Emily: It’s time for another installment of everyone’s favorite queer girl book club, Queer Girl Book Club! This time around we’re talking about Fiona and Jane, a sort of novel/sort of linked short story collection (we can talk about what exactly it is as we chat) about two friends. You guessed it. Their names are Fiona. And Jane.
So I chose this book because I typically enjoy linked short stories, and I love books about female friendship. Fiona Lin and Jane Shen have been best friends since the second grade. Both Fiona and Jane are Taiwanese American women growing up in Los Angeles with different but equally tumultuous family lives. As with most friendships, there are moments in time when Fiona and Jane grow closer to one another, and other periods of time where they drift apart.
SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!
Maybe the format of this book is the best place to start. As I was reading this book, I definitely felt like it leaned more towards short story collection than cohesive novel. Some of that has to do with the fact that this book is not ordered chronologically. A lot of it has to do with the fact that the narrative style changed story to story. How did you feel about the structure of this book? And did you read it as more of a collection of stories, or did it feel like a novel?
Kelli: So, I have to admit that I was entirely unaware that these chapters were supposed to be read as individual stories. I didn’t know anything about this book other than that it was about Taiwanese American best friends and that it was queer. I went into this thinking it was a novel, and I read the entire thing as a novel, and I think that probably did impact my experience a bit because I was definitely feeling the disjointedness.
I should also note that I listened to this on audio, and there was just one narrator. I think if I had been reading the physical book, I might have noticed a bit more when the chapters changed and became new stories, whereas listening to it, it just felt like one long story told in shifting perspectives. It did jump around in time a lot, but I’ve read other books that do that without being split into individual stories, so… I don’t know. I guess I’d say it feels more like a novel, the caveat being that I totally approached it as a novel.
Emily: Yeah, I kind of agree. I feel like if this story was told in order, this would just straight up be a novel. Not that novels never shift back and forth through time, but the shifting back and forth in this case sort of affected the theme/focus of each chapter for me, even more than the change in perspective/narration did.
For the audiobook, I do wonder if the story is narrated by one narrator because this is all told from Jane’s perspective, in a sense. That’s sort of how I read it anyway. Jane, I think, is the only character who narrates in the first person. Fiona’s chapters are told in third person, and while we get a look inside Fiona’s head in these chapters, we also get into other people’s heads as well. Jane’s chapters are more closely told from her perspective. Which made me wonder if Jane is sort of shifting into omniscient narrator territory in the Fiona chapters.
Kelli: This is another thing that I honestly didn’t notice with the audiobook, probably because it was the same narrator and I wasn’t keeping track of the perspective. This is starting to make me sound like I was not doing a very good job reading, but I promise I was paying attention!!! Though I guess this makes sense when at the end we get Jane doing the classic “I’m writing a book about us, and that is the very book you are holding in your hands” moment.
Emily: We love that (we don’t).
Kelli: How did you feel about Fiona and Jane as individual characters? Were you more interested in one of them than the other?
Emily: Well, this kind of goes back to the narration style, I think. I think we’re supposed to relate more to Jane than Fiona. But Fiona does tend to make bigger, more daring choices and therefore bigger, more catastrophic mistakes. Which makes her more interesting to read about in a sense. But does that make me like her more? Nope. I think Jane is written in a way that makes her easier to understand. How did you feel?
Kelli: I would agree with that. I think Jane also seems a little bit more self-aware, whereas Fiona keeps repeating the same mistakes and not totally recognizing the consequences of her actions. Fiona is the selfish one, and as a reader it’s always harder to relate to the character who is being, for lack of a better term, a jerk. Even when they’re in high school, Jane is the one who is protecting Fiona, putting Fiona first. Fiona is like the sun and Jane is one of the planets revolving around her.
But I think that for both of these characters, there’s a central issue, and that issue is the relationship (or non-relationship) each of them have with their fathers. This is the part where we psychoanalyze characters in a book in the way we are often tempted to do in real life. In real life it’s not really okay to do that. But this is fiction, so. I don’t feel bad.
What did you think of the way the author writes about the impact the absence of their fathers has on both of these women? What about familial relationships in general?
Emily: Again, I thought the Jane thing was really interesting and complicated and the one I remember more vividly. The first story in the collection (or the first chapter in the novel) is Jane visiting her father in Taiwan. Jane’s father introduces her to his boyfriend, and basically comes out to her and explains that he’s not coming home to Jane and her mother because he’s gay. Then Jane goes home and outs her father to her mom. This was a very emotional moment for Jane, and one she regrets for the rest of her life, because she feels like her actions make her responsible for her father’s death (her father dies by suicide shortly after). For me, the fact that the story starts there and we see Jane reflect back on that moment during different parts of her life made that super impactful.
Fiona’s absent father is impactful too, but (to get totally Freudian) I feel like we see her relationship and feelings about her father play out more in her relationships with other men—which are generally bad. Bad bad bad.
Kelli: Yes, for sure. Fiona spends the book basically hopping from one relationship to another; she is the sort of person who wants to be a serial monogamist but she keeps choosing awful people to shack up with. She is drawn to men who simultaneously give her tons of attention while also being halfway out the door, “artist types” who are fascinating and messy. We were just talking the other day on the podcast about how artsy dudes are often the worst type of dudes, and I think their excuse for being terrible often comes back to being ~passionate~, and Fiona falls for this again and again until she finally settles on a dude who seems kind of boring but who sticks around. It’s kind of sad, though, because it seems like Fiona never really gets a chance to define herself outside of the relationships she’s in.
I also think Jane’s complicated relationship with her father and what happens to him is more interesting, probably because it’s less typical than what’s going on with Fiona. Another element that complicates things for Jane is that she, too, grows up to identify as queer. I thought it was really interesting that she has to wrestle with queerness as something that defines her and also as the thing that turned her away from her father — though really, it was his absence more than the queerness in and of itself.
I think that’s a good transition into talking about the ways in which this book explores being a queer woman dating. If I recall correctly, Jane never states a specific sexuality, though the people around her often refer to her as a “lesbian” (despite the fact that she also enjoys sex with and has had relationships with men). I enjoyed reading about this in-between space because obviously it’s the space in which I find myself existing. How did you feel?
Emily: I did think that her sexuality and grappling with her sexuality was going to be a more central role in the novel, which is why I chose this book for QGBC, but… I’m not mad that it’s not the central point of conflict for her. Like, yeah, there is a point where she wrestles with her queer identity, but overall across all the chapters/stories, she just is queer. And I loved her relationship with Won.
Kelli: I also loved her relationship with Won! The moment when they came out to each other as high schoolers was so sweet.
Emily: I feel like every queer character needs a queer support system. And it was nice to see her have a positive (or mostly positive) relationship with a gay man, despite her complicated feelings about her father.
IDK—just as an aside, my mother left my father for a woman, so I related to all of this so much. That’s probably another reason it stuck with me.
But let’s talk about Jane being a queer woman dating. Can we talk about Carly?
Kelli: Yeah, so… Carly is the worst. For one thing, she’s a lesbian who is very intense about her hatred for men to the point where she judges Jane for even engaging in relationships, sexual or otherwise, with men. I get that she has trauma around her own father (who killed her mom? dark), but the way she projects that onto other people isn’t fair. BIPHOBIC MUCH? Additionally, Carly is white, and the first time she meets Won, she decides it’s a good idea to make a joke about Asian people eating dogs? Like… Carly sucks.
But then we get another complicated moment. During the argument that leads to their breakup, Jane slaps Carly across the face. After this happens, Carly won’t speak to Jane, and Jane is devastated. I found this really interesting and sort of horrifying, because as we’ve said, Jane is the character we relate to the most throughout the book — but in this moment when she hits her girlfriend, I was totally thrown for a loop, even though I straight up hated Carly. It was hard to get back on the same page as Jane after that happened. One of the other books we previously read for QGBC was In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, and in that book Machado details her abusive relationship with a woman and offers a lot of troubling information about the differences in the way we treat physical violence in same-sex relationships versus heteronormative relationships. I found myself thinking about it reading this moment — like, was it easier for me to forgive Jane committing an act of physical violence against her partner than it would’ve been for me to forgive a man doing the same thing?
How did you feel about that moment?
Emily: Yes, I thought about In the Dream House a lot when I was reading about this relationship. Carly was controlling and jealous similar to the way Machado’s girlfriend (can’t remember her name) was. It was a very toxic relationship. But when Jane resorts to physical violence, I think we see that the relationship is probably toxic on both ends. And at the end of the day, even if Carly is horrible (and make no mistake, she is horrible) she doesn’t deserve to get smacked.
But yeah, speaking of that racist moment (I know, I feel like we’re jumping all around here), this book is also looking at racism and microaggressions Asian Americans are far too used to having to deal with. For instance, when Fiona tells someone she’s Taiwanese, and their response is “Oh, I love Thai food!” Or just the fact that Fiona had to change her name from “Ona” to “Fiona” when she moves to America, because “Ona isn’t a real name.” What did you think about the way this book confronts racism against Asians?
Kelli: Well, it should be noted that we are both white girls so our opinions on this subject should be taken with five thousand grains of salt, BUT, I thought this book did a good job of highlighting the various forms of racism against Asian Americans in this country, particularly those targeting Asian American women. There’s a moment when Fiona is dating a new guy (I believe he’s Puerto Rican?) and he tells her she reminds him of an Asian student he once had, which prompts her to ask him if he thinks all Asian women look the same — and then she asks him how many Asian women he’s dated. This is a telling moment because Fiona doesn’t even have to directly bring up fetishization or explain it to the reader; it’s an issue that affects many Asian women here (American or otherwise) to the point that any time Fiona dates a non-Asian guy, even if he isn’t white, it’s something she automatically has to be on the lookout for.
I like that this book doesn’t have one big specific moment “about” racism. Instead, the things that come with being Asian American and what it’s like to live that experience are threaded throughout each story, sometimes in the form of microaggressions, sometimes in moments of connection between the various AAPI characters.
Emily: Totally agree. Uh… is there anything else we haven’t covered that we need to talk about or should we rate this sucker?
Kelli: Let’s rate it! I’ll go first. I’m going to give this book three stars, I think. I honestly would love to turn the clock back and buy the physical copy to see how that would have changed my experience of reading it and therefore my reaction to it, but as it stands, I felt a little bit like this was a lot of decent pieces that never really came together for me in a satisfying way. If we could give half stars I’d go 3.5, but I feel like a 4 is a little too high for this when I came away from it feeling dissatisfied. Also, the ending with the “this is the book Jane wrote” thing… made me want to die.
Emily: Yeah, I feel like the author used the linked stories concept to tell a disjointed story that really should have just been better organized into a novel. And as with most story collections, there are some stories I enjoyed more than others. So yes, I will also rate it three stars.
What are we reading next?
Kelli: We’re reading The Memory Librarian by Janelle Monáe! This short story collection will expand upon the Afrofuturistic world Monáe introduced us to in her 2018 album Dirty Computer. We can’t wait!
Emily: See you then!