The Convergence of Food, Memory and Language, with writer Rachel Khong

Cultural Mixtapes

I came across a novel that used food as tool for reflection into the life and mind of a few characters. Rachel Khong’s first novel Goodbye Vitamin, is about a woman who moves back home to care for her father, who has started to develop Alzheimer’s. And Khong meditates on this family by refocusing on their daily activities. From cooking to eating, to morning conversations, we see how mundane routines can change, bend and break under stress.

Food was my entry point in the novel, but my discussion with Rachel starts to incorporate other ideas that she was interested in during her writing process. We’ve talked a lot about memory on this sh ow, and Rachel’s very interested in the simultaneous perfection and imperfection of memory. What happens when a character goes about their daily life on a faulty memory? And what happens when everyone else has to watch the memory of someone they love, dissipate.. We take a step back, and start to think about the memory of a writer, how does a profound mistrust of one’s memory change the way they perceive scenes and characters in a novel.

We thread these ideas in with Rachel’s new novel Real Americans which is out April 30th from Knopf. Her new novel is entirely different in style and structure to the first one. It weaves between two timelines that show the intersection of two vastly different families, immigrants from China, and a pharmaceutical empire with generational wealth. We talk through her writing process for this novel, and how she sees part of it as a response to the world we’ve lived in, since 2016. The novel’s not overtly political, but you can start to see what Rachel’s project is with this new work, and we dive into how she spent the last few years writing it.

Real Americans is out April 30th.

Rachel's Website

Real Americans

Recommendations

Martyr - Kaveh Akbar

Monk