Beach Reads Week: Katie Yee's Heartbreak Novel

We continue our week of beach reads with a debut novel from Katie Yee, called Maggie: Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. The story follows a woman who finds out her husband has been having an affair with a woman named Maggie... and that she has also been diagnosed with cancer. Yee discusses the novel, which is out on July 22, and will be speaking on 'pub day' at Yu and Me Bookstore at the NYPL Chatham Square Branch, and on July 24 with Books Are Magic at the Melissa Joy Manning Jewelry Store.

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We're continuing our week of beach reads with a debut novel that could even count toward your summer reading challenge. There are two Maggie's in the novel from local author Katie Yee. One is the woman the protagonist's husband has been having an affair with, and the other is a cancerous tumor. So it's fitting that the title of the novel is, Maggie: Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. The story follows a young mom, married with two kids. She is blindsided by her husband's revelation that he's fallen in love with another woman and that their marriage is over.

In the midst of this heartbreak, our protagonist receives another shock. She's diagnosed with breast cancer. She names her tumor Maggie, after the woman her husband has left her for. The novel follows the moment of transition as one woman figures out how to push through in the face of life changing circumstances. By day, Katie Yee, she works for the Brooklyn Museum. Maggie: Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar, will be out on July 22nd. On the 22nd, Katie will be speaking at the NYPL Chatham Square branch with Yu & Me Books.

On July 24th, she'll be at a special BFF night with Books Are Magic at the Melissa Joy Manning jewelry bookstore. That's important. We'll get to it in a moment. It is really nice to talk to you, Katie.

Katie Yee: It's really nice to be here, Alison. Can I just say, I'm such a huge fan of the show. I feel like it's so wild to meet you, because I've been listening to your voice, keep me company on like lunchtime walks and just in my living room. So it's a pleasure to be here.

Alison Stewart: It is nice to keep you company as well. I read that you started working on this novel really in a serious way during COVID.

Katie Yee: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What was it about that time that motivated you to work on a novel?

Katie Yee: I think we all picked up some interesting hobbies during that time. I also started roller skating, but that's like a whole other story.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Katie Yee: I've always wanted to be a writer, though. I, before this, had considered myself only a short story writer. I started this novel probably as a short story, just before the pandemic, but I just kept coming back to it time and time again. Eventually, she just kind of got too big and rolled away from me and became this novel.

Alison Stewart: Well, you also have a job job at the Brooklyn Museum. [chuckles]

Katie Yee: I do.

Alison Stewart: How does being around all that visual art inspire your writing?

Katie Yee: This is a fantastic question. Have you-- I'm going to go on a little bit of-

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Katie Yee: -a tangent here, so forgive me, but have you heard that Radiolab episode about aphantasia?

Alison Stewart: No.

Katie Yee: Okay. There is this whole thing. Listeners, bear with me. Close your eyes for a second, not if you're driving, but if you're able to close your eyes, close your eyes and picture an apple. You got it? Okay. Open your eyes. Can you describe your apple to me?

Alison Stewart: It's red.

Katie Yee: Okay. Okay. The crux of the episode is just that whether or not you can have like a mental image is kind of a broad spectrum. Some people can really see things in general, and also when they read, they can picture the scenes and picture the characters, and some people can't. I feel like I kind of fall on that other end of it. So it's really lovely to be around art all the time and around this visual medium when, for me personally, I'm so focused mostly on the words and like the language and the sound.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's so interesting.

Katie Yee: It's changed for me in the past couple of years, as you can imagine.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Before our narrator in this book has dinner with her husband, what would she say the state of the marriage is? How did she think things were going?

Katie Yee: She was really happy. I think that's the sad part. She was really, really happy in her marriage. As you mentioned, she's got two young kids, and I think she just thought her life was kind of set. I will say that the novel opens with her kind of watching her husband tell her children this bedtime story, and she's noticing that he's kind of mixing up all the characters in these different fairy tales.

I think, if anything, there was a little bit of a moment of jealousy, where she kind of watches her children laugh with him in a way that they don't really do with her. This kind of sets her off on this journey of trying to really understand her kids' sense of humor. Aside from that, I would say she thought that the marriage was good.

Alison Stewart: We're going to ask you to read a little bit from the book. This is the moment that our narrator finds out about her husband's affair. This is Katie Yee reading from Maggie: Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar.

Katie Yee: When my husband told me about Maggie, we were out kidless at a nice Indian restaurant. I should have known something was up, but the restaurant we were at was actually an all-you-can-eat buffet, so one can imagine the excitement that blinded me. The plates they give you at those things are never as large as you want them to be. They trust that you will not want to get up and down and pace around the buffet table so much, but I requested we get the table right in front of it. "So we'll see when they replenish the samosas," I said to my husband, who simply shook his head but sat down across from me the way he always had.

He laid the red linen napkin across his lap, which reminded me to do the same. My husband, always the man with the good manners. When we first moved in together, with no furniture to speak of, we sat on the hardwood floor and ordered Papa Johns. I remember he laid a tiny paper napkin across his knee with a great flourish that night, and I remember remembering that moment at the restaurant. Funny, isn't it? The things that stick. The first part of the evening was marvelous. An all-you-can-eat buffet, a place of possibility. I gorged on garlic naan and saag paneer. We drank creamy mango lassis out of stout goblets.

Having the table near the buffet meant we got a lot of foot traffic. This, of course, made it incredibly awkward when my husband finally said what it was that he wanted to say. I remember thinking he had been eyeing the buffet line with a rare intensity all evening. At first I thought he was just eager to get his second fill when the line was shortest. In hindsight, I think he was timing it such that no one would be within earshot when he said it. I had been in a good mood that day on account of the surprise fancy dinner. "Don't get too excited. It's not that nice," Sam had said, when I was opening the door and making little exclamations of joy.

When I was growing up, my family didn't eat out at restaurants much, and there are some things you never grow out of. I was yammering on about some gossip from the PTA, a very minor treasury scandal that isn't worth dwelling on. Then I guess my husband saw his moment. A clearing of the cars, a log to float on, and said it. Four little words. "I'm having an affair."

Alison Stewart: That's Katie Yee reading from her book, Maggie: Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. Okay, first of all, why did you want to have a conversation at an Indian food buffet?

Katie Yee: Do you want to know the internal logic answer-

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Katie Yee: -or like the real life?

Alison Stewart: Both.

Katie Yee: Okay. I think within the logic of the book, I think for Sam, he's kind of obsessed with this idea of being the good guy. Right?

Alison Stewart: Good guy. Right?

Katie Yee: He wanted to give her one last beautiful date at this restaurant that clearly, she was having a really good time at. In real life, I had wanted to order Indian food. I was hungry. My boyfriend was not home that night, and I was like, "This will be my special treat. I'll eat this food and I'll write the scene." That's really where the samosas came in.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: It's interesting you said that he wanted her to have one last beautiful night. That seems to be a theme that comes up in the book. That he wants to have one last time with the kids. One more beautiful thing. I think that speaks to his character a lot in this book.

Katie Yee: Definitely. Well, and this is something that she's also preoccupied with, that I think we all kind of are like, thinking about the way that we tell ourselves certain stories. Right?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Katie Yee: The way that some of us might always be thinking about the way things might end, the way that you might continue dating someone a little longer than you should just because the meet cute story. Right? The origin story was so good. Yes, I think we all have this preoccupation with kind of crafting the story of our own lives in an interesting way.

Alison Stewart: Is this why she doesn't necessarily fight over the marriage? Is this why she's like, "That's not going to be in my story. I'm not going to fight this woman to the death for this man."

Katie Yee: I think he makes it clear, at the beginning, when he tells her that he's sorry, but he's not asking for her forgiveness. Right? I think to her, I mean, she kind of retreats internally and she says, "You know what? Fine." Right? "You've made your decision, I'm going to make mine." Then she has this whole other huge life event to deal with. Right? She's diagnosed with breast cancer shortly thereafter, and she makes this very conscious choice not to tell him about the illness, because he's no longer part of her story in that way. I think that there can be something really powerful about reclaiming your own story that way.

Alison Stewart: How did breast cancer enter the story? Was that always going to be a part of it? Was that always going to be part of the end result of the book?

Katie Yee: Yes. I mean, on a personal note, and sorry to get so dour, but breast cancer runs in my family. It's something that my grandmother and mother have both had and lived through. So, I think for a long time, I had been trying to write about breast cancer.

Alison Stewart: How interesting.

Katie Yee: The way that I understand the world has so much to do with what I put on the page. I think I'd been trying and failing to write about this thing that runs through my family. I think actually, when it was a short story, they started out as very different elements, right? There was like divorce, maybe there was like another story that had to do with cancer. The kids weren't even really part of it when it was a short story, but in this narrator, I felt that I had created someone who was resilient and fun and could be funny. I wanted to lovingly kind of throw as much at her as I could and see what she could do with it.

Alison Stewart: This might sound odd, but-

Katie Yee: Yes.

Alison Stewart: -how does having cancer affect the way she processes grieving her marriage?

Katie Yee: I think it really puts a lot of things into perspective. I mean, she names the tumor after his lover as kind of a way to be like, "You have your Maggie, I can have mine. You have your secrets, and I have mine." Yes, I think it kind of puts things to scale.

Alison Stewart: We're talking with Katie Yee. Her book is titled, Maggie: Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. It's her debut novel. We don't learn a lot about Maggie. We learn that she's blonde.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: She goes looking for her on LinkedIn. Why didn't you want to go into more detail about Maggie?

Katie Yee: Yes. This wasn't Maggie's story. I feel like you could maybe say the same thing about Sam. Even her husband. He's in the novel, and I guess he's as close as you can get to a "villain character." I didn't want to make them too flat, but I also wanted to kind of honor the space that she wanted to take up in her own story. I mean, you don't really see much of Maggie and not terribly too much of Sam either.

Alison Stewart: Why did you choose to name her Maggie?

Katie Yee: [chuckles] I am horrible at naming characters. The honest answer is I was listening to a lot of Maggie Rogers, who I love. Saw her in a concert when she was here in New York City, but I think it's important to give even your "villain characters" traits of people that you love, as a way to not completely vilify them and flatten them. That's honestly probably where the name came from.

Alison Stewart: As I said, I mentioned that she's blonde. They realize that her husband that is leaving, Sam is leaving for a white woman. How does our narrator feel about that fact?

Katie Yee: I think that's so hard, right? I mean, on the one hand, we've probably all experienced a kind of heartbreak. Maybe you've been left for someone else, maybe there was an affair, maybe you're looking at the person that your person is dating right after you, and you're wondering-- you're trying to parse out, like, what is it about them? What do they have that I don't have? I mean, honestly, there's no way that race doesn't come up a little bit in our narrator's mind. She's Chinese American, her husband is white, and of course, it's something that she thinks about.

Alison Stewart: What emotions does it bring up for her?

Katie Yee: I mean, a little bit of jealousy, a little bit about-- I think it makes her revisit their story a little bit. Right? I think she's sort of like, "Does he feel like he made the wrong choice?" Class is also a little bit of a question mark here. Where her husband, Sam, has grown up in this rather wealthy family, and I think our narrator is kind of looking towards Maggie, and she's like, "Did Sam really mean to end up with a woman that was a little bit more like him?"

Some people, I think, they think of relationships as finding someone who will-- the perfect last puzzle piece that'll fit into their lives, and some people look at them as doors that'll open up whole other worlds. I think that's what our narrator was hoping that their marriage was.

Alison Stewart: Yes, Sam kind of goes through the world with a certain amount of ease.

Katie Yee: Yes.

Alison Stewart: I mentioned the BFF event you're having, because friendship is a really big part of this book. Darlene is her friend. She's a little bit of ride or die.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: What did you want to explore about the power of friendship?

Katie Yee: I have read and loved so many divorce novels, that the whole time I'm reading them, though, I'm like, "But where is this girl's best friend?"

Alison Stewart: Where is she?

Katie Yee: Where is she? I'm incredibly lucky. I have never had to go through anything truly terrible in life all alone. I have so many best friends who I can lean on, and I've put bits and pieces of all of them into Darlene. So she was by far the most fun character to write.

Alison Stewart: She was the most fun?

Katie Yee: Definitely.

Alison Stewart: Nice. A big part of the novel, it's about the myths and the fairy tales that the narrator tells her children at night. Why did you want to include these classic folktales in your story?

Katie Yee: I love Greek mythology. My own mother was a classics major, so she told me a lot of Greek myths growing up. With that, I also heard a lot of Chinese myths from my mom and my grandmother when I was growing up. I hadn't seen so much of that on the page in a lot of books I was reading. Even when I was trying to research different Chinese myths, I was having a hard time tracking some of them down. So a lot of the ones that you'll read here in this book are just from my mom and from my grandmother and the way that they told it to me, and the way that I remember them.

Alison Stewart: Which one really stays with you? Which story?

Katie Yee: That's a really good question. I don't know that we have time for like the really, really long one, but one in particular that I'm thinking of, I was standing in the driveway when I was a kid, and there was a full moon that had all these kind of speckles on it. My grandmother was with me and she said, "You know, the Chinese believe that there's a tree on the moon and that that's kind of where the shadows come in." So I did a little bit of my own research and fleshed out that myth a little bit. I often think about that moment there in the driveway with my grandma.

Alison Stewart: My guest is author Katie Yee. Her new book is titled, Maggie: Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. It's about a woman coping with divorce and breast cancer diagnosis. It's out July 22nd. All right. You were so nice to give us some examples for our summer reading challenge. People could read your book as a book that came out in 2025. Let's talk a little bit about some of the choices that you've made.

Katie Yee: Sure. I would love to.

Alison Stewart: The first category is a classic you've been meaning to get to. What are you recommending?

Katie Yee: Okay. First Love by Ivan Turgenev. This is an example of how quick this book is easy to read, because in the time that's elapsed between us having this conversation and me writing this list, already read it. Great novella. It starts off, it's very gossipy. A bunch of people sitting around at a dinner table and someone says, "Tell us the story of your first love." Then we get this long-- the rest of the novel is just this long story about this man, when he was a teenager, falling in love with his beautiful next door neighbor. It embodies the feeling of like, at the end of the night, you're sitting with a bunch of friends at a dinner table and you're opening one last bottle of wine and-

Alison Stewart: Perfect.

Katie Yee: -yes, read that.

Alison Stewart: A book about or set in New York City. You selected The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe.

Katie Yee: Yes. This is an incredible book that follows four young women who work in publishing. I used to work in publishing, so a lot of this resonated, because a lot has changed and a lot has not. I think what publishing fails to do in pay, really, they compensate with the people. So, a lot about this book is about the people that you meet when you're at this young, malleable age learning how to have a job, learning how to be young in New York. Great for fans of The bold type and Younger.

Alison Stewart: For a recent debut novel, you've been recommending a novel called Cinema Love. Who's this by?

Katie Yee: Yes, this is by Jiaming Tang. Super fantastic novel about gay men in rural China and the women who marry them, but for all you local New York City listeners, it's just the most wonderful depiction of a Chinatown that I have not really seen in books.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Katie Yee: If you remember the East Broadway Mall, this one's for you.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] I do. For memoir or biography, you're recommending Nothing More of This Land by Joseph Lee. It's a memoir and a history of a place close to my heart, Martha's Vineyard. My parents are laid to rest there.

Katie Yee: Really?

Alison Stewart: My sister lives there. Tell me more. I don't know anything about this book.

Katie Yee: This is very much a book-- Joseph is a journalist, and he's kind of exploring what it means to be Indigenous. His tribe is from the Martha's Vineyard area. So definitely, if you've spent time in that area, this will be the book for you.

Alison Stewart: Finally, for a book published in 2025, you're recommending a collection of stories called Exit Zero. Who is this by?

Katie Yee: Yes, that's Marie-Helene Bertino. I just love short stories. I think they need more love. Hers are wonderful. Almost like a fever dream of a short story. There's one where the main character is walking down the street and it starts it's raining, ex-boyfriend. So I feel like, enough said.

Alison Stewart: Wow. Well, thank you for contributing to our summer challenge reading list.

Katie Yee: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: I had to ask you. You said you worked in publishing, and you worked at the Brooklyn Museum. When did you find time to write?

Katie Yee: [laughs] That's a great question. I'm kind of a night owl, so just in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep.

Alison Stewart: Really?

Katie Yee: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What was your process like? Is it the kind of thing where you just turn on the light and you sit down at your computer and you just write whatever comes to your mind?

Katie Yee: I am old school, so I like to write by hand, mostly.

Alison Stewart: By hand. Oh, interesting.

Katie Yee: I draft mostly by hand. I just love going to the stationary store and picking out a new notebook.

Alison Stewart: What kind of pencils do you use?

Katie Yee: Oh, that's a good question. I love the Muji pens.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

Katie Yee: 0.5.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

Katie Yee: Yes. My boyfriend goes to bed a little bit earlier than I do, so I think the hours between like 10:00 and 1:00 AM are really where I like to try to sit down and write, but I'm not terribly disciplined, so it's not every day.

Alison Stewart: I love the Blackwing pencils. They're so gorgeous when you write with them.

Katie Yee: Yes.

Alison Stewart: You think you're writing something beautiful. Not necessarily, but you think it's beautiful.

Katie Yee: The most gorgeous grocery list you've ever seen.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] You also write with a lot of parentheses.

Katie Yee: I do.

Alison Stewart: Why is that? Is that because you have a thought coming to mind, you want to make sure we get it, or why do you include them so often?

Katie Yee: I like a little bit of an aside. It kind of feels almost like-- I have a lot of friends who work in theater, and I think that the parentheses are sort of like a different way to address the audience.

Alison Stewart: This book is going to be out in the world in just two weeks. What are you looking forward to its release? What are you looking forward to once it's been released into the world?

Katie Yee: Well, I did order a giant cake with the cover on it, so I'm very excited to eat that with my friends and family who are all coming to the launch, but I'm mostly excited to connect with readers. We're going on this wonderful tour through the Midwest, and I've already been getting sweet DMs from people who've been reading it. Yes, just this opportunity to connect with people who the story speaks to has been amazing. I feel really lucky.

Alison Stewart: There are people out there who think they have a debut novel in them. They probably do. What advice would you give them to get started?

Katie Yee: Get an hourglass. This is what I would recommend. Get an hourglass, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, and just sit down. So much of writing is just putting your butt in that chair.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is, Maggie: Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. It is coming out on July 22nd. I've been speaking with Katie Yee. Katie, thanks for being on the show.

Katie Yee: Thank you, Alison. This was such a delight. It was so fun talking to you.

Alison Stewart: I'm so glad you were here.