Sometimes, all a book needs is a good title to hook a reader. Blob: A Love Story is definitely one that leaped out of the stacks of books sent over to Debutiful HQ. The title hooked me and the premise of Maggie Su‘s debut book lured me in.
“A young woman who tries to shape a sentient blob into her perfect boyfriend.”
It could have easily gone off the rails and missed the mark, but luckily for readers, Su created two of the most fully formed characters who were messy, original, and lovable despite all of their flaws.
I wanted to learn more about how the premise and characters were created and I chatted with Maggie Su to learn more about how Blob: A Love Story went from an unshaped idea to one of the more surreal debuts I’ve ever read.
Debutiful: Definitely. When does Blob: A Love Story come into your brain? Why? How?
Maggie Su: I was taking a fiction workshop and I was thinking a lot about connection, a lot about relationships, and how mysterious they are to me. I wanted to externalize that. I love speculative fiction and I had been writing a lot of flash fiction, so it started as a ten-page short story. Then I took a playwriting workshop and it became a ten-minute play. Then I took a year off of it to do my PhD exams and I eventually started writing it as a novel in 2020, during the pandemic. It just came out of that loneliness and isolation. I was also living in a basement apartment in Cincinnati. So I think the basement apartment is very much kind of inspired by that.
Debutiful: What is it about relationships and connections that mystify you?
Su: In popular culture and places like my mom’s romance novels that I read growing up, there’s this idea that you can kind of fully know and understand someone. And I think that’s something that Vi struggles with at the beginning of the novel. She wants to not just have a partner, but have a partner whose entire essence and motivations she’s able to really track and read. Bob is not just this blob that she can mold physically into her perfect man. She also thinks she can know him because she’s created him. That’s also part of the appeal for her.
Debutiful: Did Vi or The Blob come first?
Su: Vi came first. I wanted to give this character exactly what she thought she wanted. So she came first as a character who was looking and searching for this thing. Then the blob came as her test, her challenge, and also her reward.
Debutiful: Was the idea going to be about a woman just looking for connection or was the Blob always there?
Su: The Blob was always there.
Debutiful: And how do you do this? How do you pull off this surreal love story?
Su: It always starts where they’re not so much characters, but they’re more thought experiments. They’re kind of these puppets that I’m playing with. Especially writing short fiction and being invested in condensation. When I started writing the story as a novel, I realized that I had to put air into these characters to invest in their growth and development in a way that I hadn’t before.
I think I think it was my professor, Chris Batchelder, who said writers almost never befriend characters in short stories. I didn’t really buy that for the longest time and then I wrote a novel. It’s not necessarily that I’m friends with Vi, but I think you have to, in some ways, commit to a journey with a character for a longer period, and that gets easier when you’re able to have some sort of personal investment and have something at stake that’s not just kind of these concepts that you’re enacting upon them.
Debutiful: Part of Vi’s journey is also being mixed race. Was that also part of Vi’s story?
Su: Yeah, that’s always something I wanted to explore. My PhD was on Asian American literature and speculative fiction, and so much amazing contemporary Asian American literature has come out. There are these stories of immigration narratives, the mother-daughter relationship, and all of these fraught kinds of tropes that have been such a standard fare for what we think of as Asian Americans. So, I was kind of playing with those ideas. I hadn’t seen this messy, Midwestern Asian American woman who is biracial and struggling with that. How that interacts with her sense of otherness, her social anxiety, her depression, and how all of that kind of interacts together.
I wanted to have a messy, Asian American woman who’s not neat, who’s not Marie Kondo-ing. I was intentional in wanting to see that person and also reflect on how my own upbringing was.
Debutiful: What does it say that Vi is a mess and her journey doesn’t follow a lock-step path?
Su: I think that desire for control and that external validation is I think it’s very it’s very much part of her DNA. It’s kind of I played a lot with the flashbacks, and it’s interesting you say that it’s not like lock-step, because I didn’t want those in the book.
I was trying so hard to keep the book from being like, oh, here’s her past. It explains why she is the way she is. But I felt like you can’t understand a character without kind of understanding what was shaping her. As she’s shaping The Blob, we’re understanding the external forces that are shaping Vi. So, hopefully, the complexity comes through in that and it’s not just point A to point B. I didn’t want to present trauma and show the result directly from the trauma. Instead, I wanted to show her complicated memories that she’s holding on to. All of this guilt that she has for some reason, and how that kind of guilt, jealousy, and desire creates these questionable decisions.
Debutiful: The flashbacks reminded me about how we’re all blobs being shaped by things like our parents’ choices or school or friends. And how our past is our own Vi. Did The Blob ever have any say in his own journey or was Vi always in control?
Su: It’s funny. Initially, he was a much bigger part of the novel. I had The Blob point-of-view sections. Then I realized it was it’s VI’s story. It was very difficult for me to try to inhabit that type of blank slate he was. I was grateful that The Blob added some comic relief to the very heavy things she’s dealing with. His entrance into her life catalyzes a lot of her changes. It was wonderful to think about a person who comes into the world very new, very fresh. Then at the end of the book, you kind of see that he’s developing his own struggles. He does have this interiority already that isn’t something Vi can control. It’s what makes him human in the end and that is something she has to come to terms with as well.
Debutiful: It’s very much VI’s story. And yet, the novel’s subtitle, A Love Story, almost implies it’s both of their story. Why A Love Story?
Su: I wrote the dedication is like to my family and fellow blobs. I think we’re all kind of blobs in a way. Vi conceptualizes herself as sort of this unformed kind of creature.
Debutiful: As she is coming to view herself and love herself and learn to love The Blob, you balance a lot of heart and humor. How important was it for you to figure out how to handle all of the emotional weight in the book?
Su: It was really important. I think it’s it’s really great that people find it funny. I wasn’t quite sure that it would be that be received that way. I think it’s the best when it just kind of comes naturally. I enjoy juxtaposing different things together that are kind of contrasting. With The Blob and Vi, there’s this cynicism mixed with this optimism, and there’s this kind of fresh take on the world versus this woman who feels unlovable and like she wants to give up. I think putting them together and seeing what happens and the hijinks that ensue gives that balance.
I was writing a scene where The Blob, who’s now Bob, comes out of a pool, and it’s like a porn scene with there’s water rippling down. I think mixing the fun and following kind of where that led helped me. My thesis advisor from when I was writing the book reminded me to embrace the humor in situations, in writing, and in life as well.