What Else?: A conversation with Katie Yee
Rolling out her debut novel
While interning at Grove Atlantic in 2019, I spent most of my time standing in the mailroom, sending packages.
Sometimes, I would distract myself with podcasts. I once jammed out to the Mamma Mia soundtrack until the Publisher walked in on me in the middle of lip-syncing a high note, using a tape gun as a microphone. Most of the time, though, I eavesdropped on conversations happening in the nearby Literary Hub offices.
One of the most comedic voices at the center of these talks was Katie Yee. Not only was Katie smart and good at her craft, she was also genuinely cool and nice. She easily made friends with everyone in the office. As did her dog Ollie, who came into work around the holidays donning a festive sweater. I spent half my time wanting to get to know her better, and the other half wishing I could be more like her.
Katie went on from LitHub to earn numerous prestigious writing fellowships as well as have credits in top literary journals. Now, she’s gearing up to release her first book Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar. The novel follows a Chinese American woman whose life implodes when she gets the one-two punch news that not only is her husband leaving her for another woman, she also has breast cancer. Both problems take on the name of Maggie. Despite its bleak plot points, the slim narrative is every bit as charming as Katie herself. With Nora Ephron-esque hilarity, Katie has the narrator cope with heartache by turning as many elements as tasteful into something humorous, while still rendering motherhood, friendship, and fear with tenderness.
Ahead of Maggie’s publication, I spoke with Katie about how she spends her time when not reading and writing. The answers might surprise you, precisely as she intends.
What is something you do for yourself that is completely unrelated to writing?
I picked up roller skating during the pandemic. I saw someone doing it on Tiktok and thought it looked like a lot of fun. I’m not an athletic person. There is no athletic ability in my body. I didn’t do any sports growing up and in gym class I was absolutely picked last for everything. It’s definitely a new physical challenge to put myself out there in this way.
I’m the Mia Thermopolis of athletic things: I don’t like team sports but I’m okay in solo activities. Why did roller skating speak to you?
I like dancing with friends, and this looked to me like the best combination of exercise and dancing. My boyfriend is a runner. That looks draining. There’s no way you’re running and not thinking, “When will this exercise be over?” Roller skating instead looked fun. How do you learn this trick? Like you’re a dog.
It’s funny you bring up group sports versus individual activities because I’m totally like you. If I were ever to do some kind of group sport, I would be the bane of everyone’s existence. Roller skating was just me outside, falling on my ass and laughing hysterically. I did manage to convince my friends to buy roller skates during the pandemic. My algorithm also started to feed me a lot of roller skating videos. You can watch other people do it and talk you through the moves.
Is that how you learned? Through watching videos? Does Roller Skating for Dummies exist?
That definitely exists, and even in my neighborhood people started coming up to me and saying they worked at skate schools. I never made it to any of those classes, but it was interesting to learn they’re out there.
I learned the bulk online. There is one woman in Long Beach, California named Dirty Deborah Harry and she has the Dirty School of Skate. She calls herself a third generation roller skater. She really breaks down all the moves and also talks about how she wasn’t athletic growing up and this is just something she loves to do. I practiced at this playground at a nearby school. They have these basketball courts with a smooth, squishy ground material that’s nice to skate on. I would just go really early in order not to disrupt any basketball games planned. There were a couple of girls who I met there who’d also picked up skating. I haven’t seen them in a while, but we were learning tips and tricks from each other.
I feel like writers tend to be a little bit Type A and don’t want to do things they’re not good at. Does this resonate with you?
I think that’s been part of the joy for me: learning how to be bad at something, trying something new, surprising myself. My friend Joseph—who’s also a writer and works in publishing—we were having a chat the other day, both wondering if we needed more interesting hobbies. I feel like the only things I do are go to work and type emails; come home and read; talk about books and think about books; write. I sometimes fear I’m a one trick pony.
What makes roller skating really fun is that it’s unexpected. I’m not good at it. I’m horrible. I remember very early on in my attempts to learn, I had the whole nine yards of protective gear. A shiny new pink helmet, wrist guards, elbow pads, knee pads. I should’ve taped a pillow to my butt. And I remember there was this little girl who was watching me fall, then she looked up at me and said, “You can do it! Keep trying!” It was very sweet, very humbling.
The other thing, too, have you seen online the whole office chair butt thing?
Please enlighten me.
Basically it just means you’re sitting too much. Writing, at least for me, is not very physical. I sit so still that if I were to be in a room with a motion light detector, the lights would be off. I’m not very good at being in my body. Writing is nice because it allows me to live more in my mind than in my body. And roller skating is good because it’s all body.
Do you have to be in one place to write?
I kind of have to be at home. My boyfriend is the exact opposite. He can’t write at home because he gets too distracted, but I need to be surrounded by all of my things, my Post-Its. My other books that I love. Sometimes I’ll sit on the couch or in this hot pink chair that I inherited from my cousin. Sometimes I’ll switch it up and have a blanket and be very cozy. But mostly I have to be at home. I have to “enjoy my rent,” as I say.
Also, unlike writing, I feel like roller skating is really fun because you can see your progress. With writing, you can sit down for hours and maybe you’ll only have deleted things. Whereas there is something fun about going out and seeing you’re better at a certain trick or you can balance on one leg. There’s something tangible that is really satisfying.
Last month, Kristina Forest and I talked about how we’re both super Type A writers. I find deleting things, like cleaning up a chapter with too many repetitive words, as productive as meeting a word count goal. Would either be satisfying to you?
I’m definitely not a disciplined writer. I don’t work to a word count. As you’ll see, my book is teeny tiny. I think it was T Kira Madden who said she’ll write until she hits three surprises. Whether that’s unfurling a sentence in a surprising way or something happens on the page she didn’t plan on. I’ve kind of taken that sense of discipline.
I like that.
Also, we should totally go roller skating together!
Oh my god, Katie. I will break something.
No! We’ll go really slow. I’ll bring a pillow and tape it to your butt. It’ll be fun!
Oy… Do you have any other activities you do that are unrelated to writing?
My boyfriend and I watch films together. My full name is Katherine Lauren. My mom named me after her two favorite actresses: Katherine Hepburn and Lauren Bacall. Growing up, I didn’t know who these people were, but in college I thought I should watch all the movies these women were in that my mother loved enough to name her first born child after them. I’m now deeply obsessed, with Katherine Hepburn especially. I’m trying to watch all her movies.
At some point, my boyfriend gave me a projector for Christmas. We’re both pretty against having a TV. We think they’re ugly and New York apartments are so small. Plus, the projector made movie night feel fun and special, not just like we’re turning on Friends for the millionth time. It seems like more of an event, having a movie screening.
As someone who used to work with Andrew and constantly had to endure West Wing references, it’s surprising that he doesn’t have a television.
It’s not like we don’t watch TV. We just do it on our laptops, like college students. It’s uncomfortable enough to watch something on a little screen so then you’ll do a couple of episodes and be done. It dissuades the binge watching.
The way I know I’m secretly an old person is that certain activities have to happen on certain screen sizes.
Like buying plane tickets?
Buying a flight on your phone is crazy. And things over fifteen minutes should be watched on a big screen.
In a way, we’re giving all of these movies the most respect because we’re giving them the biggest screen by projecting them onto the wall!
Fair enough. How do you decide what to watch?
We’re pretty omnivorous consumers. I think we have a good overlap of tastes.I love rom-coms and old romance movies more than anything. Andrew likes Westerns. Noir is the middle of the diagram there. You have your femme fatales, but also murder and questioning of the American dream. It’s the perfect in between.
We usually take turns picking movies. We’re very influenced by friends or colleagues. I only just downloaded Letterboxd, so now hopefully that’ll be a better way of keeping track of what we’re watching and getting recommendations.
Does watching movies connect at all to your writing?
You know the Radiolab thing about aphantasia? Close your eyes, picture an apple… I don’t think I have complete aphantasia. The whole thing when movie adaptations get made and people get upset because the casting isn’t what they imagined didn’t make sense to me until recently. I’m jealous of the people who can do this. But reading and watching movies are very different to me because I do not have a cinematic experience of any book that I’ve read. I don’t picture things when I’m reading. If there’s a long description of nature with a tree and a lake, I would really have to stop and force myself to picture something. Then I can’t hold that image. People don’t understand how I conceived of a place when writing. Some of my friends even say they feel cheated because they could picture scenes and characters in the book really clearly, so it’s kind of weird that I can’t.
We’re right around the corner from your debut being out in the world. How are you feeling?
I feel like the luckiest girl in the world. I’m mostly a short story writer, or at least I thought I was, so this book started out as a short story. And I guess much like I was talking about with roller skating, I wanted a fun, little challenge.
Most of my short stories involve magical realism. They dip into the surreal and break the rules of the real world. When I started this as a short story, I gave myself the challenge that nothing could be outside the bounds of our earth. I was curious what I would reach for in the places where I might have pulled in some sort of magical element, and the thing I went for instead was humor and voice.
Did writing something rooted in reality feel limiting or exciting?
A lot of times people expect a first novel to be autofiction. I’ve had the experience where someone has read the galley and will be like, “Oh, you wrote this?” I’m much younger than they think. I’m not a mother. I’m not divorced. But maybe this is praise for the voice, and also speaks to what we expect from debut writers.
The facts of the story did not happen to me, but there’s a lot that’s very lived in. The novel deals with breast cancer which runs in my family. I’ve spent a lot of time in hospital waiting rooms. Similarly, the characters were so fun to write. I’ve poured bits and pieces of all my best friends into so many of them.
I really like the way you write about children. As someone who is also fairly young and not a parent, I’ve struggled to capture that.
The kids in the book really came as a surprise to me. This story became more of a novel length project during the pandemic. In New York, there was all this violence happening against Asian Americans, and I was thinking about how in the city—my hometown where I’ve always felt so safe—what would happen if I were to have a child who even looked half like me, who I couldn’t protect from racism and all these horrific things. The other thing was as I entered my late twenties and moved in with my boyfriend, a lot of people started asking me about my plans for children.
Writing this book was really an exercise in envisioning what it would be like to have kids. Not just does it hurt to give birth, but what would it be like to sit down at the kitchen table and check their homework? I really wanted to slow down and imagine the daily life of motherhood in all its hopes and fears. But of course I feel a lot of imposter syndrome about it. I know moms. I’ve talked to mothers. I’ve researched to the best of my ability, but not being a mother myself, I was nervous. My mom read it and she said, “I think it’s so interesting that the siblings don’t fight nearly as much as you and your brother did.”
Do you think your next book will be a novel or a collection?
That’s so hard. Everyone says that story collections don’t sell. Not that that’s the only reason you’d want to put one into the world. Though after finishing this, I’m finding it harder to return to short stories. I’m working on maybe another novel.
When I wrote nonfiction, I hated labels, so I’d just call my work “Burt.”
Burt! Love that. I do think this one might be a little more magical. The challenge in making a novel length magical project is how long can you strain against the suspense of disbelief. I think that’s my new challenge to myself.
Katie Yee is a writer from Brooklyn. She has received fellowships from the Center for Fiction, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and Kundiman. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, No Tokens, The Believer, the Washington Square Review, Triangle House, Epiphany, and Literary Hub. By day, she works at the Brooklyn Museum. By night, she writes, usually under the watch of her judgmental rescue dog, Ollie.
Rachel’s Weekly Recs:
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As Pride Month winds down, I’ve been reading Anita Kelly’s Love & Other Disasters, about two chefs who meet on a competitive cooking show. It’s deliciously spicy, both in the dishes the contestants make and in the intimate scenes.
Writer Jess Cartner-Morley penned an interesting piece for The Guardian about the resurgence of boobs in American culture. It’s both fascinating to learn their history, and horrifying to think about the forces behind big busts being back in.