The life of the author has often been framed as an idyll: brooding academia, intellectual prestige, craftsmanship forged through grandiose pain. Authors who seek to elude the general public’s fascination with their lives seem to draw more intrigue than their work. Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut But The Girl delves into this, through the perspective of a nameless young Malaysian Australian writer who is increasingly troubled by her lifelong love for Sylvia Plath.
Yu’s Künstlerroman – documenting an artist’s coming of age – was shortlisted for the 2020 Victorian premier’s prize for literature in the unpublished manuscript category and was picked up for publishing by acclaimed US novelist Brandon Taylor. It follows the narrator, referred to only as Girl, as she travels from Australia to Scotland for an artists residency. Girl is meant to be writing “a postcolonial novel” and a paper on Plath; instead, she does very little writing but quite a lot of thinking – about her upbringing in Australia and her migrant parents’ struggle, but also her relationship with Plath, a writer she has obsessed over since girlhood.
Yu guides the reader through Girl’s descent into, and return from, lonely madness at the residency – a parallel to Plath’s novel The Bell Jar and its protagonist Esther Greenwood. Growing up, Girl saw herself in Esther – a highly anxious, high-achieving writer rebelling against gender expectations in her melancholy. But upon rereading The Bell Jar, Girl confronts the internal dissonance of dedicating her life’s work to an author who, at one point, describes Esther as “yellow as a Chinaman” and who sees a “big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face”. Girl is hurt by this realisation: “I felt betrayed because in the most routine, narcissistic, obvious way, I had thought that I was Esther Greenwood.”
Yu untangles the knots within Girl’s self-perception – as a woman, a reader, a writer, a daughter, a Malaysian, an Australian – and topples over her realisations like a series of dominoes. Girl’s romantic notion that an artist is “a person that floated above normal society” is shattered. On the retreat, she’s left to deal with micro-aggressions against her background and her body: a fellow resident tells Girl that “diversity is kind of like hot now, like it’s the new trend”; a white married man tells her, pointedly, “I know a thing or two about Asian women.” When Clementine, a painter at the residency, invites Girl to sit for a portrait, the novel’s linear structure is interrupted by the narrator’s inner monologue, where Plath is often front of mind.
The work of all artists, Yu insinuates, is solipsistic; engaging with anything outside one’s mind cannot be done unless through the lens of the self. “As much as I thought of Clementine as a kind of Doreen figure, she thought of me as a sort of Betsy type – a type and not a person,” Girl thinks. “That was the problem with always identifying with the protagonist of a coming-of-age novel, no one else but you ever got to come of age.”
Clementine’s portrait of Girl, painted over a portait of Plath, is symbolic of just that. As she sits for hours each day, Girl escapes her writing and the reader slips into her stream of consciousness. We find Girl isolated and exhausted. Like many children of migrants, her mind floats in a liminal space, arrested by a crisis of place as profound as a crisis of identity. Neither Malaysia or Australia feel like home (“What if the finger that turned the globe had slipped?”). Instead, home is Girl’s family matriarch Ah Ma, and her parents Ma and Ikanyu. Purpose, then, is making the most of opportunity inherited from their suffering.
Girl is struggling with how to reconcile her family’s expectations with her reality, as well as the pressure on her to play the role of the “lucky migrant” on her Commonwealth-funded retreat: grateful, deferential, unchallenging. “I was getting sick of simulating enthusiasm about everything,” she observes. Despite her moral opposition to the Commonwealth, Girl must rely on the scholarships it offers to the colonies; feigning delight in the face of such tension is “the exchange you make … your facial expressions for their funding”.
A postcolonial novel is just a “theoretical, distant and impressive” label for a book about immigrants, Girl observes at one point. But Yu’s debut is neither theoretical nor distant, though it is impressive. But The Girl’s pull comes not from plot, but from layers of concept and complex narration.
Yu writes Girl’s fascination with English as sadomasochistic: “I also wanted to be the one to hurt it back, to teach it new tricks, to stand over it, to win its favour, to know it better than it knew me, to mangle it and deform it and remake it into my own image.” Yu is the writer Girl wishes to be – remaking, in her own image, the young female protagonist, the Künstlerroman, the postcolonial novel, and the art of writing itself.
But The Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu is out now in Australia (Penguin Random House, $32.99) and the UK (Jonathan Cape, £16.99). It will be published in the US in March 2024
