Rebecca F. Kuang: belief

Transcript context

…You could appoint a dictator, someone in charge, and have that settled by contract. One of you pays the other some share of the royalties, and you could have the final word. I’ve co-authored plenty of things. Never fiction, not deliberately fiction at least, and they’ve all worked out great in fact. I’m sure that it’s much easier to do with nonfiction. I also can only speak for my own relationship to writing. I’m sure there are lots of other authors who would happily work with co-authors, but it is such an intimate process that involves a deep understanding of every character and also a deep understanding of yourself. I think that I become a different person with each novel I write, and everything is a bit like therapy in a sense. Not that I’m exactly chronicling my emotional journeys, but they have to do with what’s troubling me at the time and what questions are acutely bothering me. To split this psychological burden across two people would mean that not only do we have to clarify our relationships to the text, but we’d also have to clarify our relationships to each other. So yes, we would end up killing each other or getting married, I think, and I’m already getting married, so that’s not interesting to me. Another theme in Yellowface — why is it that the internet brings out the mean side of people so much?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.