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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. Yolk is a young adult novel from bestselling author Mary H.K. Choi about a Korean American college student named Jane. Jane was lured to New York by glamorous media portraits of the city, and she really does love it. Even though her apartment is cockroach-infested, she has a freeloading roommate she can't get rid of and no idea what she wants to major in. Jane is also struggling with an eating disorder and body dysmorphia. She thinks she's doing a good job at hiding it from everyone, but her older sister, June.

June lives in New York too, but the sisters don't see each other much. Jane thinks that June is self-righteous, stubborn, and uncool. June thinks that Jane is self-absorbed and chaotic, but in spite of their differences, these sisters come together when Jane learns that June has been diagnosed with cancer and doesn't want to tell their parents. According to Variety, the book was acquired last year by PICTURESTART the production company behind recent films like Theater Camp, Strays, and Cha Cha Real Smooth.

The planned television series is still early in development, so you have plenty of time to pick up the book before it comes out. First, for some more background on the story, here's my interview with Mary H.K. Choi.

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I mentioned the YA novel, but it-- I read the whole thing. If anybody's thinking like, "Oh, it's not for me," I think it's a great novel for adults to read, honestly. It doesn't shy away from talking really explicitly about important topics, disordered eating, drug use, cancer, generational trauma, but you do have to think about your audience because younger readers will read this as well. How do you think about your audience when you're tackling really tough subjects?

Mary Choi: I actually do think that there is something almost arbitrary seeming about literary taxonomies, especially as it relates to, I feel like, young adults or like new adults, which is another designation or like adults. I definitely see the reasoning behind whether or not you would want a content warning for younger audiences like middle grade or even grade school.

I think that, for me, I've always been really interested in coming-of-age stories, and so my stories have centered around people in their 20s where it's this weird no man's land purgatory, where all the expectations of adulthood are foisted upon you, but you're still kind of, at least in my experience, new on planet Earth enough that you have a lot of different issues and things are happening for the first time and maybe you've already quasi- made a mess of things.

I tend to write about things like student loan debt or credit card debt or mental illness or anxiety and things like that, but for this book, specifically, given the eating disorder narrative and also just the narrative around sickness, I did put a warning in the front of the book as a letter, basically just-- not alerting, but just a note to check in to say that this story may be emotionally expensive for certain readers and to just be gentle with yourselves depending on what your own histories are. That's where I land on it.

It's funny because I'm also now working on an adult book and there's something just tawdry sounding about that. I was just like, "Ooh, it's an adult book, and I don't really know what that means." Yes, totally. The people I just have in mind are anyone coming to terms with this new phase of life. I don't think that excludes too many people. I think a lot of people are doing something for the first time ever, like along the entire duration of mortality, I guess.

Alison Stewart: At the center of the story are these two sisters who live in New York, they don't really see each other. What was it that you wanted to explore about sisterhood in this novel and the idea of sisterhood and estrangement?

Mary Choi: There's actually nothing more harrowing than knowing someone for so long and being known for a long time. Especially if you have these grandiose delusions of the new you you're going to be in the big city or whatever. I love the tension that these two girls-- because they're so enmeshed and because they're so in love with each other, they almost can't speak because the portent of rejection is too painful. All the trespasses that we do against our siblings are just egregious.

I have an older brother and-- Oh my God. First of all, we were just screaming at each other for decades and then maybe being mean to each other in school or whatever, or trying to shame each other in front of friend groups. A lot of that really does carry a lot of scars. For Jane who moved to New York after June was there, her older sister, because they'd been compared to each other so much, which does happen to siblings all the time of like, "Oh, this is the pretty one," or, "This is the smart one," or even worse, "Your sister's the smart pretty one," that kind of thing, and so when Jane moved to New York, she just wanted a completely blank slate.

In order to do that, she felt that she had to cut off all contact with the person who knows who she "really is". Of course, we come to find out later in the book that they're still keeping tabs on each other and they're still-- It's almost like when someone brings up an ex-boyfriend and you're like, "How dare you?" Except that relationship is their sister.

Alison Stewart: We're not giving too much away because we talked about how one sister is diagnosed with cancer and it changed the alchemy of their relationship. As you're writing us, did these two sisters come to love each other, or have they always loved each other?

Mary Choi: They've always loved each other. That tenuous line between loving and hating, it's just like that obsession is baked into it. They only ever had each other as children of immigrants who are complete workaholics and emotionally distanced and perhaps not very verbally supportive because-- as was the case in my house. I had a language barrier between me and my parents, and so my brother and I are felted together as these aliens in our own home, where our family are like aliens in the larger context of the city or the state or the country, because I didn't move to America until I was in my teens.

Because of that proximity and because you are surviving this together, it's like you love each other so much, but the prospect that the person closest to you would not be accepting of you is too painful to even begin to explore. It's almost like dumping someone when you see the sort of getting dumped on the horizon where you're like, "Ooh, like me first," where they mutually repel each other because the pain of being rejected outright is just too much, which is to say that they love each other so hard that they're constantly butt hurt and berating the other in their minds.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Mary H.K. Choi, the name of the book is Yolk, and the novel really is rooted in the Asian American experience and the Korean American experience. Was there something very specific you wanted to make sure you included in this novel and then something that you swore up and down, hard no, not happening, in this novel? [chuckles]

Mary Choi: Well, yes. There are so many different narratives, and I didn't want to portray this whole thing as these are Koreans and this is Korea in its totality. This is a story about a very specific family within the larger landscape of the Korean diaspora and even beyond that, like the Asian American diaspora. The one thing that was really important to me, and it was so important that I was just like, "This is what the title is," is that Yolk denotes my feeling of a speck of yellow, a wash in a sea of whiteness. That was my experience when I immigrated to Texas of all places, especially in a suburb of San Antonio, not necessarily a metropolis.

That's just sort of how I felt like. The sky was so big and everyone was white and I was yellow. I just really felt that. Then the other part of that too is that the yellow part was the part that I, as someone who does identify with having an eating disorder, didn't eat for a really, really long time as well. Then that's also tied into the wordplay of being yoked together like beasts of burden that are just saddled with each other. As a part of the Asian American experience, it's really strange in this idea of this American binary or in, I guess, American genocide history.

It's like Asians don't really have a place and it's so uncomfortable and it's so painful. Given all of these hate crimes and the shooting in Atlanta and everything, it's like we're not white enough. We're not white at all, in fact, but our proximity to whiteness as viewed by Black and brown people is also so painful. There's this liminal quality to where we as Asian people don't really know if we count as minority enough or having had enough awful violence happen to us so far, given the tapestry of brutality of this country. That's something I did want to talk about.

The metaphor with Jane is that she suffers from not wanting to have a body and feeling disembodied all the time, and so she flings her body into circumstances within New York like, "Oh, there's a scary man." Maybe she'll just fling her body in that man's way to see if there's something interesting about his power dynamic or something. The eating disorder too is a part of that, that not feeling embodied because that erasure is just so vaporizing. The part about Korean-- [crosstalk] Yes, go ahead.

Alison Stewart: I want to dive in because you mentioned the eating disorder and I want to get to this book because I don't want to run out of time, that you write about it in such a harrowing way, in such a raw way, and it doesn't really happen till later in the book. I'm just going to read a little bit you write about Jane. "I swallow and swallow until my stomach is distended and my head aches from repeatedly grinding away at the mouth effing. I stack wheat thins three high and bite into them. I put the flattened part of the Nilla wafers together, make little spaceships and destroy them and do it 10 times more, 20 times more."

It goes on to say, "I'm thrilled at the devastation destroying beautiful things so carelessly and so fast. The mac and cheese is a paste. It's gloriously gluey, sticking my mouth together, cementing all the sharper foods, lending a contrast, some cushioning. I crash-land a Nilla spaceship in the tub and scoop it in my mouth. I eat a fifth donut and then I top it with the last one."

This scene of her binging is so hard to read. I wanted to know what it was that you wanted to express and for people to understand about disordered eating, and why did you wait so late in the book.

Mary Choi: Yes, eating disorders are my experience and bulimia is my experience. I really did think it was important to show the devastation and the true violence and also the self-loathing aspect of it, just as a calling card to say that, "Hey, the meta-narrative of this is--" because I knew I'd be asked about it. Is it like, "This is my story. If this is also your story, please know that I have a little light on in the rec center. Come see me if you see me and I'll see you"? That was a really important signal as to why it comes later in the book is that eating disorders are so insidious.

I didn't know that I was still bulimic for a long time because I wasn't purging, but I would still exercise bulimic and I was still incredibly body obsessive and incredibly self-hating. Actually, in a lot of ways, the eating disorder is right there, bang, on the first two pages of this book where she is walking into a restaurant and she sits down and she's scared of the person that she's sitting next to and she's immediately comparing and despairing their bodies and feeling completely disembodied and terrible.

To me, if you have that also in your mind, I'm not trying to pathologize you and I'm certainly not a therapist, but maybe stick a flag in that and see where you are in the spectrum of this. There's so much pressure to look a certain way and there's so much pressure that's just such an inside job. That's really important to me when I talk to young people. Just like "You don't have to fix it, you don't have to do anything about it necessarily, but if you're ready to know, then try not to unknow it, and then eventually please try to seek help."

Alison Stewart: I do want to point out, in the back of your book, you have resources, including the National Eating Disorders Association, the largest nonprofit organization. I just would like to read that number in case anybody needs it right now. The number is 800-931-2237. That was my conversation with Mary H.K. Choi, author of the book, Yolk, which is currently being developed for a series adaptation.

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Alison Stewart: Up next, another book turned series. Charmaine Wilkerson joins us for her novel Black Cake. Stay with us. This is All Of It.

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