an effort to get to know the characters better, to put them in hard situations to see how they might react. Some of those scenes made it into the book while others didn’t. The deleted scenes informed who the characters are. The readers don’t necessarily need to experience them, but I do, as the writer. I’ve come to accept that that’s how I write. For every document I have another document that says “cut from document,” where I copy/paste all the things I’ve cut. It feels better to put them in this separate graveyard doc than to just press delete.
JD: As a poet, I feel gratified that you began Real Americans with an epigraph from Cameron Awkward-Rich’s prose poem, “Meditations in an Emergency”: “Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming.” I know you are an avid reader of poems, as well as fiction. How does poetry inform your work besides the content of this epigraph? How do you think your work would be different if poems weren’t occupying space in your head?
RK: Like many people, I read poetry in school and was taught that there was a “right” way to read it. I found my way back to it as an adult, even though there was some residual fear of “doing it wrong.” But the pleasure outweighed that. Poets pay so much attention to language, which is itself this imperfect medium. Poets are often capturing or gesturing at things that can’t be put into words. I care a lot about “efficiency” in writing. Well, that’s not exactly the right word—too utilitarian. Maybe “elegance” is what I mean. When someone is saying something interesting using the fewest number of words necessary. Novel writing falls somewhere in between nonfiction and poetry: even when it’s narrative, it can’t be completely straightforward or it will lack magic. Not to say that poetry is always magic; it’s also a craft, something that’s worked at. But a good poem feels like it was always that way, that it could not exist in any other way. And I think that’s what I’m striving for in my fiction writing. Reading “Meditations in an Emergency” partway through writing this book, something clicked. This book is so much about American myths, and the ways those myths shape lives for better and worse. “Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming” felt like the perfect epigraph.
JD: One of the biggest differences, besides length, between your first novel and RA is the latter’s inclusion of multiple narrators: Lily, Nick (Lily’s son), and May (Lily’s mother). How challenging was this polyvocalism? What sort of “rules” (for lack of a better word) did you come up with to keep the three narrators separate?
RK: It’s weird, it wasn’t even really a conscious effort on my part to decide here’s how Lily will speak, here’s how Nick will speak, here’s how May will speak. The characters came to me with their exact voices, and I understood them on a subconscious level. I did consider what kind of language each character would use based on their upbringings. Nick gets some of my favorite descriptions because he is a boy growing up on an isolated island surrounded by the natural world. Even if he’s resisted many aspects of his upbringing, he’s steeped in the beauty, and can’t help but notice it.
JD: I find it really interesting how a TV becomes a sort of gateway in this book, a way of bonding Matthew (the rich white blond boy) to Lily (the Chinese-American middle-class girl). Later, the TV is replaced (more or less) by an iPod. What role do entertainment technologies like these play in the “institution of dreaming”?
RK: I love this question. Technology shapes all of our lives and yet it feels so hard to grasp the ways in which it changes us. The scene with the TV at the beginning of the book was one of the very first scenes I wrote. Later in the book, Lily forbids her son, Nick, from using screens; they don’t even have wi-fi in the house. We’re surrounded by screens. I’m typing this onto a screen right now. Yet we never really consented to it! Social media is so present in our lives in a way that it didn’t used to be, and that is changing who we are as people. We can’t really understand those changes yet. But I wanted to at least call attention to it, raise this question.
The institution of dreaming is such a rich phrase. “Dreaming” doesn’t seem capable of being institutionalized and yet it has been, by America, which either takes lots of nice ideas too far, or doesn’t realize them completely. “Justice” is a really nice idea, for example, but at the present moment our justice system heavily favors the already privileged and continues to harm the perpetually harmed. What happens when you institutionalize dreaming, and technology is part of that dream? I think a lot of people are harmed in the name of “progress.”
JD: Is Second Novel Syndrome a real thing? If so, how did it manifest while writing RA? If not, why do people say it is?
RK: Very few people knew that I was writing my first novel. There were pros and cons to that of course. A pro was that there were no external expectations. It was more about me proving to myself that I could do what I set out to do. In many ways, that hasn’t changed. Writing is always about me proving something to myself. It’s about exploring questions that obsess me. With Real Americans, there were expectations. Other people knew I was working on a second book, and that it was taking forever. So there was some pressure there. I felt some nervousness about disappointing the readers who’d loved Goodbye, Vitamin and expected something similar. But there was no way I was ever going to write Goodbye, Vitamin, the sequel. That wasn’t interesting to me. I never want to do the same thing twice. Having written this novel feels freeing. It really was the best that I could do. And I’m excited to write the third novel, which will be completely different, too.
JD: One of the concerns in the novel that really stuck with me is the ownership of time. Stan describes art collection as the rich’s attempt to possess the hours the artist spent making their work. Later in Part 1, Lily deconstructs the phrase “to take a moment” and its implication that time could belong solely to one person. In English, we spend time and waste it; there’s a strong connection between time and commodity and property. Have you thought about this ownership in relation to Real Americans and the six years it took you to write? Who owns that time?
RK: I was constantly thinking about time while writing this book. I think about time a lot, period. In part because when writing I’m always bumping up against the limits of time; I’m always impatient to finish. I constantly feel like there aren’t enough hours in a day. I was raised to believe in the importance of not wasting one’s time, of “spending” time wisely. In America especially we have all this language that refers to time like a currency, as you mentioned. Time as a resource. In America we also value youth and beauty—that’s something that time takes away. I think when we saw each other recently we commiserated about aging. Time does wreak havoc! It’s something that’s so entwined with capitalism, where your hours belong to whoever or whatever you’re laboring for. With the book I was trying to ask myself: Is this how I really want to view time? In this antagonistic way, like I’m in a race against it? I guess I’m trying to orient more toward a different conception of time. I want to orient away from hoarding my hours. I’m more curious about what it would be like to just accept its passing; to share time with people, and see what might emerge from that. As a result of being so time-oriented I think I’ve lived so much of my life in the past or in the future (like May does!). I want to shift to a way of existing that’s more oriented toward the present.
JD: What words of advice and/or encouragement do you have for authors out there who are working on their second books and finding it challenging in ways they didn’t expect?
RK: It seems so obvious, but something I learned with this book is that writing is an act of devotion. It requires time and patience and faith. At its best, the act of writing changes you as a person, so it helps to be curious about that change. Living in capitalism, we are so oriented toward the shiny new object, like the hardcover book that can be purchased. But writing is about what happens in the less glamorous hours. It’s about dailiness, commitment, turning thoughts over and over in your head. There’s something so rewarding about doing hard things, about coming up against our limits and then trying to push beyond them. My main piece of encouragement is that if the writing feels hard, you’re doing it right. Don’t give up.
James Davis serves as editor-in-chief of American Literary Review. His debut poetry collection, Club Q, won the Anthony Hecht Prize. His poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Five Points, The Hopkins Review, The Sewanee Review, and DIAGRAM. He is a Voertman-Ardoin Teaching Fellow at the University of North Texas, where he will graduate with his PhD in literature and creative writing in May 2024.