Katie Yee

A New York Times Notable Book. One of Time’s 100 Must-Read Book of 2025. Summer’s Best Beach Reads by The New York Times • Books You Should Read This July by New York magazine • Books We’re Most Excited About by Today • Best Beach Reads by Harper’s Bazaar • Best Books of Summer by ELLE • Most Anticipated Books of the Summer by Time • Best Summer Reads by Oprah Daily • Books to Read this Summer by The Washington Post “As with Nora Ephron’s Heartburn…you read Maggie to spend time with its author.” —The Washington Post A Chinese American woman spins tragedy into comedy when her life falls apart in a taut, wry debut novel, “as playful as it is profound” (Alison Espach, author of The Wedding People)—perfect for fans of Joan Is Okay and Crying in H Mart. A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie. A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak—it’s cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie. Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation. She starts talking to Maggie (the tumor), getting acquainted with her body’s new inhabitant. She overgenerously creates a “Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual” for Maggie (the other woman), hoping to ease the process of discovering her ex-husband’s whims and quirks. She turns her children’s bedtime stories into retellings of Chinese folklore passed down by her own mother, in an attempt to make them fall in love with their shared culture—and to maybe save herself in the process. In the style of Jenny Offill and the tradition of Nora Ephron’s hilarious and devastating writing on heartbreak and womanhood, Maggie is a master class in transforming personal tragedy into a form of defiant comedy.

A Novel

Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar

tiff <3

Memory is a funny thing, the way it distorts. If a heart is like a home, then memory is like a fun house. You never know how the mirrors will tilt. Bad memories have a way of casting a film over everything. Bad memories are greedy. They lay claim to a place.

Are you ever nostalgic for the way the light touches a place? The way the sun holds on to a room? Could you mourn the loss of that arresting sight— the way the light fingerpaints the wall with colors of its own, playful and daring and unselfconscious? The sunset throwing colors like a child before lights-out. One final burst of what's inside.

Maybe every lover becomes an archivist of their beloved.

Me? I'm the face on the other side of that coin: I'm obsessed with endings. I may not be the one to execute or act first— sometimes I feel like my life is simply happening to me-but I will write these endings in my mind: I am always telling myself this is the last time as a way of reminding myself to savor something— as a reminder that everything can be taken away. As a way of taking control over something I have absolutely no control over-as though I myself had penned and therefore chosen the way the story ended. I want things to be tied up neatly. No extra string.

Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar quotes

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