Reflections from an aspiring author on 'Yellowface'

Writer: Verónica Pombo Hollmann

Reading Yellowface by R.F. Kuang was somewhat of a fever dream. I had the book on my TBR for a long time, and it only shot up the list when I read Babel, her award-winning dark academia novel from the year prior. It follows the first-person story of June Hayward, the late friend of novelist Athena Liu, a superstar in the literary world. When Athena suddenly dies, an envious June takes her unfinished manuscript, which nobody knows exists, and uses that to build her own career. 

When I opened the book, one of the first things that struck me was the dichotomy between June’s relatable worries about not being good enough, and constantly comparing yourself to your peers, and the clearly questionable thoughts that are going through her head during all of this. There’s a limit between professional jealousy and what June did, considering there were a lot of other options if she did want to get the book out that wouldn’t get her into all this mess. That feeling continued during the majority of the book. On one hand I was celebrating the publishing milestones because who hasn’t dreamed of having those if you’re a writer, on the other, I was worried about all the implications and the slippery slope. 

Rebecca Kuang’s prose has always been blunt about issues of racism and the criticism she’s making, and this was definitely that, which makes it a love it or hate it book, but at least for me it worked. I come from a different perspective than a lot of people reading this book will. Some will have already been published authors, others are just readers. But for me, I am not only an aspiring author, I’m also studying literature at university and have listened to hours upon hours of a podcast on publishing. I haven’t even gone through a bad experience like June had before, but the prospect is still scary. A book like this is so frank about one of the sides of publishing—since this is clearly just from the perspective of a person who can support themselves in between those moments of trying to make it and being able to quit your day job after only a single big release—and how it works really makes an impact. All the behind the scenes and the non-glamorous parts of it; the way authors deal with social media besides the overwhelming advice of ‘don’t look at reviews or get involved’; the twitter scandals we’ve had so much of recently. It’s a fascinating look into this world that isn’t often seen besides the more performative posts on social media or talking about it on a podcast without being in that real time mindset of knowing what the advice is but not being able to stop.

One weird thing about this book was the ending. Not that it was bad, but mostly that it felt strange structurally. The climax with Candice felt very late in the book, and more like a release of tension that led to a certain sense of relief, in the weird dichotomy this book constantly had, than what I’ve come to associate with a climax. But maybe that was also because this is literary fiction, and unfortunately, I don’t get to many of the climactic moments of the liftic I read for class, simply because it's unsustainable to read that much at the pace they demand, particularly when I don’t always enjoy those books in and of themselves. I felt the memoir-ish conclusion coming from a mile away, but it felt fitting for the writing style. 

Speaking of voice and writing style, though I went in knowing it would be a first-person book, and that the context was extremely different from Babel’s, I was pleasantly surprised at Kuang’s ability to have such extremely different styles in the two books. Voice is always something I’ve been fascinated by, but that is hard for me as a writer. I won’t lie, I felt tempted to go back to Babel and examine that more closely in comparison, but that’s a book you don’t take on lightly. In different ways, both styles used helped add to the authenticity of the story she was telling. They fit not only the plot, but the emotions she wanted to convey. June’s mindspace felt genuine, not like worries manufactured to add something to a plot that’s so internal and with so little dialogue. It rang true of stories I’ve heard, conversations I’ve seen, and feelings a lot of writers have had. And I think that’s why, despite how polarizing her books may be, I’ll keep coming back to Yellowface over the time of my publishing journey. As a reminder of how important a genuine support system is, but also that it's totally human and normal to sometimes feel inadequate when it comes to the arts and this industry. But overall, as grounding of how things can go so wrong with a series of decisions made because of fear and jealousy. It wasn’t that June wasn’t a good writer. A lot of the words that she ended up putting out were her own. What ultimately brought her down was that she was so afraid to lose what she thought proved her worth, that she held on too tight, and it all broke down because she wanted to be able to control everything––the prime example of that being the sensitivity read. As hard as it is, especially for those of us with perfectionist tendencies, sometimes you have to learn to let go. 

I look forward to whatever Rebecca Kuang writes next, because so far, each book has been so different from the others, but they’ve always made me think in a way that few other books do, as much as I can enjoy those for their own reasons.