Set in a small Massachusetts town, Vincent Yu‘s debut novel, Seek Immediate Shelter, follows a group of residents whose lives fracture in the moments after a false ballistic missile alert forces them to act on their most instinctive impulses. In the aftermath, each must confront the consequences of what they revealed about themselves, as the ripple effects of those choices unfold over years.
We asked Yu to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
The Animorphs series took up the vast majority of my early reading life. I have yet to experience a sense of thrill and wonder equivalent to that of stepping into the school cafeteria, finding it repurposed to host the Scholastic Book Fair, and seeing those incredible covers, with the human kids transforming into all manner of different animals. It was so, so cool. It was also a book series that plumbed serious moral questions, whose stakes were deadly high, and whose characters each possessed unique, complex, often hilarious traits.
What book helped you through puberty?
The Male Body: A Physician’s Guide. Kidding! I think it was Jane Eyre. I was a dreamy, romantic teenager, with a real soft spot for love stories. Jane Eyre was the first one I could recall reading in which both characters were specifically referred to as not particularly attractive, and whose courtship felt like a real journey, with each forced to reckon with their flaws and incompleteness, rather than two pre-formed characters gradually reaching some joint understanding. At the end, when Jane returns to a semi-blind, helpless Rochester and the power dynamic between them has completely shifted, my heart was a trembling mush.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
Four Treasures of the Sky. Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s astounding, heartbreaking story of a young girl navigating a hostile country during the Chinese Exclusion Act shed light on an aspect of American history that I was truly embarrassed not to know more about. We’d covered the broad strokes of the legislation in US history class, and I probably learned about the political milieu that led to its passage, but it was all sterile and academic. It took reading Zhang’s book to feel properly horrified and enraged.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
Goodness. And this class would be a single semester? That is a difficult
The Round House, Louise Erdrich; The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen; Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout; War and Peace, Tolstoy (okay this is definitely now longer than a single semester); The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner; All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren; Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy; Birds of America, Lorrie Moore; White Teeth, Zadie Smith; A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James; Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett; Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston. And far more, if I didn’t physically stop myself from typing.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
For me, literary influence has always been inextricably tied to anxiety. I just don’t know if it’s possible to love a book and not desire, in some way, to ape it. Equally compelling is the dread of doing so at the expense of my own voice and style.
That being said, I definitely wanted my characters to have the subtle humor and knotty complexity of those in Olive Kitteridge when I set out to write this book. I also wanted to include some scientific concepts to complement the literary references, as Andrea Barrett does so easily in all her work, but in particular, in Ship Fever. Finally, I wanted to capture the dynamic of flawed, messy, but fundamentally loving families, as in Franzen’s The Corrections.
What books are on your nightstand now?
All Our Evenings by Ruthvika Rao
The Topeka School, Ben Lerner
The Antidote, Karen Russell
Cold Peace, Michael Doyle