But the Girl
‘A wonderful new novel’ Brandon Taylor
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
‘I used to have this line I saved and brought out for grant applications and writers festivals – that having been Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Esther Greenwood all my life, my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me.’
Girl is spending the spring at an artist’s residency in Scotland. Far from her home in Australia and her tight-knit Malaysian family, she is meant to be writing a postcolonial novel and working on a PhD on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. But she can’t stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of her parents and grandmother who raised her. How can she reconcile their dreams for her with her lived reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a ‘postcolonial novel’? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity but learning to understand the people who shaped you?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This brilliantly introspective debut novel sees an unnamed Melbourne PhD student travel on a scholarship to England and Scotland, reckoning with the complexities of her Malaysian-Australian background, her family’s violent histories and the persistent challenges of objectification. Without being heavy-handed, But The Girl explores how the past becomes ingrained in our identity, and influences our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us. It’s a tapestry of modern experiences, weaving together references from sources as diverse as reality television and the Bible; the narrator likens herself to Lot’s wife from the book of Genesis, always looking back and longing for the past. As a writer, Jessica Zhan Mei Yu emerges as an advocate for empathy, gently nudging her readers to remember the power of understanding and the significance of our individual stories.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yu's masterly debut follows an Australian Malaysian woman awarded a scholarship to visit the U.K., where she attends a month-long residency to work on a postcolonial novel. The unnamed narrator goes on leave from her literature PhD studies and settles in Scotland, where she meets other artists in the program, most of whom are white, and struggles to fit in. One, named Clementine, befriends her, but also mocks her in front of their peers by suggesting she knows something about the disappeared Malaysia Airlines flight MAS370: "Are you covering something up for the government? We can't trust them. How can we trust you?" The group also complains about popular artists getting "cancelled" over their racism. Clementine further disenchants the narrator by offering thoughtful feedback to others, but focusing her critique of the narrator's work on the narrator's "diverse" identity. After a bout of writer's block, the narrator eventually begins writing about her parents' lives and how they came to Australia, drawing inspiration from her belief that as a second-generation immigrant daughter it is her responsibility to carry and preserve her family's difficult past. Zhan's bildungsroman brims with striking insights and fully realized characters, exploring with nuance and self-deprecating humor the fraught reality of navigating academic and artistic spaces as a woman of color. This signals the arrival of a bold new voice.
