Kitten by Stacey Yu, one of Debutiful’s Most Anticipated Debut Books, follows protagonist Katie, who is fresh out of university and desperate not to enter the adult world quite yet. When she goes to the Hamptons with her boyfriend James, she becomes instantly enamored with his cat Silver.
Across Katie’s dynamics with James and Silver, we understand the wound of her upbringing: her enmeshment with her mother, her anxious attachment, and her tendency to seek what is familiar over what is healthy or good. In Silver, she sees the potential for the eternal and pure childhood that she so craves, but she also knows that this desire is impossible.
Katie wants to be both left alone and folded into the world. She wants to be free of responsibility but she also wants to have purpose and grounding. Ultimately, she has to set herself (and Silver) free from these impossible oppositions, and choose a path forward.
Stacey and I spoke about how this tender coming-of-age novel came to be, and the redemptive quality of small, simple choices. The conversation below has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Lior Torenberg: One of the themes that stood out to me was this idea of being free from responsibility. Katie wants to be like her boyfriend’s cat Silver. She wants to be held and pampered. She doesn’t want anyone to expect anything from her. But on the other hand, as we see with her mom, this same sensation can be smothering. Can you speak to that?
Stacey Yu: Love and care and smothering are so closely connected. We form our ideas of what love looks like from how we experience it in childhood. I wanted Katie’s relationship with Silver to mirror and reinforce the one she had with her mom, and to a certain extent, her relationship with her boyfriend James, too. He puts her in the childish position that she sought out, but he might have sought that out in her, too.
Sometimes we don’t know what kind of love we really want and need, and we only learn that it’s not the right love when we go through it. Katie is getting the type of love she thinks she wants from James, but over the course of the book, we see her rebelling against that.
LT: And Katie is so young. She’s still figuring so much out. People of all ages, but especially at her age, want to act out and have tantrums. Silver has tantrums, too—constantly wanting to escape and go swimming in the ocean. This may be a spoiler, but there is a pivotal scene where Katie lets Silver out of the house and the cat darts to the sea. Do you think Katie did that on purpose?
SY: It’s a tricky question. I’ve written so many different versions of this scene and thought about different ways that it could play out. In earlier drafts, I do think she did it on purpose, and her relationship with Silver was more one of animosity and jealousy. But that wasn’t right. I wanted their relationship to be more about understanding and connection, childish whimsy and delight.
So I think it’s not exactly clear whether Katie let Silver run to the ocean on purpose. But maybe it doesn’t matter; she could have made a childish mistake, consciously or unconsciously, without fully understanding the consequences.
LT: What you’re essentially writing is a character who is undergoing arrested development, and I imagine it’s difficult to write change for a character who is so actively resisting change. On a craft level, how did you approach that?
SY: It is hard to have a more passive protagonist. I feel like the first thing you learn when writing fiction is that you have to make your characters do things. In my earlier drafts, Katie wasn’t doing anything at all—no one would have read that book!
The balance I had to strike was retaining her passivity while putting her in situations where she would have to do things and take action, almost against her will. In the same way that, if we suppress our thoughts for long enough, they will jump out in the most inopportune moments. For Katie, that’s how action comes about for her—under extreme pressure.
She is so used to being infantilized by her mother, but there is a part of her that desperately wants to act. When James invites her into his life and his social circles, she has this breakthrough where she realizes: I don’t want this. And that leads her to make some catastrophic and misinformed decisions.
Basically, to overcome her passive nature, I had to put Katie in positions where her actions were forced out of her and led to really big consequences.
LT: It is interesting to hear that you started with a draft where Katie was more petulant towards Silver and had less agency overall. How did the book change for you across drafts?
SY: For my first draft, I think I was trying to write a book that I couldn’t write—a book of pure malaise and angst. I realized by writing that draft that this was not at all what I wanted to say. I wanted to write a book that was ultimately about hope. I wanted to write a book about someone who learns the lesson that they have to grow up, but I wanted it, above all, to be hopeful.
From what I learned myself while growing up, action begets hope. Even if you’re not sure what to do next, and you’re not sure how to change your situation, you can take one step, and that will lead to another. It’s these very simple revelations that I wanted Katie to have.
LT: I would agree that Kitten is more hopeful than angsty. It’s a loving book, a very sweet book. It’s not what some people would think: a weird, quirky book about cats. How do you feel about genre labels like “weird girl lit fic?” How do you think about genre in general?
SY: I feel like “weird girl lit” is a genre that people ascribe to books where a female character behaves in socially unacceptable ways, and I have no issue with that. Genres help people find books! But I don’t think of Kitten that way myself. Of course there are weird elements in it, just like there are weird elements in The Metamorphosis by Kafka or Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte. There are so many weird books, and there always have been. I see Kitten more as a coming of age novel.
LT: I’ve also seen your book compared to The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and The Guest by Emma Cline. Are there other books that you see in conversation with Kitten? Did any books in particular inspire you?
SY: The Guest is one of the earliest comps I had in mind, so I’m glad that’s coming through for people. I think Kitten also sits on the shelf with My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, which is another book about a woman who is a bit aimless, and whose aimlessness becomes her weapon.
I also see my book on the shelf with some magical realism, like Banana Yoshimoto’s books. Yoshimoto has this glittery sheen to her writing. It doesn’t quite dip into the magical zone, but there always seems to be the potential for it in the mood and the atmosphere.
LT: I love that. While I was reading, I was often thinking: When is Katie going to sprout whiskers? When is the cat going to start talking?
SY: Yes! And I also see my book on the shelf with a lot of mother-daughter books as well. One of my biggest inspirations was Hot Milk by Deborah Levy, where the relationship between mother and daughter is so intimate and sinister. Katie and her mother don’t have that degree of cynicism in their relationship, but I do think a lot about books where the throughline is this intense relationship that colors everything.
LT: And there is so much to be said about how Katie’s relationship with her mother colors everything, such as Katie’s relationship with James for one. Do you think that relationship is doomed?
SY: I’m an optimist. I don’t think anything is doomed. Even Katie’s relationship with her mom; they find a way to connect in the end. Maybe that’s temporary—maybe it’s one brief, bright light and they’ll be fighting again soon—but they have found a new and unfamiliar way to relate to one another.
I feel the same way about her relationship with James. Katie is just starting to understand herself, and while James is older, he is still learning about himself. Maybe they’ll find a way to reconnect.
LT: What do you think Katie is up to now?
SY: I recently talked to a reader who thought that Katie’s life would completely transform at the end of the book, that she’d have a job and be completely settled. But all she really does is get the money to pay a month of rent. That is still such an achievement for her because rent is something that tethers her to the world, to a specific place and specific people, her roommates. And I see her life continuing on that way: small, beautiful, ordinary steps forward.
LT: I was so proud of Katie for taking those small steps to ground herself. This book takes place in New York City and the Hamptons, and the setting is so vivid and evocative. Did this story always take place in the city?
SY: Yes. Regionality is a big part of Katie’s character. She is from Arkansas, and I wanted to play with dynamics of class, because New York City so often represents this closed-off and high-flying world where levels of privilege are so different from anywhere else. Transplants to the city are hyper aware of this and constantly reminded that there’s so much they don’t have access to. At least for me, that was the case when I moved to New York City.
Class is both a visible and invisible element of each day and each interaction. I thought New York was the best possible place to make that tension come alive.
LT: Understanding where Katie comes from does seem to be so integral to her character. Is there anything else you want to make sure that readers understand about Katie?
SY: I want readers to come to their own conclusions, but Katie is just very young and naive and has a limited understanding of the world. There are so many ways in which I can relate to her, and so many ways in which I can’t. People are always so different, and I hope readers are able to meet Katie where she is.
LT: What are you most looking forward to when Kitten is officially out in the world?
SY: I’m most excited to see everyone at my launch—it feels like a wedding! My parents are coming, and my agent and my editor. My amazing new professional partners and people who have been reading my writing since I was a melodramatic teenager. I am excited to be surrounded by people who know me and know my writing and want to celebrate Kitten.
I didn’t feel this way until recently, but now that my pub day is around the corner, there’s not a lot I can control or be anxious about anymore. So I’m just thinking about the celebratory parts!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stacey Yu is a Chinese American writer. She grew up between Texas, Arkansas, and California and currently lives in London. Kitten is her debut novel.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Lior Torenberg’s work has been published by One Story, MAYDAY, the Poetry Society of New York, and others. She received her MFA in creative writing from New York University and graduated from the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project. Just Watch Me is her first novel. Learn more at LiorTorenberg.com.