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Chapter 1: What is the central theme of 'Boring Asian Female'?
Have you been sitting on the fence about signing up for the Beta Reader matchup? Or have you signed up before but haven't yet found your writing soulmates? The next matchup is the last one for the summer, so don't snooze on it. Get matched up with those writing in a similar genre and or time zone so they can critique your work as you critique theirs.
Your manuscript doesn't have to be complete to sign up for this 3,000 word evaluation. This particular matchup will be open to registrations from now until the 1st of June with the matchup emails going out on the 2nd of June. For more information and to register, go to BiancaMarie.com and go to the Beta Reader matchup page. and welcome to our show, The Shit No One Tells You About Writing.
I'm best-selling author Bianca Murray and I'm joined by Cece Lira of Wendy Sherman Associates and Carly Waters of PS Literary. Hi everyone. Today's guest is a debut author whose writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the Kansas City Star, Chalkbeat, Era Magazine, and more. She is a graduate of Columbia University. It's my pleasure to welcome Kanwen Xu. Kanwen, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. I actually listened to this show when I was querying and preparing to query. So it's really exciting for me to kind of be on the other side now. Oh, wow. That's amazing.
Chapter 2: How did Kanwen Xu transform personal failure into her narrative?
We love hearing those full circle moments. That's incredible. Well, for our listeners, we are actually going to have Cameron read us her success or query letters shortly. which is always exciting. And we're going to put that in our sub stack. But let me just firstly tell you about the book we're discussing. Those of you who aren't watching on YouTube, I'm holding up the cover of the book.
It's called Boring Asian Female, very striking cover. And we're going to link to it on our bookshop.org affiliate page, where if you buy the book there, you can support an independent bookstore and the podcast at the same time. And Yeah, pre-orders, all orders are so important. So please go there to support our authors. Okay, let me read you the flap copy and then we're going to dive in.
Elizabeth Zhang knows her place in the world. She knows she's in the 10th percentile for likability and the 70th percentile for attractiveness, but she's also in the 99th percentile for academics. So when Harvard Law School rejects Elizabeth for not standing out enough, which she knows means she's just another boring Asian female, her carefully constructed life falls apart.
What shocks her even more is that Laura Kim, a classmate at Columbia, got in. At first, she follows her because she's just curious. What Laura orders for lunch, where Laura shops, what Laura's hobbies are, all of these things must contribute to her overall package, what makes her an acceptable, interesting person to Harvard. But still, Elizabeth can't see it.
Chapter 3: What challenges did Kanwen face during the writing process?
The only thing she sees is that Laura has taken her spot at Harvard, a spot she knows she deserves after working so hard, a spot she'll simply have to take back. Guys, this was one of my favorite reads of the year. I couldn't put it down. I'm a menopausal woman who wakes up at 2 a.m. all the time, and this book was my go-to. I just flew through it.
So highly, highly recommend, and there's a lot that we are going to discuss. So before we dive into the actual book itself, Carmen, I would love for you to tell us the genesis of the story. I always love knowing where a story idea came from and how it developed from there.
Yeah, so I knew when I started writing that I wanted to write a story that took place at Columbia, my alma mater. And the reason is that it was just such a unique experience with so many different characters, so many characters. people who seemed so confident, but at the same time, really insecure.
And it was just at this very transitional point of everyone's lives, where looking back, I'm like, I felt I was trying to find my place in the world. And everyone else was actually trying to find their place in the world as well. But back then, I thought everyone else had it figured out. And I was the only person who who didn't have it figured out.
And I knew I wanted to write about a female friendship. I'm kind of putting that in quotation marks because I know that term is overused. But I wanted to write about, you know, the dynamic between two young women who one who maybe has her life figured out a little bit more, one who has her life figured out a little bit less, even though on paper, it might seem the opposite.
That was just kind of, I think I started with kind of a vibe. And I also wanted to incorporate these elements of, you know, being on a college campus where,
Most people don't have access to a ton of disposable income, but then you're in this big city where you also just get access to all these people who are so much older and so much more established and seeing their world from an aspirational lens. So that's why I opened the book with the protagonist at an art gallery.
since it's kind of juxtaposing her dorm room where she lives, where there's, you know, rats and it's small and dingy with this really rarefied world that she hopes to enter. So that was kind of the genesis of the story.
Yeah, I love that. And I think I read somewhere as well that you said you wanted to deal with failure, you know, someone who should be successful by all means and has this huge setback. And I think you said that this was based on something that you personally went through as well.
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Chapter 4: What insights does Kanwen share about writing a morally complex protagonist?
So it was an exploration of that as well. Can you speak a bit about how something personal can become a book, even though the book is not about that personal thing?
Yeah, for sure. Well, you know, I was attending this New Yorker panel with Sandra Oh, and Min Jin Lee. And one thing that they said, that really stood out to me, and I think I had maybe just started writing the novel, or I was thinking about writing it. One thing they said was to tell the truth.
And I didn't really understand what that meant because I was like, well, if I tell the truth, I took it in a very literal sense. If I tell the truth, then aren't I just writing a memoir or something like that? But when I thought about it a bit more, what I realized was that they meant telling kind of like an emotional truth.
So my emotional truth was that, you know, when I was in college, so I had grown up in the Midwest and I had gone to high school in Idaho. And then I had gone into this world where It's like so many of the people around me, they had gone to boarding school or they had lived, you know, internationally. And I always felt kind of I always felt a little bit less than or like I didn't belong.
And I wanted more than anything to just feel like I belonged in this world and not feel so much like an outsider. And I think that my path to trying to kind of resolve that conflict. And I think a lot of people at these types of universities feel the same way was I decided to to go into Wall Street.
So I figured, you know, if I worked a Wall Street job, if I made a ton of money, then I would finally feel like I belonged. I finally would feel like I wasn't an outsider. And that was kind of, you know, how I try to resolve these conflicts.
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Chapter 5: How did Rea Frey navigate the publishing landscape?
So I got this very, very prestigious internship in private equity. I worked my ass off. During the summer, I was like, I was working, you know, 9am to 11pm regularly, I would go in on the weekends.
And it was one of those internships where, you know, everyone knew if you got it, it was like, people on campus would come up to me, and they would be like, you know, how did you get this internship, whatever. And kind of the point of the internship was that at the end of the summer, you get a return offer, which means that you get a full time job.
And generally speaking, it was like, if you get the internship, there's a very good chance you're going to get a return offer. So when I got the internship, I was like, my life is set. I'm going to get the return offer. I'm going to be super rich. I'm going to be so successful. Everyone's going to want to be my friend, whatever. And then at the end of the summer, I didn't get the return offer.
And it basically sent me down this spiral where I didn't become obsessed with someone else, but I... felt like I had to completely rebuild my identity from scratch. In that process of rebuilding my identity, what I also realized was that the building blocks for that identity were fickle in the first place.
Because even if I hadn't gotten the return offer then, you know, you never know when something in your career is going to suddenly change. So I wanted to kind of speak to that emotional truth of that failure. I never applied to law school, but I wanted to kind of take that emotional truth and put it onto a different situation that maybe would be a little bit more fun for me to write about.
Since, you know, law school admissions, it's like a lot of people know about them. A lot of people are talking about just college admissions generally.
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Chapter 6: What are the common mistakes authors make in the publishing process?
So I kind of put that emotional truth on that situation.
That makes me think of the, I think it's a quote from Cool Runnings. So it's the Jamaican bobsled team. It's especially, it makes me laugh today because Jamaica just beat Canada in the bobsled in the Winter Olympics. And you're like, wow, Canada, good one there. But I think someone there says, if you're not enough without it, you'll never be enough with it.
And I think that's so true in so many things. And I see that even with writers, you know, it's like, I'll be happy when I get an agent. I'll be happy when my book gets published. I'll be happy when I make the New York Times bestseller list. I'll be happy once my book becomes a movie. And so it goes.
And the goalposts keep shifting because so much of your value is placed on external things that are so much outside of your control.
Yes, for sure. And it's so funny that you bring that up since I was having the same exact conversation with my husband last night, which is that, you know, for me, I have started to hold all of these external achievements, almost an arm's length distance. So, you know, I obviously I'm so happy about the press that the book is getting. I'm so happy about readers who are really enjoying it.
At the same time, I am focusing my own fulfillment on the fact that I wrote a book I'm very proud of. And I wrote the story that feels true to me.
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Chapter 7: Why is understanding the business side of publishing crucial for authors?
I worked really hard on it. And I'm just really happy about that. So while it is nice to see... people sharing the book, people complimenting it. I have started to hold some of that external validation at an arm's length distance where I let myself feel happy about it, but I don't let that define me as an author.
Yeah, excellent advice to all authors and I think to everybody in general. So let's look at the journey to publication. I mean, it took you what, four years, 25 drafts and a genre change to write this book? Take us through that.
Yes. Well, so I first I sent a first batch of query letters to about 20 agents. And this was when I had been working on the book for about six months, which was way too early. I had finished the first draft in maybe like a month and a half. And I spent, you know, the rest of the time just editing. So I was like, well, I've done a lot of editing and I feel like it's good now.
You know, I sent it to 20 agents. I got two full manuscript requests and both of them were rejections. But one of the rejections actually came with a lot of feedback. And this agent who I'm so grateful to for her feedback, she also kind of gave me a solution to what she saw as a problem in the book, which was kind of the lack of momentum, especially in the first two thirds of it.
So I kind of went back to the drawing board and I was like, you know what?
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Chapter 8: What advice does Emilie offer for aspiring writers?
I her feedback bothers me a lot. And the reason it bothers me is because she's right. So I was like, you know what? This wasn't this wasn't ready. This wasn't ready. I'm going to go back and I'm going to edit it until I feel it's ready. And I took another year just just editing it. And then I edited it to the point where I just felt intuitively I was like, this is ready.
This is as good as it's going to get. I mean, obviously, you know, I've edited it further, but I really felt intuitively like, you know, someone's someone's going to like this. And if they don't, that's their problem. That's not mine, because I really I really like that. So that's kind of going back to the internal validation part. So and then that was that was when I found my agent, Rachel.
she was very, very quick to send a full manuscript request. She was very quick to, to ask for a call. And immediately, I just felt like there was so much chemistry between us. We love all of the same books. That was a huge thing for me. I was looking at her list of favorite books.
I was like, Oh my gosh, I haven't seen a single other agent who has the same has such a similar taste in books that I do. And we just really hit it off. And I'm really grateful. But I will say that when I was querying the book, the book was a lot different than the version that's coming out now. So it was originally a very contemporary fiction, women's fiction type book.
My comps were Sally Rooney, Lily King. It was not a thriller at all. It was not a suspense book at all. It was just about this girl who has to deal with rejection and kind of spirals. And then when I went on submission, I had a call with Angela at Berkeley and And again, it was like we had a lot of chemistry at the beginning of our call. But she then kind of, you know, put something out there.
She was like, well, the issue is, this is not quite a women's fiction novel, because there's not really any romance in it. And we don't want to make you turn it into a romance. Would you be open to changing this to suspense? And I had never considered that before. I never considered myself a suspense writer. It was not something on my radar.
But the more I thought about it, the more I was like, you know what, she's right. This would actually work really well as a suspense novel. Since it is, there was suspense in it. It just didn't quite get to that level that is needed for the genre. So then after that call, Berkeley ended up preempting the book in a two book deal, which I was so happy about.
And I just spent, I think, three or four months completely writing the book into a suspense novel. Laura, the antagonist, didn't exist up until that point. But then I essentially wrote in an entire obsession plot. And the book just, it just completely changed.
So even though I had gone through two rounds of editing, two very large rounds of editing myself, I then went through probably an even larger round of editing with my publishers.
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