Would You Steal Her Story?
13 Aug
Written by Lou Nylander
For our latest Wildflowers book club, we read Yellowface by R.F. Kuang. We started split roughly down the middle on whether we'd even recommend it. By the end, the vast majority of us had come round to a yes. What we agreed on from the first page: the narrator cannot be trusted, and Kuang knows exactly what she's doing with that.
The book, in brief
Yellowface follows June Hayward, a struggling white writer, and Athena Liu, her spectacularly successful Yale classmate. When Athena chokes to death in front of her, June steals Athena's unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own. As well as. the book, she also starts repackaging herself. This propels her foray into living her life as a character that she concocts that is racially ambiguous in the process. Told entirely from June's self-justifying point of view, the novel is a masterclass in unreliable narration, forcing you to sit inside the logic of someone doing something indefensible while, occasionally, still finding yourself rooting for her audacity.
What we talked about
Is June a monster, or a product of a broken system?
This is where the room split. Some of us couldn't look past the theft, the deception, the sheer nerve of it. Others found themselves half-admiring her scrappiness, the skulduggery and her dogged refusal to give up. Even while knowing that's exactly the trap Kuang sets. June suffers real psychological consequences for what she's done, and that suffering softened the group's judgement more than we expected going in.
Why do we perform morality for an audience?
The book's real subject might not be about plagiarism at all - I think we centred on the fact that the core tenant is about social validation. June's spiral is driven as much by what her followers think as by any internal reckoning with guilt. We ended up on a bigger question: why do people commit genuinely heinous acts while still anxiously tracking their social currency? What does that say about where we've located our sense of right and wrong? Is it inside ourselves, or in the eyes of an audience?
Why can't the women in this book celebrate each other?
Every female relationship in the novel is fractious, self-serving, unequal. Nobody gets to be happy for someone else's success without envy creeping in. We kept circling back to this…is it commentary on the publishing industry specifically, or on something much wider?
Is any of this actually satire?
This was the detail that recontextualised the whole conversation. Kuang has said in interviews that very little of the book is invented. The industry behaviour, the yellowface pen-name phenomenon, the online pile-ons, are all drawn from real publishing life. Once you hold that frame, it stops being an absurdist exaggeration and starts being something closer to reportage in disguise.
Why it matters for Wildflowers
This book is about ambition, envy, and what we're willing to do and justify to be seen. It's about the stories women tell about each other, and the ones we're too threatened to tell honestly. That felt like a Wildflowers conversation to me.
The next book club is coming. Watch this space.
Lx
Image: StockCake