Maggie: Or, A Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar, Katie Yee
Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar is a debut novel exploring an unnamed Chinese American woman grappling her husband having an affair, a cancer diagnosis, and handling motherhood – she decides to name her tumour after her husband’s lover, Maggie. It is full of heartbreak, yet also of wit and astute observations. At only 200 pages, this is a short and cutting read.
Yee chooses not to have any chapters, and to instead tell this story in little snapshots with breaks between stories, bouncing between the painful and the silly over the course of a few months. These snapshots reflect how fractured her life has become in the wake of these tragedies. The narrator’s way of coping with her situation is through darkly humorous moments like imagining a “Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual” for her husband’s new lover. Humour is essential to the telling of this story because, despite its tragedies, Maggie focuses a lot on the mundanity of life, particularly in motherhood – the school runs, the night routines. How life must always go on as a mother, even when everything else is falling apart. Additionally, Maggie is interspersed with stunning retellings of mythology, primarily Chinese, that she tells her children to get them to sleep, just as her mother had done with her.
Many of the subtle observations made in Maggie made me pause and reflect – they were so cuttingly precise, so ordinary yet things most people would never stop to consider. Despite the writing style being quite detached, it is easy to grasp a sense of the narrator’s character and still root for her. Yee so wonderfully shows that friendship is one of the greatest loves of all – the narrator’s best friend Darlene was brought to life in these pages and such a gem, always there in such deeply sensitive and understanding ways for her.
I would’ve preferred this to have chapters and for the snapshots to be longer sometimes to flesh out the characters and storyline. The fragmentation meant emotion felt lacking at points too – the anger and sadness felt rather tame given her circumstances. But this is an impressive debut with so much potential in its vivid anecdotes and sharp observations – I look forward to seeing what Yee produces next.
Editorial Picks
