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Lit Recap: Author Event with Zen Cho

When it was first revealed that Zen Cho’s new book would be a contemporary romance, the news came as a surprise. After all, the UK-based Malaysian author has made a name for herself in the realms of fantasy and speculative fiction with such acclaimed titles as Black Water Sister and Spirits Abroad.

Zen’s new book is called The Friend Zone Experiment, and it’s inspired by K-dramas and political scandals. She says, “It’s a cross between the K-drama, Crash Landing on You, which is on Netflix, and like corporate intrigue and the 1MDB political scandal. It’s set in London about a young woman called Renee Goh, who is a Singaporean heiress who runs her own business. She’s estranged from her family, which is why she lives in London.

“But at the beginning of the book, she finds out that she’s in the running to take over her father’s company, which is one of these massive Southeast Asian conglomerates. And on the same day, she runs into her first love, Yap Ket Siong, who broke her heart 10 years ago when they were both at university and hadn’t been in touch since then. So they reconnect, but the secrets from their past and what they’re trying to achieve now threaten their renewed connection. That’s my elevator pitch for The Friend Zone Experiment.”

Zen was speaking to us at an author event at Lit Books on 17 Aug, 2024. She had initially wanted to go the self-publishing route because she wasn’t sure her agent would get behind this book. But her agent did see its potential and was supportive of it, even if she did caution Zen that genre-hopping might not be the wisest move commercially.

“This definitely is a departure for me. I definitely could have earned more money if I had stayed in fantasy,” she quips. “But I don’t actually write to make money because I could make money much easier if I just focused on my day job, which is being a lawyer. I was writing what I wanted to write.”

In the hour-long conversation that ensued, Zen spoke about how this all came about. Below are edited excerpts from the session moderated by our co-founder Fong Min Hun.

On why she enjoys K-dramas and how that led to writing The Friend Zone Experiment:
What happened was, during lockdown, I got really into K-dramas. What I really like, and I’m sure this will resonate with many of you who watch it, is that they really focus on very trope-led storytelling. It’s very entertaining storytelling; it’s often very over the top; it’s very light-hearted.

But then they also, at the same time, grapple with quite serious issues… Stuff like government corruption, family issues. That combination of the light-hearted and the substantive, I’ve always been really drawn to and tried to achieve in my work. So I said to myself, ‘Oh, I wonder what it would be like if I wrote my own K-drama.’ This is the result.

On incorporating Malaysian themes into the book, such as the 1MDB scandal and the issue of illegal logging:
In the earlier version of the book, it didn’t have anything to do with all that stuff. But my agent said it needed higher stakes; it needed more conflict. The male lead, Ket Siong, had a bereavement, and he was trying to work out what had happened. The female lead Renee always had a corporate succession subplot. And my agent was like, ‘Why don’t you make them scions of competing business families?’ Which, of course, is a very classic trope.

But it wasn’t quite what I wanted to do. And I think part of it was that their families are really important in the story and I wanted to tell a story where there were two very contrasting families. Renee’s from this wealthy family where it’s all about business and she’s in a competition against her brothers to try to become CEO of the family company. But on Ket Siong’s side, he’s actually from an activist family. His mom’s a lawyer who was very involved in civil society and so on. And that is going to be the thing that sets them on the path to clash, to be like a collision of values. And they have to decide what’s important to them.

I think that was where the Malaysian themes came in. What generally gives a story idea enough energy for it to become a novel for me is there’s a story I want to explore or understand. This was my chance to think about 1MDB.

On writing sex scenes:
I wouldn’t say I am very comfortable writing them, but they’re kind of mandatory for the genre. I mean, you can do clean romance as well, and I would say this is actually quite clean romance. But I did feel that there should be at least one sex scene.

But actually, what I enjoy writing much more are moments of intimacy that don’t necessarily extend to sex, but have a lot of meaning. I think this is from my Regency romance background because my first two novels, Sorcerer to the Crown and The True Queen, were inspired by Regency romance, by these kind of 1800s-style romances where even just the touch of the hands is very meaningful. And that’s something that has always spoken to me.

Something I like about K-dramas is there’s so much yearning in just looking at each other. For some reason, they always seem to stand at a distance from each other and stare at each other really meaningfully. And you’re like, ‘OK, this is quite awkward, but fine.’

Two of the scenes I’m proudest of in The Friend Zone Experiment that I enjoyed writing much more than the sex scenes is where the female lead, Renee, is cold, and the male lead puts his scarf on her. That’s a really meaningful moment for them both because they’re not really sure what terms they are on.

There’s another scene—this is not a spoiler because you know what happens at the end of romance novels—where they get together and he dries her hair after she’s had a shower. This caretaking scene has a quiet intimacy to it. That is what I was more interested in writing.

On writing within the confines of the romance genre:
A romance novel, for people who don’t know, has got a very specific definition. Firstly, the main plot has to be the development of the romantic relationship. The other thing is that it’s got to have a happy ending—either happily ever after or happily for now. I knew that I was going in with these kind of restrictions, as it were. But I really enjoyed it, actually. It was a fresh technical challenge.

With romance novels, there’s a formula, which I say in not a critical way at all. I found it quite interesting writing with those concerns and working within the boundaries but I didn’t let them really inhibit me.

But I did have some issues with my agent when we were editing the book. She pointed out that my style is very different from most romance novels where every emotion had to be expressed as a physical sensation. If the person was alarmed, their heart had to race. If they were nervous, you had to describe how sweaty their palms were. I gave in in a couple of instances, but I did push back on most of that because I feel that if you overuse it, it just doesn’t achieve what it’s intended to do, which is to evoke the same emotion in the reader. If you use it too many times, people’s eyes just skip over it, in my opinion.

On trying to market the book to publishers:
Most publishers turned it down. What was interesting was a lot of the feedback was, ‘Oh, the writing’s good, but it’s just a bit serious for where the contemporary romance market is at the moment.’

You can see this in fantasy and science fiction as well. I think after the pandemic and with all that’s happening in the news, people don’t really want to be stressed by their fiction. They’re looking for escapism; they’re looking for gentleness. And although I would say The Friend Zone Experiment is escapist, it does kind of have a strong vein of sadness in it. But I was lucky it did get picked up.

The Friend Zone Experiment is available at our store and online here.

Author Event with Zen Cho

Zen Cho is no stranger to our bookshop and we are pleased to welcome her again to talk about her latest book, The Friend Zone Experiment, a London-set contemporary romance inspired by the romance, humour and drama of K-dramas. Come join us for an intimate evening where Zen and Min Hun will discuss the genesis of her new book, its departure from her previous work, and how to read steamy scenes in romances without blushing. As usual, there will be an audience Q&A as well as a book signing on the evening. Please book your seats early as our events with Zen are riotously good fun and often sell out quickly. Tickets are RM10 and you will receive a RM10 voucher to use on event day.

🗓️ Date: Saturday, 12 August, 2024
⏰ Time: 8pm
📍 Location: Lit Books, PJ
🎟️ RM10.00

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Lit Recap: Author event with Erica Eng

When Johor-born animator Erica Eng won an Eisner Award for her webcomic Fried Rice in 2020, she was 21 years old and still a college student. The semi-autobiographical, slice-of-life webcomic based on her experience of applying to an elite art school after secondary school was something she started as a personal project.

Erica submitted her webcomic to be considered for awards, and she won the Eisner and then a Ringo after. While it gave her exposure after that thanks to the numerous articles written about her, it wasn’t exactly a game-changer. She shopped around for an agent to represent her and get the book published but got rejected each time because she didn’t have a “track record” as a published writer and illustrator. She finally settled on self-publishing Fried Rice and promoting it herself, and that’s how we came to host her for an author event at Lit Books on 1 June, 2024.

Below are edited excerpts from the delightful conversation our co-founder Fong Min Hun had with her.

Why is it called Fried Rice? In the book, there’s actually no picture or mention of fried rice.
When I was writing it, I was still in college in Subang and I was really missing my family. I was thinking the vibe of the story that I want to tell is like this home-cooked meal—it makes you feel nostalgic. My mum’s favourite comfort food is fried rice and we’re always eating that at home. So, I created this Spotify playlist with all the songs that inspired me, and then I titled it Fried Rice, and it was just a placeholder title because it didn’t make sense—it wouldn’t make sense to anyone else except for me. But then I started posting the comic online in September, won the award in June the following year, and after that, I felt like the title kind of stuck. And then I kind of liked that it didn’t make a lot of sense either, so yeah, I kept it.

How autobiographical is it? What are the parallels between your life and Fried Rice?
I actually knew who the main character was gonna be before I started writing this book, and I started drawing her in my sketchbooks. I liked her design, but I didn’t have a story to put her in. At first, I was writing all sorts of things—she’s gonna go on a gap year, go on holiday and find herself. But it didn’t feel authentic because I never experienced that.

And then, I got rejected from art school, but at the same time, it was a really bittersweet experience for me because I was experiencing rejection, but my family was all around me. I wanted to write about that because it felt interesting to me. So, I took very specific experiences from my memories, like, finding out about the rejection email during Chinese New Year on my cousin’s laptop—that’s real—but I kind of rearranged the timeline of events to create a story arch that makes sense. But the main character is not me because I designed her and I thought about her before I knew what I was going to write about. I made the main character not myself because I could take as many liberties as I wanted to. So I can’t really say it’s all about me. I was taking experiences that I felt were useful narrative wise.

Tell us about the actual production of the webcomic itself. This is your first narrative-driven, long-form piece of work, yes?
Yeah. Before that, I was drawing and writing really short comics and posting them online. I was posting them on Instagram and on Twitter… I was like, man, I don’t want to write Tweets for the rest of my life. I want to write something long. I want to learn how to craft a story from start to finish. So this was an experiment to see whether I could do it.

Did you draw influences from other webcomics out there or graphic novels? What are some that have influenced or inspired you?
At that time, I was reading On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden. The whole thing is online and you can read it for free. So for a college student, that’s like a gold mine… And then there’s This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki—I love the illustrations—and Portugal and Equinoxes by Cyril Pedrosa. I felt like, oh, someone’s telling a really interesting and experimental kind of story in comics and not using ink. I’ve only ever seen those Marvel comics drawn in ink all the time. I thought it was really interesting to see different art styles in comics.

Another one is Himawari House by Harmony Becker, but that came out after Fried Rice. That’s one of my favourite graphic novels ever.

Do you find scripting and writing more difficult than drawing and illustrating or the other way around?
Writing is 100% more difficult. The drawing part, well, it’s hard to come up with the compositions and the colours as well. But for me, that part is just getting it done, you know, churning out the drawings. But writing is when it could be anything so it feels really daunting.

There’s also the storytelling elements as well. Is this something that you were trained to do in school, or something that you just picked up yourself from reading other people’s work?
I learned film language in school, because I studied animation and also elements of acting and things like camera angles. I read a lot of screenplays and books about film language. So yeah, I would say that I learned about how to make comics from learning about films.

I loved Roma by Alfonso Cuarón, who did big movies like Gravity. But Roma was a really personal story to him from his childhood about a domestic helper that they had. And he had said that he wanted to make a movie like this for a long time and finally got the chance to. I didn’t want to be like 50 years old and then only get the courage to make something about a personal story that mattered to me. So that kind of inspired me to do Fried Rice.

How did you think about pacing? Was that something that you constantly had in your mind, or were you just happy to let it play out?
Yeah, I was thinking about pacing. I would read through the comic again and again, just to make sure that it felt right. The dialogue and everything had to sound good, and the pictures had to flow in a certain way. And I watched a lot of Eric Romero movies, which someone described as the experience of watching paint dry. So, it’s a bit slow. But I don’t know; it just felt nice. It felt like I was watching someone live their life in front of me, which was the kind of pacing that I wanted.

Fried Rice is available in-store and online here.

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Lit Recap: Author event with Yeoh Jo-Ann

Malaysian writer Yeoh Jo-Ann burst onto the local literary scene when her debut novel, Impractical Uses of Cake, won the Epigram Fiction Prize in 2018. Together with Honey Ahmad and Diana Yeong of Two Book Nerds Talking, we spoke with Jo-Ann about her book over a Facebook Live session at the height of the lockdowns in 2020.

This year, we finally met in-person at a recent in-store event celebrating the publication of her second book, Deplorable Conversations with Cats and Other Distractions. The novel is about Lucky Lee who has everything—wealth, charm, good looks—but does little with it. He coasts through life and takes things for granted until his sister, Pearl, his only surviving family member, suddenly dies. As he struggles on without her, he begins to hear her cat talking to him.

Jo-Ann started writing Deplorable Conversations with Cats during the pandemic and worked on it during a three-month writer’s residency at the Kerouac Project in Orlando, Florida, US. She recalls, “I finished most of it but couldn’t end it. I didn’t know how… Then in January 2023, I somehow opened it up again. I read it and suddenly, it came to me. I knew how to end it and, within five days, the thing was done.”

She recounted this and more during the hour-long conversation with Lit Books’ co-founder Elaine Lau and our lovely audience on the evening of 27 April. The following are edited excerpts from the chat.

On where this novel comes from:
The book is about grief, but it’s also about sibling relationships and how difficult they are because they’re so complex. These are the people we grew up with, the people we know first, and the peers we know first. Your first betrayal and many other things was by a sibling, and they know you the way no one else does because they’re there right from the beginning.

I hadn’t really explored sibling relationships very much. When I talk to people about relationships, I find that I tend to have conversations about my relationship with my mother or whoever I’m dating at that time, stuff like that. But the sibling relationship tends to be something we don’t talk about very much, especially the strange, constantly shifting dynamic of someone who is a peer and yet not a peer, someone you didn’t choose. It’s that kind of encumbrance. But at the same time, if you need to be honest, it’s a sibling you can be completely honest with because they already know who you are.

So this is a book that explores grief and the many facets of it and how there are no right ways to grieve. It’s also about family and sibling relationships and how they can be beautiful and difficult and extremely frustrating. And somewhere in there is a talking cat because my mother is a cat woman of the first order, and I grew up having to play second fiddle to quite a few cats.

On grief and recognising how it changes a person:
We talk about how there are different ways to grieve and this is a thing that we all accept. I feel like we grapple less with how grief changes us and how we view the world and how we interact with people. When you think about dealing with grief, you think about coping mechanisms and things like that, but you don’t think about how grief really does change you. The process you go through when you’re dealing with loss and all of that, it affects you and it affects the people you interact with. That was what I was curious about also.

So in the novel, what I do try and grapple with is how Lucky is changed by losing his sister, grieving for her and not understanding exactly how to deal with it. It’s that kind of struggle that I was grappling with throughout the novel.

On creating the book’s main characters:
The main character of this novel is called Lucky Lee, right? He is handsome, he is rich, he is extremely privileged and therefore, a little unlikable. It’s not easy to identify with this rich man who has everything and doesn’t have to work. But I feel that grief is something that is not the privilege of the poor or rich. I wanted to explore having a character who was unlikable and yet you find yourself identifying with them somehow, even if I definitely didn’t want to.

On creating the wonderful cast of supporting characters:
The reason why the supporting cast for this one had to be so strong was because Lucky is really an irritating little thing. There are only so many ways that you can spell out that someone is irritating and irresponsible and hasn’t got ambition. What I did was to have the people around him communicate that through their experiences with him and the daily frustrations that they have to put up with because he is the man that he is. So it’s the effects of Lucky’s character that you see throughout the book, all the consequences of the actions that he hadn’t thought through or hadn’t bothered very much with or things that he was supposed to do but didn’t. You experience Lucky through them more than him doing things.

On how a talking cat came into the picture:
I’ve always wanted animals to be able to talk back to me, because I cannot resist speaking to animals when I see them.

I always wonder where cats go. Being from a household where I am a second-class citizen, I do wonder where the more superior beings go off to when they’re not at home terrorizing me. I often wondered if there was a parallel society of some sort. Do they congregate? What do they talk about? Do they talk about us? Is there a plot to overthrow mankind?

So, I guess that part of the book where the cat walks off and meets the Raja Kuching and all the cats help her and do things, that’s my imagination running a little wild.

On incorporating food into the narrative:
My experience in my family is that it’s easier to talk when your hands are occupied, when you’re eating or cooking, or when you’re preparing stuff like chopping chili padi—it’s easier to talk to your mother about things.

I think that’s what worked its way into the first novel and the second one, because I feel that it’s a vehicle for us when it comes to expressing ourselves. In the novel, what you’ll find is that a lot of the difficult conversations between Lucky and Pearl or when they’re fond of each other is when they’re helping each other out in the kitchen or fighting over something in the kitchen. But they spend a lot of their time in the kitchen doing things together, and that’s where all the family drama happens.

I am also very food motivated, like most cats. In order for me to sometimes write a chapter, I must know what I get to eat after I finish the chapter.

Deplorable Conversations with Cats and Other Distractions is available in-store and online.

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Lit Recap: Author event with Vanessa Chan

Malaysian writer Vanessa Chan had always dabbled in writing fiction. But it took what she called a “millennial existential crisis” to propel her to pursue it seriously—she left her job in communications at Facebook and enrolled in a writing graduate programme in New York City.

What then started out as a short story assignment for class where Vanessa wrote about a teenage girl going through checkpoints during the Japanese occupation of Malaya in World War II eventually turned into her debut novel, The Storm We Made, published in January 2024. The novel is about a housewife, Cecily, and how her decision to collaborate with the Japanese occupiers brought about political and personal devastation for the nation and her family, in particular her three children, Jujube, Abel, and Jasmine.  

Vanessa recalls the moment she had a novel in the making: “I got a handwritten note from my professor, and it said, ‘This is actually not a short story… This is actually something more. All the air left the room when I read it, and my breath caught in my throat. There’s something I want you to protect. I think this is an outline or your brain telling you that this might be the beginning of your life’s work.”

But Vanessa didn’t think she would write historical fiction. “I always thought I would write like a millennial angst novel about a girl doing millennial things. But then the pandemic happened. I experienced a series of personal griefs that made it hard for me to get up and get out of bed in the morning. And I needed something to get me out of bed, and so I started writing this book.”

We had the pleasure of hosting Vanessa in an author event at Lit Books on 16 March, 2024 where she spoke at length about the intricacies of her novel and writing life. The following are edited excerpts from the hour-long conversation she had with Lit Books co-founder, Elaine Lau and our wonderful audience.

What was the process like turning a short story into a full-length novel?
It was so hard. I had always written short stories before. Short stories are great; they work for my very rigid personality. There are a series of parameters, a timeframe, a limited number of characters. Your story has to end by a certain time.

Writing a novel is like wandering in metaphorical darkness in a forest, and you think you arrive at a lake or something but it’s a mirage. It’s not ended, and you keep wandering. You have to be open to getting somewhere, realizing that may or may not be it, and just continuing to write into the darkness until you reach something else. As a rigid person who loves structure, that was a nightmare. But you just have to write into the chaos and hope for the best, even if you’re like the most detailed outliner in the world. You’ll have to toss that outline aside at some point and be like, let’s start over and figure it out. That was weird for me.

I also chose to write two timelines and four points of views, which was not easy. It was ridiculous. I don’t know why I did.

Some of the stories in this book are from your grandmother. Can you tell us more about that?
My grandma inspired this book and some of the facts came from what she calls a memory book. It was a book where towards the later part of her life, where she was worrying that she was forgetting things, she would write down stories of her life, some of it during the war, some of it pre-war, and some of it post-war. That book was a really wonderful resource for me, both as a writer, but just as a person and a member of this family. I want to note that the book, she always told me, was written for public consumption.

So, some of the stories are from there, but a lot of the stories from this novel are from conversations I had with her growing up. When you don’t finish your food, my grandmother would be like, ‘You know, during the Japanese times, we had to mix in tapioca with our rice because we didn’t have enough to eat.’ There were stories like that, both the ugly and the good, and they just sort of got embedded in my mind. And when I was ready to write it, that’s kind of what came out.

Tell us about how you wrote the characters in this book, starting with the housewife, Cecily. What were you trying to convey with her story?
When I first started writing this book, Cecily didn’t exist. The novel was only about three sad children living through the war because that was what I knew. I knew about children living through the war. That was the experience my grandmother and her siblings had.

I started writing most of this during the pandemic. I was in New York City… And then my mother and my uncle passed away and I couldn’t even go home. I was just filled with grief and rage. I felt robbed of the ability to be with my family, to celebrate the people we loved who had died. And then I’d wake up every day to write about these sad children whose lives are just getting sadder. I needed to give myself a little bit of joy. I needed to give myself something with an element of the ridiculous.

And so, I decided to write about this slightly insane woman who gets to run about all of Kuala Lumpur being a spy. I only wrote her as a spy because I used to really like to watch spy dramas. I was just gonna throw it in there and we can always take it out if it doesn’t work out. I’m gonna give myself some agency via this woman who gets to be irresponsible, make mostly bad decisions, be really, really horny and just do stuff. And that’s what happened. I wrote this character and I guess she stuck because she has since become the central emotional core of the novel. The book has now become a family drama with touches of espionage thriller.

About her morally grey circumstances, I strongly believe that morality is a function of the circumstances we are in. I believe that we don’t know if our principles, our morality, all the things that we believe in will hold if we are faced with the threat of not being able to survive or to have to save our families. We can hope that it is. We can hope that our desire to be kind and wonderful and good does hold. But I don’t always think that is the case. And Cecily, I think, had the best of intentions.

One of the children, Abel, went through a truly harrowing experience in the labour camps. Was it difficult to write these horrific events? Can tell us how you approached Abel’s story arc?
Some of the anecdotes from Abel’s story—who has to live through the camp and who encounters people who cut themselves to use the blood to write and draw memories from the camp in order to make a record of it because they didn’t know if they were going to survive—anecdotes like that, Western audiences often assume are the fictions that I make up. But the truest part of the book is that section because that is a lot of what happened; that was what I was able to research. There’s a fair number of records available because there were a lot of European POWs in those camps.

It was emotional to write, to understand that the 1940s wasn’t that long ago, that people we know had been through something like that. I get asked a lot whether or not I should have made it a little bit less gory or a little bit less confronting. I don’t believe in gratuitous violence, but I believe in honesty.

What do you hope readers will take away from this book?
I want people to remember Cecily, Juju, Abel, and Jasmine’s stories, and that doesn’t mean I want people to remember every plot twist. I hope that audiences remember how they felt when they read the book, because like I said, a lot of our history doesn’t really have a place in the larger canon, and the only way for it to enter the larger canon is if people remember how they felt when they read books like mine, and they talk about it, keep it in the conversation, and remember that experience—because shared experiences make history.

Limited signed copies of The Storm We Made are available in-store and online.

Author Event with Yeoh Jo-Ann

Catch award-winning Malaysian author Yeoh Jo-Ann at Lit Books on 27 April! She’ll be talking about her new book, Deplorable Conversations with Cats and Other Distractions, and how she’s evolved as a writer since her first book, Impractical Uses of Cake, which won the 2018 Epigram Books Fiction Prize. Tickets are RM10, and you will receive a voucher to use on event day.

About the book:
Lucky Lee has everything—wealth, charm, money, good looks—and does very, very little with it. He’s content. He’s happy. He takes for granted that life is good and always will be. But then his sister, the go-getting, successful, famous TV chef Pearl Lee, dies, horribly, and suddenly. Lucky is devastated. As he struggles to live without the big sister who’s always been the dominant, often relentless force in his life, the inconceivable happens—her cat begins to talk to him. It wants to know where Pearl is. It questions his eating habits, his outfit choices, his life. It hogs the TV. It tells him stories. Now grief-stricken Lucky has a major problem: he may very well be mad.

About the author:
Yeoh Jo-Ann grew up in Malaysia and lives in Singapore. As a teenager, she dreamt of being a cat or a rock star, but instead spent most of her adult life working in publishing, somehow ending up as the features editor of a women’s magazine before giving it up for a career in digital marketing. Her first novel, Impractical Uses of Cake, won the Epigram Books Fiction Prize in Singapore in 2018 and has been translated into German (Kroner, 2022). Her short stories have been included in Singaporean anthologies such as Best Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Three, and in 2020, her short story Dog Tiger Horse won the Boston Review’s annual Aura Estrada Short Story Contest. She is currently working on her third novel and hopes to finish it before she turns into some sort of cabbage.

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Lit Recap: Author event with Paul McVeigh

Belfast writer Paul McVeigh made a name for himself as a playwright and writer of comedy shows before he penned his first novel, The Good Son, published in 2015. The novel, which won the Polari Prize and the McCrea Literary Award, is a coming-of-age story of 11-year-old Mickey Donnelly set in Belfast during The Troubles. It is an evocative, thoughtful and well-written book that’s full of humour despite the bleakness of its setting.

We had the privilege to host Paul in an author event at Lit Books on 17 June, 2023, where he charmed us with his warmth and wit. The novel is very much drawn from his own experience of growing up in Belfast during this horrific period of Northern Ireland history, and he tells us that humour was a survival mechanism. He shared with us stories from his life in the hour-long conversation with Min Hun and our audience – the following are edited excerpts from the session.

On the history and personal background that informs the book:
I was born in 1968 and that is recognised as the beginning of The Troubles. I thought if I was going to write a book, everything in it I would have to know is absolutely true. In order to do that, I thought I would set it where I grew up and in the environment I grew up in… In Belfast, it was war but they never called it that. They called it The Troubles, which makes it sound like something a little bit annoying, like bad traffic. It minimised what it was – it was actually a war and it was absolutely barbaric. 

Where I was born, in Ardoyne, which is where the book is set, at the bottom of my street there were walls and barricades so I couldn’t get out. At the top of my street there were walls and barricades and I couldn’t get out. Two streets away was a Protestant community, and three streets another way was a Protestant community. Ardoyne was unique in that we were surrounded by our enemy. It was like an open-air prison.

The second and probably more damaging thing, because it affected everyone’s psyche, was you couldn’t be different. Any difference was not tolerated at all. You couldn’t have your hair different, you couldn’t wear different clothes, you couldn’t be LGBT, you couldn’t be artistic, you couldn’t want an education because somehow that was an insult. If you wanted an education, you were trying to better yourself and that meant where you were at wasn’t good and you want to be better than that. So you couldn’t do well or stand out in any way – it was really oppressive. 

On how this novel came about:
I was a playwright and I wrote for stand-up comics. After one of the shows, someone asked if I would like to write a short story. One of the major repercussions of growing up working class is that you never think you could be a writer. You think you’re stupid so how could you write a book? When these people asked me, I was a writer already for comedians and for plays where you could write and be inarticulate. You can just say funny things, you can use bad grammar and have a limited vocabulary… When they asked me to write a short story, I thought I was never going to be able to because I had no confidence even though I had been up for awards for these comedy shows and plays. I don’t know how to write a sentence that describes anything; I only write dialogue. And so, I said I’ll cheat – I’ll write in the voice of a little boy and he can make loads of mistakes. So the whole book is a monologue of him thinking. That is genuinely why I wrote the initial story [that became this novel].  

On the experience of writing a novel derived from personal story:
It was quite a traumatic experience writing the book, I’ll be honest… When I was reliving those things I was thinking, I can’t believe I just accepted that as normal, you know? But growing up during The Troubles, we didn’t know any different… When I was writing this, it was just a litany of the most horrible things. I had to rewrite it and remember that each page had to have laughter and love. It really is funny, the book. It sounds depressing but there are a lot of jokes in it.

On the protagonist Mickey Donnelly:
I think he’s an absolute hero because when everyone’s telling you you’re wrong but you know you’re right, you put up with all sorts of abuse because you know in your heart that you’re right. He protects his family – he makes massive sacrifices to protect his mother and his little sister. He does things that are going to affect him for the rest of his life but he has no idea. He will go through all that torture because he refuses to be cruel and he refuses to be nasty and harsh. There’s another way, there’s love… he’s gonna take on The Troubles, he’s going to take on Ardoyne and the way people behave, and he’s going to say, ‘You’re the one that’s going to change’. 

On modelling Mickey’s mother after fierce and courageous women:
My mom was fierce. It was women who ended The Troubles. it was women that got Catholics the vote. Everyone thinks The Troubles started because the IRA started shooting and bombing people. The Troubles started because of the right to vote [Catholics didn’t have the right to vote at the time]. It was started by a 16-year-old girl who got a march going from Belfast to Derry for the right to vote, housing and the right to get a job. It was a human rights march, happening at the same time for black people in America. It was women who did it… They would take on the world to protect you.

Signed copies of The Good Son is available in-store and online, while stocks last! 

Author event with Florentyna Leow

Join us for a conversation with Japan-based Malaysian writer Florentyna Leow who will be speaking with Elaine Lau about How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart, an intimate collection of essays about navigating life, friendship, and belonging in the storied city of Kyoto, Japan. The talk will be followed by audience Q&A and book signing. Tickets are RM10, and you will receive a RM10 voucher to use on event day.

About the book:
Twenty-something and uncertain about her future, Florentyna Leow is exhilarated when an old acquaintance offers her an opportunity for work and cohabitation in a little house in the hills of Kyoto.

Florentyna begins a new job as a tour guide, organising elaborate trips around Kyoto’s cultural hotspots. Amidst the tourist traps and temples, she develops her own personal map of the city. Meanwhile, her relationship with her new companion develops an intensity as they live and work together. Their relationship burns bright, but seasons change and things grow strange between the two women.

How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart is a collection about the ways in which heartbreak can fill a place and make it impossible to stay.

About the author:
Florentyna Leow is a writer and translator. Born in Malaysia, she lived in London and Kyoto before moving to Tokyo. Really, though, she lives on the internet. Her work focuses on food and craft, with an emphasis on under-reported stories from rural Japan, like English Toast (neither English nor toast), a shrine dedicated to ice, and Japan’s rarest citrus. She cannot go five minutes without thinking about food. How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart is her first book. She can be found @furochan_eats on Instagram and Twitter, or at www.florentynaleow.com

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Lit Recap: Author event with Red Hong Yi

Malaysian visual artist Red Hong Yi is renowned for her larger-than-life portraits and art installations created using everyday objects and materials not typically associated with art-making: socks, teabags, bamboo chopsticks, eggshells, and coffee stains, to name a few. An architecture graduate who found her true calling in making art, Hong Yi has established a worldwide following with her unique creations and artistic vision.

Hong Yi spent the better part of the pandemic writing How to Paint Without a Brush, an autobiographical survey of her work over the past decade, charting her growth and development as an artist. The book, which features Hong Yi’s earliest works and her transformation from promising architect to global artist, was put out by American publisher Abrams in May this year.

Lit Books hosted Hong Yi in an author event on 27 May, 2023, and the wonderfully down-to-earth artist spoke candidly with Fong Min Hun and our audience about how the book came together, her art and journey as an artist. The following is an excerpt from the hour-long chat.

On how the book and its format came to be:
What’s amazing about Abrams my publisher is they were open to ideas. They said we could do something that’s about your culture as an Asian artist or a compilation of your projects or it can be a materials book… If it’s purely autobiographical, they told me from the get-go it might not sell as well as a how-to book. That is why there’s a how-to at the back, so it appeals to a more general crowd. I thought if I’m going to come up with a book, I want it to reach as many people as possible.

On the process of writing the book, the challenges and joys:
I found it quite intimidating at first. I love reading, and I do enjoy writing but I never thought of myself as an author… The best advice I was given was just to write the way you speak. I read a lot of advice tips from authors and they said your first draft is going to be bad; you’re going to have to edit and edit, which is what happened.

The first draft was hard. I felt it was really rigid and boring. My mom read the first draft and she was like, ‘The first page makes me want to sleep.’ That was really scary for me and I thought I better get rid of all this jargon and make it more personal. I was trying to make it sound hyper-intellectual at first. But then I thought maybe I should write it in a tone like I’m talking to a friend, so I changed it completely. I quite enjoyed that process. 

The introduction was the part that was the hardest for me — to come out and be vulnerable. You’re talking about challenges you had, your childhood, and I felt I had to really dig things out of me. That was daunting, but also beautiful, too.

I had [art consultants] Rachel and Beverly from RogueArt help me. I felt I needed feedback from people in the art industry that knows art in the Southeast Asian context so they read the draft and helped me with the edits quite a bit. 

I dedicated this book to my mom and dad because they were the ones who taught me how to paint and draw when I was a kid. My mom especially — she had a Picasso print from Ikea in her room and I remember she told me, ‘Look at it — it’s just a few lines, but you can tell it’s a person. You don’t have to make it elaborate.’ I thought that was so profound. 

On why she uses materials in her artistic creation:
I think a lot of it really comes from my background in architecture. When I graduated I realised that I really wanted to create all these portraits but painting, which is something I used to do in high school, didn’t come naturally to me anymore. What’s me is reading floor plans, playing around with the material, understanding space and scale. If I’m going to create art that’s really me, I thought I should make it with materials and tools I know best… Till today that speaks to me.   

On her wide choice of materials:
I see this book as a compilation of my first 10 years. Some of my early inspirations were artists like Ai Wei Wei, who uses a range of materials. That became my inspiration at the start. My first decade is about experimenting with materials. But the next decade, I do want to stick to a certain type of material and master them. I’ve been burning red paper in particular and searing that red pigment onto canvas. That’s become my focus and I do want everything to be predominantly red — I’m going through this red phase right now. I’m hoping it would become a more recognisable material in the future. 

Signed copies of Red Hong Yi’s How to Paint Without a Brush are available in-store and online, while stocks last.

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Lit Recap: Author event with Preeta Samarasan

Fourteen years after her critically acclaimed debut novel Evening is the Whole Day was published, Preeta Samarasan returns with her second full-length novel, Tale of the Dreamer’s Son. It is an ambitious and darkly humorous book that examines the hubris and frailties of a community of Malaysians. Novel and insightfully written in a way that only Preeta can, the book delves into the synthesis of religion, politics and violence that lies at the heart of this country.

The France-based Malaysian writer celebrated her homecoming and launch of the new novel at Lit Books on 5 Nov, 2022. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation she had with Min Hun.

On how the novel first took shape:
This book very much began with the characters, with their individual stories. […] It’s about the children, first and foremost, who are just dragged along their parents’ weird, spiritual quest. It’s, of course, also about the way that the Malaysian political context shapes the destinies of the characters, in a quite obvious way.

I began with the child, the narrator Clarence Kannan Cheng-Ho Muhammad Yusuf Dragon. I started with him because I have been very interested in the way that parents decide what values their children are going to believe, the values that they’re going to pass on. I think this is true for all children but it’s sort of more apparent when the parents embark on some unusual spiritual journey.

Preeta: “We tell these stories in an effort to somehow fix something in the retelling.”

I tend to not begin with themes. Everything grew out of this idea of who would this child be, what would it be like to be an observant child yet a child sort of marooned in this weird situation where your parents, they have this weird relationship to the cause. And you’re there trying to figure it out. I did have this novel be bookended by May 13th and Operasi Lalang, and I think the themes emerged out of that as well.

On whether the novel is the story of Malaysia writ small:
It is this one guy who’s a visionary trying to build what he feels he can build… Yes, Malaysia writ small. He’s building a small community where all of what he wants Malaysia to be can be done in this hermetically-sealed context. He’s lost hope that it can happen on the grand scale, but he can at least do this.

On how she came up with name and concept for the Muhibbah Centre for World Peace in the book:
It went through several iterations. I had various, different names, and none of them felt right. And then one day, we were discussing the whole concept of muhibbah on social media and I was like, ‘That’s it!’ That’s the Orwellian concept this book needs … you know, this big hope but it ultimately means nothing. It’s empty. It doesn’t ever happen.

It’s not based on any one particular sect or cult. My parents, they never entered into any residential commune like this where they were fully involved in the cause, but they experimented in a lot of different things. My mom especially was always seeking truth. As a child I was exposed to a lot of religious movements and the characters are amalgamations of people that I ran into and also of the infighting that I saw in all of these movements. And also, the way that I was exposed pretty young to different religious leaders and the way they’re all this sort of weird mix of really believing in the cause, being really committed to their values but also being flawed human beings, having their own desires and imperfections.

On whether May 13th continues to be a major issue in Malaysia:
I think on a conscious level, no. I think most people don’t think about it, really. It’s sort of gone. But I think that, the fact that people don’t think about it is the exactly why it continues to matter. Because I think we’re not really exorcising those ghosts; we’re not really facing our history and not really talking about why and how we would want to depart from where we were. Precisely because we don’t talk about it in any meaningful way, it’s still very much a part of our biological makeup as a nation.

On whether her role as a fiction writer is about seeking redemption:
I feel like that’s kind of what almost all writers do. We tell these stories in an effort to somehow fix something in the retelling, even if the retelling is not in an obvious way because it’s not like we retell the story and then put some happily-ever-after perfect ending. But somehow in the retelling, it’s a way to relive it and to fix certain things. I think this is an idea that was there in my first novel and it’s very much there in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. It’s in a lot of books, this idea of going back into history and somehow if you can think about it the right way, if you can just fix the story in your head, that you’ll change something, that you could change the way that we experience the present.

Preeta says that this novel required her to “invent a lot more, speculate a lot more, imagine a lot more”.

On her favourite character in the book:
Oof. They really aren’t likeable characters. They each have their moments where they’re actually being kind of a halfway decent human being. I have a lot of sympathy for the narrator, especially when he is a child. But would I want to be his friend? No, absolutely not. He’s terrible. I mean, I wouldn’t want to spend more than two hours with him. When he’s a child, he’s my favourite character in the book. He has the possibility of becoming what he doesn’t become.

On portraying identity and class in the novel:
I think it would’ve seemed too unrealistic to have everyone treating everyone, regardless of race or class, with the utmost respect all of a sudden. You can’t just switch on a switch and all of a sudden Malaysians, or anyone anywhere in the world, becomes capable of never thinking about class or race. Of course, they arrive at this community and the idea is that they’re never supposed to think about race and class. But they just can’t do it. In the end, they’re just conditioned by their prior lives. I’m not trying to make any larger point but as a writer, I felt myself constrained by reality. Like how would Malaysians behave if they suddenly found themselves in a place where they can’t talk about race? I don’t think they could do it.

On how different the experience of writing this second novel was from the first:
It was quite different, for one because Evening Is A Whole Day is so much closer to my immediate life experience. It was about a Malaysian Tamil family. It wasn’t autobiographical, but it drew a lot on my familiar world. In this one, I had to, sort of, invent a lot more, speculate a lot more, imagine a lot more. So the experience of writing it was very different. The experience of publishing it was night and day. […] It’s not a book that’s easy to pigeonhole ethnically and because it’s a much less South Asian but much more Southeast Asian book, it’s much, much harder to sell because Southeast Asia is unfamiliar to the West. And the West is not particularly interested in Southeast Asia yet. They say they are, but they’re not really. So yeah, it was very different in that sense as well.

Check out Tale of the Dreamer’s Son here.