A kitten is a fairly efficient way to get someone to lower their guard. They are tiny, needy, impossible to argue with. They also have the unnerving ability to make an otherwise sensible adult reorganise their entire emotional life around a creature that spends most of the day asleep.
It is this peculiar power that Stacey Yu gets interested in in Kitten, her debut novel, where an attachment to an animal becomes something much larger, messier and harder to explain. Yu's book is fascinated by the ways helplessness can distort a relationship – how being needed can feel like love, how love can become a kind of possession, and how something unbearably cute can begin to look a little strange when you stare at it for long enough.
Here, we speak with Yu while she's mid-way through her US and UK book tour, conversing about everything from favourite books and tour highlights, to Jenny Zhang’s poetry, sea-side reading vistas, and even the virtues of peeing in the ocean.
What was the first idea that became Kitten?
I’ve always been interested in people’s different reactions to the vulnerable, needy, or simply the bafflingly cute, and cuteness’ inherent association with helplessness. I thought it would be interesting to write a completely exaggerated relationship between a person and an animal – the way relationships between people can often be distorted and all-consuming – and see what that reveals.
Were there any books, films, writers, or other cultural references that became touchstones while you were writing Kitten?
Jenny Zhang’s poetry – so fresh and slippery and unafraid. Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, particularly the lines “My love for my Mother was like an axe. It cut very deep”, which repeats throughout the book, the story’s clear God sentences. Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, for its voice and sense of humour. Tove Ditlevsen’s vivid recollections of youth in Childhood.
Who was the hardest character to write?
Katie’s mother. She haunts the narrative. She only has a few lines, but she is, in many ways, the book’s life force.
If you could pick the ideal setting for reading Kitten, what would it be? Curled up in bed, in the park, on a train...?
Somewhere by the sea, in the off-season.
I loved one review describing the book as ‘the agony and ecstasy of helplessness’. Are there any kind of weaponised incompetencies you completely vouch for in real life?
Pee in the ocean. I don’t think anything should be weaponised, really, for personal gain. But the ocean can fend for itself. It’s older and more powerful than anything.
A writer I admire the most is…
Toni Morrison.
My favourite book of all time is…
'All time' makes me nervous. At the moment, the few that come to mind are: The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, Wuthering Heights.
The literary character I most identify with is…
Maybe Frances from Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends? When I was 21 years old, I was also terribly repressed, better at expressing my politics than living them, easily dazzled and mortified by other people, and desperate to be a writer.
The last book I read was…
What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt.
On my bedside table, I am currently reading…
Like everybody else, East of Eden. I’m also keen to read Hustvedt’s nonfiction after being completely bowled over by What I Loved.
You wrote a Substack post recently called “Writing my novel forced me to grow up” (which I loved). What has surprised you most about life after publishing Kitten?
I underestimated how many of my friends and family would actually read the book, and how much that would mean to me.
You’re also in the middle of a US/UK book tour, which is very exciting. Have there been any standout moments, interactions, or responses to the book so far on this trip?
My conversation with Kelly Link in Boston was a highlight. I love Kelly’s work, I think she’s a genius. She led the conversation in such interesting, unexpected directions. The first question she asked me was what my Grandparents did. What a brilliant icebreaker! Later on, she asked why I believed the novel persists as a form. That’s a big question to answer live. I went on and on about interiority, but I really didn’t have a clue. We continued to email about it after the event. (My current answer has something to do with the experience of reading novels as an act of creation.)
Stacey Yu's debut novel Kitten is available to purchase now.
