“I’m interested in the kind of the strange and the weird — how to get at the reality of being human — in this kind of sideways way, because that’s kind of the way that I think about and experience the world.”
Maggie Su, author of the upcoming speculative fiction novel Blob: A Love Story, spoke to BookTrib in a wide-ranging conversation about the novel.
Twenty-three year old Vi feels stuck in her midwestern college town, where dead ends await her in her job and her relationships. When she discovers a blob-shaped creature outside of a drag bar, she takes it home and feeds it sugary cereals. The blob becomes sentient, and Vi morphs the creature into the Perfect Boyfriend of her own creation.
But can love be forced? Can love be unconditional? We explored these central questions in a conversation with Maggie Su, as well as the advice that shaped Su’s writing process, the impact of childhood pets, and the writers that inspired her love for literature. Watch the interview below!
Transcript:
O: Hi, thank you so much for meeting with me!
M: Hi! It’s great to be here.
O: I’m so excited to talk to you about your upcoming novel Blob. How are you feeling about the release being in just about two weeks?
M: Oh my gosh, it’s been very exciting. It’s cliche but I have dreamt of it since I was a kid. My mom’s a public librarian so I always loved to read. It’s just been surreal, the idea first came to me seven years ago so it’s been a long time in the making and I’m just thrilled to see people reading it and engaging with it. It’s been wonderful.
O: That’s amazing. Seven years is such a long time. Is there anything that stands out to you, seven years ago, the first thought that came to mind that sparked the idea for the rest of the novel?
M: Yeah, I was really interested in connections. Both romantic and platonic connections, and kind of thinking about how mysterious they felt to me and, I wanted to explore that idea through a surreal or speculative conceit. So using the blob to kind of think about the ways in which these connections can form – and I was really excited about that idea. It started as a ten page short story and turned into a ten minute play and I put it away for a year. The pandemic happened, and I was working on my first novel, my dissertation, and I came back to the idea. So that’s kind of where it started. I think Blob and Vi were not done with me so yeah, that’s what happened.
O: So you felt like that this is the story you’ve been working on and been calling to you for so long. That’s so interesting that you had it as a play for a bit.
M: Yes, it was wonderful. I was in the playwriting workshop at Cincinnati, and it was one night only. Bob the Blob, a ten-minute play. And it was fantastic, the actors there were wonderful, and it was fun to see it in a new form. It kind of helped me understand the characters in a new way, it was fantastic.
O: That’s really interesting. What formed the idea of the blob itself? I mean, you could explore the connections and interpersonal relationships so differently but I was so fascinated with the idea of her finding this blob outside of the nightclub.
M: I’ve always loved speculative fiction and playing with surreal conceits. I was lucky enough to have two of my author heroes blurb the book, including Amy Bender and Kevin Wilson, and I’m inspired by the way that they are able to kind of craft these strange conceits that kind of get to the heart of things. So I knew that I was going to have some sort of fantastical or speculative element, it’s just always kind of been there in my writing, I’m interested in the kind of the strange and the weird, how to get at the reality of being human, in this kind of sideways way because that’s kind of the way that I think about and experience the world. I was excited to explore it through that speculative conceit.
O: Yeah, I love that. You mentioned that your mom works at a library. So, I’m just curious if there was ever a speculative fiction book that maybe was the first one to introduce you to the genre and started to become your thing?
M: I remember reading Beloved by Toni Morrison, and just being like “Oh, wow” in terms of content, thematics, but also the form. I was so struck by how she was able to play with time and use this ghostly supernatural figure, you know, I think that was the book I read. And actually, I’ve always been a reader of different stories, but I think that was the book I read where wow, fiction novels can really move you and this is something that I wanna pursue in a real way.
O: Absolutely. So when you’re thinking about the character of Bob and his relationships with, I guess, more of the real characters in the book, how do you feel about, what was his function as a character for you mainly, in the book, besides this surreal parallel to the characters?
M: Yeah, that’s a great question, and I think it’s interesting because you create these kinds of– set up these puppets, like ok here are these thought experiments, and when you write a novel, you’re like oh this is not – I have to commit to these characters. I have to try to understand them, and try to invest in their growth and development. I had a professor, who was like, in novels you befriend the characters, and in short stories almost never… so I really took that and was like, Bob needs to be a character who isn’t just a parallel to Vi, who is himself. Who is trying to figure out the world and how he fits in it, and his struggles, and his questions that he has, as this kind of new being in the planet. So I think through the novel he started maybe as a thought experiment and maybe became his own person through the processes of writing the novel.
O: It was so interesting to see the way he developed and I was honestly, happily, surprised with his ending. I don’t want to spoil anything for the readers who have not had the chance to read the book yet, but, did you find that that experience of befriending Bob and his character growth throughout the novel, did you find that that happened with the rest of your characters? And maybe they changed or evolved in ways you didn’t expect when you first started it as that ten-page short story?
M: Definitely, yeah. I think my dissertation director, Leah Stewart, who’s fantastic, I remember her vividly saying, you know, you’re putting Vi through a lot, and I think you need to be gentler with her. I think in part, I’m not the character, but in part I think she was telling me to be gentler with myself. It was so interesting to kind of put her in these situations that were difficult but I think part of the novel that I learned, and I resisted this, because oh yes, it’s very much a book about self-love, and growth and development, but I think part of me was resistant to any sort of change. But I think Vi’s character does change and she does learn and she does grow. That’s kind of what’s beautiful about the story and maybe something I was resistant to at first. I was trying to invest in her figuring things out, but I think as humans we all have that capacity and I wanted to grant her that same grace too. Yeah, it definitely went into a different space than I had originally intended.
O: That’s so interesting, that’s like really beautiful advice that she gave you for your characters, but also, you know, for everyone. I know I was, by the end of the novel, so proud of her. And honestly, I found her to be so relatable, more than any other narrator that I’ve encountered recently. So I really enjoyed seeing that journey for her. And the rest of the characters as well. When you were formatting these characters was there a particular kind of audience that you hoped to reach with them?
M: So I did my exams on speculative fiction and Asian American literature. So I definitely am very aware of writing into, hopefully writing into, kind of this really rich tradition of Asian American literature, specifically thinking about Asian American women. I’ve just been so blown away by the incredible writers that have been coming out with new books, I really loved Ling Ma’s Severance, Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, the short story collection is just fantastic, and just kind of how they’re playing with the trope of the perfect Asian American woman. I’ve been really inspired by those. I was kind of aware that I was writing into these traditions, as well as Amy Bender, this speculative tradition. But for audience, I hope that anyone can read the book and take something away from it regardless of their personal experience. I think what’s so amazing about art is you put it out there and it doesn’t belong to you anymore. It’s been really fun hearing other’s reactions, and I don’t get offended when people say they hate Vi. I think that’s kind of interesting, I think. There’s been a mixture of people who find her to be sympathetic and some who don’t – whatever folks want to take from it, I’m just excited to hear. Whether they didn’t love the book, I love to hear they finished it quickly, and still found it readable and interesting! So that’s been interesting.
O: I’m so shocked to hear that people didn’t care for Vi, I can’t believe, I’m like oh, she’s so relatable. Maybe that’s not so good!
M: No, I love that, I mean I feel the same.
O: Yeah, it’s an extension of you and it’s so interesting to see how people take it and understand it in different ways, in ways you never would think. So it must be very exciting. I was actually really interested in nature as a theme in the book. A couple of moments that really stood out to me, sort of involving like a baby bird, ants, and a couple of different bugs, and obviously the blob itself is kind of a creature in its own sense. So I was curious if there was, how that came to be for you, and if there was influence on the role of nature in the text for you?
M: Yeah, I love that you picked that out, because it’s something that was very intentional in my writing of it. And it’s something that is kind of grounded in some facts of my upbringing. There’s a moment in the book where Vi is like, she got all of these unusual pets in her childhood because her parents thought she didn’t have any friends. And I also had very unusual pets for the same reason. So I think I wanted to play with this idea that she has this kind of responsibility for other people and other characters, but also animals, and I think there’s kind of a mixture there. I think she’s failed some of these, and she talks about how they let the snake go and the birds ripped it to shreds, or there’s Japanese beetles, which is a type of invasive species in the US, where she kind of has a chopstick and is putting it in soapy water, for her dad, because they’re eating all the plants. So there’s all of these different examples of her engaging with animals in different ways. And I pulled it back a little bit. I did get the comment that it was perhaps a lot, but I also think our relationships to animals that we keep and the animals we care for is really interesting. Especially as a child, what does it mean to engage with helpless creatures in that way? I think she still carries a lot of that guilt around. A lot of the flashbacks are kind of thinking – not, I didn’t want the flashbacks to explain why Vi is the way she is, but I did want them to provide some context. Like, what are the little moments kind of in our lives that shape us and mold us, and why do we hold onto, especially the more difficult moments. Like when she’s reading her mom’s romance novels, she feels an incredible amount of guilt for that. She feels an incredible amount of guilt for these animals that she feels like she’s failed, or in some ways, come to a horrific demise because of her. I think it’s shaped her idea or understanding of herself as a caregiver, as a partner, in relationships. Her interest in nature and these things she can control versus the things that she can’t, I think nature definitely comes into play with that.
O: I absolutely agree, I think it was a really interesting and beautiful way of showing who she is as a person in these tiny moments where no one else would take notice. It was really between the lines with learning who she is inside and not explicitly told to us. So, I really enjoyed that aspect of the book.
M: Thank you.
O: I guess you’ve touched on it a couple of times, maybe a few instances of personal influence from your life that reached certain corners of the book. Is there anything particular to maybe the setting, or maybe her educational experience, or anything you took inspiration from your own life?
M: Yeah, I would say so much of the world is grounded in my lived experience. I grew up in a midwestern college town and felt that kind of otherness, of being from a place but not necessarily looking like I was from a place. Vi definitely feels that as well. And it has been living in me, longer than seven years, and again Leah Stewart gave me some great advice, she’s like, your debut novel kind of, is the expelling of a story that you’ve been trying to tell for a really long time. And it definitely felt like this to me. In terms of my short stories, hopefully a second novel, this feels like the one that has the most personal details in it. I worked in a hotel front desk as an assistant, I lived in a basement apartment in Cincinnati. But what’s really interesting is when you create the fictional version it’s always slightly different. So I can picture my basement apartment and Vi’s basement apartment, and they’re actually slightly different layouts. I just think that’s strange. I think especially for this book it was important for me to ground it in the Midwest. I’m working on a list of Asian Americans writing about the Midwest and I think it’s a little bit underrepresented in terms of literature, and it’s been really fun to delve into these writers who have very similar mid-western Asian American experiences. I really wanted to locate Vi in that place and in the hotel, where she is the observer, but also not observing. I thought that was interesting, how she becomes sort of more alive to the hotel experience and the boredom of the Midwest kind of meets the strangeness of it. I was kind of thinking about all of those things and definitely a lot of personal lived experience came in through those details.
O: I could sense it a little bit, I felt like a lot of the details of her experience were so personal and intimate so I felt there could have been a little lived experience behind it. I think it’s very interesting, you know, hopefully, I look forward to if you do have a second novel on the horizon, but for your first one it definitely can be very vulnerable to put yourself out there. It’s almost like an invitation to who you are, that must be very freeing and exciting and a lot of different feelings. How was it when you first found out that this novel was going to be published? And with Harper Collins, so exciting!
M: It was amazing, oh my goodness. It was very surreal. I had gone through a year of revision by myself, or a year of revision with myself and my dissertation director, Leah Stewart. I wasn’t sure if it was ready to be sent out, but I sent it out anyway. Then I went through a year of revision with my agent, Samantha Shay, who’s fantastic, and we did a lot of work on it as well, in terms of reordering it, making it feel more like a novel. That was a really fantastic experience. And when it got sold, I was just in disbelief I think. I never… yeah, I was really excited.
O: I’m sure. I can’t even imagine what it will feel like on the day it comes out and hits the shelves. You must be so thrilled.
M: Yeah, I think I was in the bathroom of my job looking at my emails and I was like, aah!
O: So exciting! Thank you so much for meeting with me and talking about the experience. I’m really happy to have you as my first debut author for interviews. I really loved your book! Thank you for answering my questions and making this novel come to life.
M: Thank you for having amazing questions and for reading my book so thoughtfully, it means the world to me.
BLOB: A LOVE STORY releases on January 28th from HarperCollins.
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