Maggie Su has a Ph.D. in fiction from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from Indiana University. She’s put these degrees to excellent use in her debut novel, “Blob: A Love Story.”
As former “BETA” on WPR guest Kevin Wilson has said, “‘Blob’ is a book that looks at identity and desire in profoundly interesting ways.” I couldn’t say that any better than Kevin, so that’s why I decided to use his blurb in this intro.
The protagonist of Su’s novel is Vi Liu. Vi is a young Taiwanese-American woman. One day, she discovers a responsive blob and attempts to mold it into her ideal partner — and I do mean “mold” in more ways than one.
Stay informed on the latest news
Sign up for WPR’s email newsletter.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Doug Gordon: What is the origin story behind “Blob: A Love Story?”
Maggie Su: It started seven years ago. I was in a Ph.D. workshop in Cincinnati, and I wrote a 10-page short story called “Bob the Blob.” I took a playwriting workshop over the summer, and it became a 10-minute play. And I just sensed that this idea was not done with me yet.
So I took a year off and read for my Ph.D. exam. I didn’t do any writing during that time. But I came back to it a year later as soon as my exams were finished, and I just started writing the novel.
Blob himself comes from my feeling that connections with other humans felt so foreign to me and so difficult to navigate.
And so I was like, let’s make this absurd conceit in which my main character finds a blob and tries to mold it into her perfect partner because that’s kind of how absurd it seemed to me that that’s how people find each other.
DG: It’s absurd and yet it’s also very funny and very original. Was the 1958 horror sci-fi movie, “The Blob” starring Steve McQueen an influence in any way?
MS: It wasn’t, but I had a lot of fun watching it after completing the first draft. And I got into horror movies around the time that I was writing “Blob,” so it was a nice mixture.
DG: The subtitle of your novel is “A Love Story.” How soon in writing the book did you realize that there was going to be this romantic theme to it?
MS: I actually pushed back against the subtitle for quite a long time.
It was my editor’s idea, but I think it fits so much with the idea of self-love and Vi’s journey. I think the readers are smart enough to figure that out and to recognize that this is not going to be their conventional romance.
DG: And that’s the beauty of it. It is a very unconventional romance. How did you go about creating the character of your protagonist, Vi?
MS: Vi is this sardonic, snarky, Taiwanese-American woman, Midwesterner that I had kind of always wanted to see growing up — that messy, biracial character who doesn’t have it all figured out, who isn’t the perfect Asian daughter — that was always something I was looking for.
And it’s something that’s kind of exploding in Asian-American media right now, which is really exciting. And so much of her experience growing up in a college town, her feelings of otherness are grounded in my own lived experiences. So a lot of that came from me, but I think she has a voice and a character of her own, kind of a heightened version of herself.
DG: Vi’s father is Taiwanese and her mother is white. What impact does this have on their relationship with each other and with Vi?
MS: Yeah, it has a huge impact, I think. She has so much love and respect for her parents. I wanted that to be apparent in the book because I feel like so many times we have these stories in the Asian-American canon, which are wonderful stories, but it’s a singular story of generational estrangement.
So I wanted to think about these characters, especially the father who has almost completely assimilated to Midwestern white life, and the mother who maybe has this color-blindness when it comes to race.
They both have such love and empathy for their daughter that they don’t understand and she struggles to recognize that they exist beyond her.
There’s a little bit of selfishness in the way that she thinks about other characters. So I really wanted to think about what it means to be biracial and also to create parents that felt non-stereotyped and are full, but yet still have all these flaws and blind spots themselves.
DG: What do you want readers to take away from “Blob: A Love Story”?
MS: This is a question I’ve struggled with because I feel like I’m hopeful that everyone can read it and take away whatever they want.
But I do think at the end of the day, it is a love story. It’s a story about healing and growth and trying to figure out how to be a person in the world.
Whether you’re Rachel, the popular white girl, whether you’re a blob, whether you’re Vi and struggling with all these other issues — how can we navigate those?
