Poured Over: Weike Wang on Joan is Okay
“…So much of American media is, As long as we have each other, it doesn’t matter what happens, we’re going to be fine. I don’t always think that’s true. Circumstances can really tear families apart. But, you know, I’m not going to write Succession.” Weike Wang follows up her acclaimed debut novel, Chemistry, with the deadpan, darkly comic Joan is Okay. She joins us on the show to talk about how (and why) work becomes home for Joan, family and grief and William Faulkner, the horror of Mickey Rooney’s yellowface performance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and much more. Featured books: Joan is Okay and Chemistry by Weike Wang, Convenience Store Woman by Sayata Murata, The Stranger by Albert Camus, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, and The Art of Revision by Peter Ho Davies. Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and wherever you get your podcasts.
From this Episode:
B&N: Joan’s personality is separate from her grief. I mean, she is deeply, deeply grieving her father’s death.
Weike Wang: Yeah, yeah. Just how deep, right? Because she, you know, she’s thinking it feels no different in many ways, right? But she can’t help thinking about all these memories that she’s had of him and things that she just remembers. And I think she doesn’t know how deep it is. Because she’s like, I have to put this in a box. And I do the next box. It is sort of this like boundless grief. I mean, that’s why her mom comes;I think her mom is, in a way kind of worried about Joan, because Joan doesn’t say anything to her in that way. She doesn’t talk about it, and neither does the mother. But they’re both grieving. And I think they just need each other, they need the company.
B&N: Grief isn’t Depression, depression isn’t grief. I mean, they’re going to be people who–and this happened with your first novel, Chemistry, where people looked at the narrator, because of the way you designed the character, she has a very flat affect, she’s very focused on science. I mean, in Chemistry, only the boyfriend Eric, who asked her to marry him, has a name. Everyone else is defined by their name as a character, by what they do, which is a very sort of clinical, scientific way of approaching things and categorizing things. And it makes perfect sense in the context of the novel and the character. But a lot of reviewers didn’t understand what you were doing. They were like, is this girl depressed? Is she autistic? What is going on? What is wrong with this girl? And actually, it’s a different way of approaching the world. And it isn’t necessarily categorizable. And the same thing happens with Joan, her life may not look like yours, but she’s okay.
Weike Wang: And she’s content with it until other people start to disrupt it, and sort of poke, and the more they poke, the more she’s like, well, this is not matching what I’m thinking, and they’re gonna poke some more, and then they decide, there’s got to be something wrong with you. because if I were living your life, I would not be happy.
B&N: Who are some of the writers that who’ve influenced you over time? I know you studied with Amy Hempel at one point,
Weike Wang: I think without her I wouldn’t have gone into writing, I was actually terrified of taking a fiction workshop, because I don’t know everyone reads your stuff. And then you know, they talk like you’re not there. So sometimes people can be really aggressive with that, that was kind of accelerated during the MFA program of just like, you know, really kind of critiquing, but she was sort of my first introduction to workshop. And she was just so kind and generous. And I think everyone knows that when you’re in college, what you’re writing is so nascent, that there’s really no point in trying to get this ready for The New Yorker or something like that. It’s just figuring out what you’re good at figuring out what comes naturally to you. Humor came naturally to me, and she encouraged it. And I think that sort of what helped for this book, you know, a few years ago, Convenience Store Woman [by Sayaka Murata –ed.] came out. And it was amazing. And I just cannot believe how this writer created this singular character, so unapologetically, and had kind of the balls to sort of write this amazing story. And so is sort of like that, that sort of absurdism that I was kind of tapping into. And that’s why some of the characters in here have these traits exaggerated. One of the books that in high school that I read, and obviously has always stuck with me is The Stranger that this character, after the death of the mother, somehow he ends up in jail by the end of the story, because he’s not able to show his grief in the correct way. And I think in some ways, I read that and I connected that to the Asian American identity. So well, that obviously Camus would never have thought of that. But the sense of not being able to express something so well, not being able to show your feelings and in a way being penalized for it. I think, in many ways, that’s part of the Asian American identity that we get kind of put in these boxes, and then we get penalized for not being expressive enough, or blah, blah, blah. And it’s so stupid.