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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The new novel Yellowface is author R.F. Kuang's foray into realism after her award-winning debut fantasy trilogy, The Poppy War, and her bestselling Babel, also in the fantasy genre. Yellowface takes a cold hard look at the publishing industry. Here's the story. We follow June Hayward, a white author who has not made it professionally when her college frenemy, Athena Liu, a glamorous and successful young Chinese American writer, chokes to death on a pancake. Yes, June is watching when it happens.

June makes off with some of Athena's work and decides to pass it off as her own novel. A publisher loves the book, and then the publicity machine kicks in and they change June's name. Her headshot purposely makes her racially ambiguous. The book is a smash and now Juniper Song, as she's known, is a 21st-century literary star, which, of course, means there are online trolls, but one using a Twitter account called Athena's Ghost starts publicly connecting the dots. June's approach is competitive and cutthroat as she bargains with herself about the ethics of stealing Athena's work.

In college, after all, Athena wrote a story based on June's traumatic experience with sexual assault. The emotional arc of Yellowface is driven by questions about integrity and authenticity and cultural appropriation in the world of publishing. As June navigates her long-sought success, as well as her amounting guilt and fear that she'll be found out, we don't find any easy answers. The New York Times calls the book a breezy and propulsive read, a satirical literary thriller that's enjoyable and uncomfortable in equal measure. Kirkus calls it an incredibly meta novel with commentary on everything from trade reviews to Twitter.

Speaking of Twitter, where much of the action of the book takes place, one Tweeter commented, and this is to paraphrase, "Yellowface feels like reading one big endless Twitter bleep storm, and it's so accurate to my degenerate Twitter experiences that I can't even call it satire anymore. It is just accurate representation." Joining me now to talk about the novel Yellowface, please welcome bestselling novelist, R.F. Kuang. Rebecca, welcome back, and congratulations on the book.

Rebecca F. Kuang: Thank you so much, Alison. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: I read it in two big gulps, two sittings. It's so-- Ah, you can't put it down, as I say. I'm interested in the catalyst for the book, and I understand it came to you in 2020. The publishing industry was obviously going through a number of introspection about writers of privilege, who gets to tell whose stories. We all saw what happened with American Dirt. It received a lot of blowback because the writer was not Latina but wrote a version of a Mexican-American experience. All of this is swirling around 2020. What was the actual catalyst to sit down and write?

Rebecca F. Kuang: Well, as you said, we were having all these conversations in publishing about diversity and representation, who was on the list, who was receiving publisher support. I think the big thing in my mind was transparency. There was this campaign in late 2020 called Publishing Paid Me, which was launched by two Black authors. They were encouraging other authors, especially white authors, to share the size of their advances because previously, talking about the size of your advance or really sharing any deal terms at all was not considered all that classy. You don't talk about money, you keep things close to your chest.

Then as folks started sharing their respective deals, it became very apparent that there's this huge disparity between what white debut writers are getting paid. There are untested writers who've never had a book out who were getting massive six-figure deals, which, good for them, but on the other hand, there were so many award-winning bestselling Black authors with a very strong proven track record who couldn't even get a 10th of that from publishers. People were really asking why and it became so apparent that there's so much about the industry that authors, especially newer authors don't know.

Nobody really understands how it works. It feels like murky witchcraft, trying to divine how you're doing or how your publisher views you. One of the things that was forefront on my mind is that I just want to lay all of my experiences out there and crack open the conversation a bit.

Alison Stewart: Yes, it's quite transparent. It's obviously written by someone who's been through this experience. Let's talk about Athena. I'm not giving anything away, that she chokes to death. It happens, it's the book's opening line, but after talking with the police, June was there. She has taken a draft of Athena's work and she tries to pass it off on her own. She's able to do this, which I thought was incredibly clever because Athena would only write on a typewriter, so there wouldn't be any saved copies anywhere. What makes June take the manuscript? Is she just impulsive? Is she just that desperate for success?

Rebecca F. Kuang: She is impulsive. She is desperate for success, but at the core of June's character is this deep resentment at publishing and all the ways in which it's broken and all the ways in which she feels that it hasn't given her due. June has been working at her craft for years and years, and she's quite a talented writer too. It's just that for many, many writers, not just June, publishing doesn't work the way they think it will. Their dreams don't come true overnight.

For June, she had just this heartbreaking experience with her first book coming out and receiving lukewarm reviews, really nobody coming to her bookstore events. She's just dealt with this frustration and humiliation for all this time that she poured her heart and soul into this work and nobody cared. She feels that publishing is a rigged game, that it only values diversity as a trend, that it's very performative that authors like Athena by comparison, who are so critically acclaimed and get all this attention, are only there because they do represent this token diversity.

Because she thinks it's a rigged game, in her mind it's do whatever it takes to get ahead. She's playing a giant prank on the literary world, and it's coming from this conviction that nothing was fair, to begin with, so why should she play fair?

Alison Stewart: To your point, she's talented. In fact, she really becomes almost like a super editor of Athena's manuscript. She adds a lot, she removes things, she clarifies other things. Does June think she's actually written this book?

Rebecca F. Kuang: Well, I make it quite clear that June has contributed a lot to this book. The manuscript that she inherited from Athena was very patchy. It was rough and unfinished, and it's June who added the polish and made it the commercial bestseller that it is. Now, there are lots of scenes where I take you through the revisions they discuss and why they make the changes that you do, but it's also apparent that the final product is nowhere close to what Athena intended for the book.

June has reshaped it in her own vision into something that is a bit more commercially accessible, perhaps makes the readers feel better about historical racial struggle and discrimination, and on the whole, is a more saccharin commercial fiction that doesn't get close to tackling the questions that the book was originally written to address.

Alison Stewart: My guest is R.F. Kuang. The name of the novel is Yellowface. We read the story from June's point of view. It's all of her inner thoughts, but we're also not sure if she's entirely reliable. Sometimes it seems like she's diluting herself, sometimes she has these incredible moments of clarity and she's able to articulate actually what's all very messed up in publishing. How are you thinking about June's reliability as a narrator?

Rebecca F. Kuang: She's completely unreliable. [laughter] She's not just deceiving everybody else, she's also constantly trying to deceive herself. She's taking you through all these mental gymnastics to convince you that what she did was okay and that you shouldn't feel bad about it and then that she's not a racist. June will find any excuse other than face up the fact that maybe the way that she views the world, maybe her beliefs about other people are skewed, but in a sense, it's because June is so unhinged that she's able to sometimes say things that are quite perceptive and actually really on point about the publishing industry that nobody else dares to address.

I think a lot of the times in publishing, we're all just putting on a stiff upper lip and pretending these gains of politeness and positivity and cheerfulness and ignoring all the rotten stuff happening in the bottom. June, by virtue of being so unhinged and unreliable and desperately alienated, she's able to say the ugly truth that nobody else wants to live up to.

Alison Stewart: For a long time, June is getting away with it. There are a couple of voices popping up here and there, but people just say they're trolls and she's trying to ignore it, but she can't really, but it takes a while for her to be revealed. Why was it important that she escapes accountability for so long?

Rebecca F. Kuang: Do you think she escapes accountability for that long? She does enjoy a brief moment in the sun. I think there, I'm trying to make the argument that it's far too easy for writers to get away with this kind of identity hoax, this sort of literary Yellowface. We have many examples, quite recent examples. This is the thing that still happens of white writers adopting Asian pen names because they think there might be some perceived benefit in getting through a window of opportunity meant for diverse writers. It's all too easy for June to get away with this lie.

Part of the reason why she gets away with it is because the publishing machine that's behind her is also happy to foster it because they want to sell books and they know what kind of narrative sells. They know that pitching this book as an authentic OwnVoices volume written by a Chinese American author is going to make it more palatable to readers than a book by a white woman. She's aided in this deception by a lot of other people who have an interest in the bottom line.

Alison Stewart: Another interesting point of discussion and the controversy is, who owns whose story? People remember Who Is the Bad Art Friend? New York Times Magazine piece. Can you take someone else's life experiences and make it your own if you add to it, even if you fictionalize it? How much of that conversation did you want to intersperse in the book?

Rebecca F. Kuang: Oh, I think about that stuff all the time. I wanted to make it clear that Athena has stolen parts of June's life for her own stories because I didn't want this novel to be such a simple black-and-white morality tale of evil white writer steals and exploits the work of dead Chinese American writer. I think that would be a very boring story. I always like to make things muddy and complicate the picture a bit more.

In bringing up flashbacks later on in the novel where we learned that Athena has taken things that June told her in confidence, very painful, traumatic things, and turned them into short stories where June is not acknowledged, she didn't even give June a heads-up. She just did this to further her own literary career. I wanted to use that to disambiguate the question of stealing each other's stories from the question of racism and cultural appropriation. I think no writers really know where to draw the line.

You have some people who think that anything is okay in service of good fiction, that you can treat everybody in your life as a source for material. You can hold them upside down by their ankles and shake them for the loose pocket change of life experience. In the case of Bad Art Friend, some people are arguing that, well, it's a short story so she can do whatever she likes. The Veneer fiction, the disclaimer, which I've always found a bit disingenuous this disclaimer that the events and people in this story have no relationship to events and people in real life. That's obviously not true.

I actually think this is less of an ethical or aesthetics question and more of just an interpersonal question of how are you treating your friends. It's not a question of are writers allowed to do this, but if your friend told us in confidence, would you put it in a short story and be able to look them in the eye after?

Alison Stewart: Before I let you go, the role of social media is so interesting in this book. What's one thing you'd like people to know about the role of social media in publishing these days?

Rebecca F. Kuang: It plays far too great a role, and I'm a bit nervous about it. It seems like all authors are expected to be online these days. Because authors are so visible, it seems like they have to sell narratives on two levels. First, the level of the text, the actual story that they've created that they want readers to experience. Also, the authors constantly need to tell a narrative about themselves to create a personal brand to seem likable, interesting all the time.

It worries me because all this work of performing on social media distracts from the work of writing stories themselves. I wonder if we can reach a new publishing equilibrium where we're not so focused on constantly shilling out ourselves rather than working on our craft.

Alison Stewart: The name of the novel is Yellowface. It is by R.F. Kuang. Rebecca, thank you so much for being with us.

Rebecca F. Kuang: Thank you for having me.

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