Fittingly for a book that concerns a family member’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, the California Book Club discussion of Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin focused heavily on the idea of memory.
CBC host John Freeman started from the very top, asking Khong, who’d worked for the food magazine Lucky Peach while writing part of Goodbye, Vitamin, whether she had any foods that served as prompts similar to the famous madeleine cakes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Khong recalled that her mother used to serve her cut fruit (“whatever we had lying around”) after dinner. The thought of that fruit brought Khong back to her Southern California childhood, and, she admitted, “I still have a bad habit of taking other people’s cut fruit.” Khong took pains to note that her book is not autobiographical but that it is steeped in “sense memories of growing up in California.”
Freeman, who called Khong’s book “a remarkable first novel” that “feels so confident and light on its feet,” also noted that the book begins in December, right around the holidays, much as we find ourselves at this moment. This gave Khong an opportunity to talk about some of her Christmas pasts, including some spent as an undergrad in Connecticut. There’s no snow in most of California, making the holiday feeling more subtle. “Maybe California is for people who like subtlety,” she said with a laugh.
Speaking of her book, Khong said, “I think this book really started with memory.… I was really interested in memory itself.” Memory serves a vital function but can also create difficulties, since it’s “what we have that binds us together yet is faulty.”
Halfway through the conversation, Freeman introduced Mimi Lok, author of Last of Her Name and a cofounder of the nonprofit Voice of Witness. Khong and Lok spent some time reminiscing about their days writing together at Charlie’s Cafe on Folsom Street in San Francisco and how those mornings together helped focus them and spur them to write their books, or, as Lok described them, “our book cakes we baked in the same kitchen.”
“It was so meaningful to have someone else doing this thing that felt so crazy,” Khong told Lok. “I remember so much doubt.”
Khong, who is also a founder of the Ruby, a San Francisco–based collective for “nonbinary, transfeminine, and woman-identified” creators, was emphatic that community and friends were major components of her creativity. Freeman at one point praised Khong for her support of other writers and her ability to forge and maintain friendships. “I love being friends with writers,” Khong said. “You get a sense of what this person is really thinking about and cares about.”
The last part of the discussion focused on time—how to stop worrying about it, how not to let it define oneself as an artist or a person. “I still struggle with feeling that time needs to be spent wisely,” Khong said. “It’s something I’m getting better at.”
“The point of my work is not to spit out a novel fast,” she continued. “The point is thinking through things deeply.… It’s time that enriches the work and deepens it and brings up questions you didn’t even know you had.”
“The act of writing itself can be hard, but it can be life-changing,” Khong said. “It’s so profound.”•
Join us on January 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Viet Thanh Nguyen will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss The Sympathizer. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
