Rachel Khong: On Feeling Like a Misfit, Time as Commodity, Defining Success on Her Own Terms, and Her Novel ‘Real Americans’

Rachel Khong’s second novel, Real Americans (Knopf, 2024), is a multi-generational saga that grapples with big questions, like how do we incorporate into our lives what we’ve inherited from our ancestors, and what does it mean to be an American? I fell in love with Rachel’s writing after reading her first book, Goodbye, Vitamin, and her second novel proves to be just as good. I was excited to sit down and talk with Rachel about her writing process and what it felt like to put this book out into the world.

Erin Russ: In your novel, Real Americans, you investigate the idea of inheritance and how what we inherit or don't inherit from our ancestors ultimately makes us who we are. How did this inquiry emerge for you and what came up as you were exploring it?

Rachel Khong: I think I've always wondered why I am who I am, how I became who I became, and wondered about all the different factors that went into my reality. I came to this country when I was two years old—my parents came from Malaysia. And when my family came here we were just our own unit. My immediate family was the family I knew. I felt a bit estranged from my family in Malaysia because I was growing up in a very different context, culturally. Whenever we went back to visit I wouldn't be able to speak the language, the various dialects.

I was very much shaped by America and American ideas, and the places I was growing up in. So I've always wondered about that part of me that's handed down from ancestors that I don't even feel that connected to, or that acquainted with. I think this book was a way to write about those disconnects. The ways in which you can share so much with a family member—genetically, culturally—and still feel really separate from them and feel that there's this great divide that you have to cross. 

ER: So it sounds like disconnection and a feeling of otherness was something you were drawn to exploring, or perhaps part of the impetus for writing this novel? 

RK: I think it was part of the impetus. It's something I have personally felt. We've all felt it to some degree. For most people there are contexts that you don't quite fit into. And I think for me, especially growing up with this really specific background, I felt I really didn't fit in as a kid. I didn't know any other Malaysian families. And I just felt sort of strange. Like an odd little kid. 

I think that is part of why I was drawn to writing, honestly. Well, it was reading first. Reading was where I found other misfits. Misfits always appear in books. It makes sense. Misfits appear in books, and then misfits are drawn to books. And then there's this beautiful communion there, and you can find your people in the books themselves. Reading was where I found this sense of belonging and then writing was the natural next step. It was where I felt that I could fully communicate. 

ER: One of the things I love about your writing is how good you are at zooming in on the details of everyday life. Do these moments of zooming in come naturally in your writing, or is this something you do while editing? 

RK: I do think it's very intuitive and comes in the first drafts often. But I also do a lot of work in revision. So it's both. When I'm writing I often think about all the senses, because writing is pretty limited in terms of the information that you're getting. It's not a medium like film, or a painting where you can connect visually. And I really want to make sure that I'm not evoking the complete picture, either. Just enough of a suggestion that the reader can complete the picture for themselves, or fill out the scene for themselves. Because reading is such an active activity. You can’t just read and let it wash over you. You have to actively participate and engage in the questions that a book is asking.

ER: Real Americans is very different in its structure and scope than your debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin. I'm curious about the experience of writing it. Did the idea of it simmer for a while in your mind before you began writing Real Americans? And when did you know this would become a book?

RK: This is a really interesting question to think about because the word “idea” is almost too neat for what it felt like to write the book. It wasn't as though I had an idea for this book and then worked at it, carving out the shape I knew it was going to be. It started much more amorphously. And that's how all of my writing gets done. I never start out knowing what it's going to be. Maybe with some short stories I have a full picture of what they're going to be from start to finish. But with this, I started writing, I wondered if it was maybe a short story, but then it kept accumulating subjects, and kept accumulating questions. And at some point it became so unwieldy that I thought, “This is probably a book. This is probably something that I’m going to work on for a long time.” 

Goodbye, Vitamin is a book that's set over the course of one year and is pretty fragmented, which I think was reflective of my life at the time that I wrote it. I had to write it in very short periods of time. And it’s a book that someone could read in one sitting. 

But with Real Americans, as I started writing it and it started accumulating more questions and subjects, I was thinking, I want to challenge myself to write a book that is longer and is a little bit more traditional in terms of the narrative style. And instead of one year I want it to span many years, and I want it to be a different kind of reading experience. It's a book that you have to read over days rather than in one sitting. I also wanted to stay really open to what the book might be because I think when writing can surprise you, it’s more exciting. I would find it really boring if I knew exactly what was going to happen and just had to do it. 

ER: I'm curious about the structure, because you break it into three parts with three very distinct points of view. After you decided that this was a book, when did you figure out it was going to have three main characters with three different points of view? 

RK: I started writing the character of Lily, and then the character of Nick appeared, and then the character of May. So they appeared in the order that they wound up in the book. I always start from the character, I don't really start with the structure. I'm not imposing something from the beginning. It's more that I am exploring who the characters are and then figuring out where the plot is going, how they connect, all of these different things. So that was very intuitive for me in terms of the general structure. 

A lot of my work happens in revision. I went back after the characters had been written very loosely. I had them doing a lot of things that don't wind up in the book, actually. Lots of things were deleted in revision—in the 10th draft, the 20th draft. It’s in revision that I can really make the connections between all of the characters, and make things seem as though they were always that way. Make them seem sort of inevitable and like this thread was always there and this question was always there. 

For me, revision is where so much magic happens. I like both phases of writing—the generative phase and the revision phase—but I tend to prefer the revision phase because I feel like that's where you can really go deep and really understand where you were trying to go in the first place. So many possibilities open up when you move past that point of asking, What do I even put on this blank page? 

ER: Absolutely. You include a bit of magical realism in Real Americans. Is this a genre you've explored in some of your short stories? And is it something you're considering pursuing in future projects?

RK: I never want to label anything because I feel like a bit of a dabbler. I don't feel well-versed enough in the history of magical realism. But I write things that often have fantastical elements to them because those are the stories that I loved when I was a kid. One of my favorite books growing up was a book called Half Magic by Edward Eager. These siblings find a coin that grants only half a wish. They have to double their wishes in order to get their full wishes, and all sorts of hijinks ensue. But it's otherwise quite realist. Except for this magical component. Even in The Chronicles of Narnia, there's magic but there are also just really practical concerns—real life stuff going on. I love that. It just delights me, and I love reading it. So I haven't tried to stay purely realist. I think especially in my short stories, I love having these fantastical components. I love imagining our world, but slightly different; or a world in which something impossible is possible. 

Sometimes magic can help us see really mundane aspects of being human in a new way. Or it can shift our perspectives a little bit. Especially about what it means to be human. So I think that's why I gravitate to it. Because reading is all about shifting your perspective a little bit, of putting yourself into another consciousness. 

ER: In Real Americans you write, “Every powerful man, possessing everything already, wanted the thing he couldn’t have: time.” This motif of time and our finite amount of it on this planet is something I see emerge across a lot of your work. Writers often say they write about what keeps them awake at night. Is this idea of having finite time on this planet something that keeps you awake at night?

RK: I do think about time a lot because I was raised in America. And in America time is such a commodity. It's something that we talk about in these Capitalist terms. We say things like: you spend time, you waste time, you have time, you buy time. That's the language that I was raised with. And it was also programmed into me that a person should want to use their time wisely, to be productive with their time. 

In Real Americans I was interested in grappling with all of these American ideas. And this American idea of time actually intersects with the immigrant idea of time. There is a similar urgency. It's like, Okay, one generation sacrificed for this generation, so make sure you're using this wisely because time was sacrificed on your behalf. So there's this immigrant aspect, and there's the American aspect. 

But I have also been thinking more recently, and I think this book helped me articulate this idea, about how I just want to live my life in a different way from what I was raised with and programmed with. I don't want to keep viewing time as a commodity, as this thing to be maximized. We're all trying to make a living. There are all of these reasons we are busy. We don't have the sort of structures in place to give parents enough time. There's lots of stuff working against us to take our time away. 

But I think as a result, the things that go—the things that don't get to take up space in our lives—are the things that aren't good uses of time, essentially. Relationships or just daydreaming. Those feel kind of wasteful because of how I was raised. But what actually is important to me are my relationships and the things that can't be quantified or aren't productive uses of time. 

Writing itself is not an efficient use of time. It’s not a good way to make money. Even if you write a piece for a magazine, the per-word rate is not enough. There are so many hours of thinking that go into writing, and writing is made up of time. It can't be squeezed into time. You have to actually let yourself expand. You can’t rush it.

And I think for me, writing is a way to push back against the demand for more and faster all the time. Writing is this practice that I have that lets me go really slowly and just think really deeply about things. And that goes against this American belief in time. This belief in productivity..

ER: I love that. That’s so much of why I write, as well. What other things do you do to nourish your creativity that allow you to slow down? 

RK: I do things that are not on screens. I do a lot of writing by hand. I do The Artist’s Way morning pages—three pages of writing by hand every morning. I take a lot of walks. And cooking is something I love to do because it's so physical and it's just much more satisfying on most days than writing because you have something at the end of it. You can start and finish it.

I'm always looking for that balance of being in the thinking brain, but also being in the body. You hear so many stories of writers who had wives who did everything for them. Who cooked their meals and did all their chores. And I just think it's their loss, honestly, because the chores inform the writing, and it's often while I'm weeding or doing something physical that I make the connection that I need to make in the writing itself. There's something about moving the body that I think helps with the writing. 

ER: Absolutely. I'm curious about your definition of success as a writer. And failure too. How do you define those two things as a writer? 

RK: Recently I've been thinking about separating failure from shame. Failure always feels like it's so attached to shame. But I'm trying not to be so shame-oriented in my life, because that has been, historically, how I operate. And it's just not where I want to go in the future. I also think success, for me, isn’t about anything external. It's more about showing up every day for the writing, or most days. Whatever I set out for myself. And it does feel like a challenge often because the world is always trying to get our attention.

But the writing is important. It's where you get to be in this dialogue with yourself. It's where you get to explore the things that you're interested in. And nobody's going to give you permission for that. Nobody's going to just say, here's time for you to write. You have to really fight for that time. You have to create that time. You actually have to sit down and work on the writing, even when it feels unsatisfying. 

When Real Americans was coming out I had a moment where I just felt so overwhelmed because here was this thing I had worked on, and it was so private. And then suddenly I went from having total control over the work to not having any control. People read it however they want to and make up stories about what the book is. And that part felt so strange to me and so unnatural. 

And I realized the problem was that I was thinking of success in terms of this one vessel. It was like a glass. And inside this glass was how I felt about my own book, which is positive. I'm so proud I wrote it and I worked really hard at it, and it's the best that I could do. So that was in this glass. But, also, every time something good happened to the book or something bad happened to the book, it would adjust the levels in this one glass. And it would just feel really whipped around by outside opinion. 

And then it occurred to me that there are actually two containers, two vessels. There are two glasses. And in one glass is how I feel about the book. And it's totally full. I feel so good, so proud of the book. It was the best that I could do. And then in the other glass, it's everything else that happens to it. It's the good stuff. It's the bad stuff. And that's the glass that's going up and down getting whipped around. We'll see how that shakes out. But what matters is that I have this full glass, and nobody can take anything away from that. Whatever happens to the book has nothing to do with my full glass. Everyone will have a different perspective on the book and it really doesn't have anything to do with my own experience of it. Everyone gets to have their own experience.

RACHEL KHONG is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR; O, The Oprah Magazine; Vogue; and Esquire. Her second novel, Real Americans, was published by Knopf on April 30, 2024. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Cut, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and Tin House. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission District. She lives in California.