Against Relatable Books

Or: Why books shouldn't exist to reaffirm, on books as content, and a mini-update on doing NaNoWriMo.

Happy Friday! Today’s newsletter essay is about a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while: the idea that a book is good because it’s relatable. And what happens to our literary taste and future written stories when we don’t push back against this belief.

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I read a book earlier this year that was about a young Asian American girl who was the eldest daughter of an immigrant household, with a dad who was a war refugee. I remembered thinking: well, this sure hits close to home. But here’s the bummer: the book wasn’t very good.

I felt frustrated with the story for several reasons. While it was heartening to have a book with representation of a marginalized community in an American literary canon that has sorely lacked it, particularly one that so closely resembled my own, nearly every single theme and character trait the author wrote about tried very hard to reflect your typical Asian American story, which made the reading experience monotonous. Here’s the emotional connection to food, the intergenerational family trauma, the strained parent-child relationship, the desire for whiteness and assimilation. Check, check, check, check! It’s not bad that the book had these elements because many of our stories possess them and more of our stories deserve to be told. But the narrative was just so thoroughly…reaffirming. It felt as though the book was begging me, an Asian American woman who is the eldest daughter of an immigrant household with a dad who is a war refugee, to like it. There was no challenge, no argument, nothing controversial, not even good dialogue to chew on. I guess I wasn’t looking for a story to soothe my inner child or younger self, but rather a story that would change me and force me out of my comfort zone. Instead, there was only clunky prose, flat supporting characters, and an unimaginative plot. I honestly felt offended by how boring it was. By focusing so hard on trying to make the story relatable, the author forgot to make the book interesting.

Throughout high school and even in the first couple of years of college, I read a lot of books like this; the majority of them being young adult. In an attempt to seek out books to read for pleasure outside of the typical cis, straight, white male-centered and authored books I was assigned in class, I sought out “diverse” books that weren’t being taught. Not just books about Asian American women, but also books with a rolodex of diverse characters, each one from a different background. There was nothing wrong with books with this kind of cast; in fact, they were welcomed. (Note: I always raised my eyebrows at negative book reviews that’d argue friend groups in real life couldn’t equally be as diverse as some of the literature we were reading. Hell, my friend group is extremely diverse, consisting of Black, brown, and Asian individuals. If anything, I side-eye a lot of pan-Asian friend groups, which let’s be real are really just pan-East Asians or only light-skinned Asians living in their own echo chambers). However, it was frustrating when these characters’ diverse backgrounds weren’t fully fleshed out and developed, and instead felt more like mere set dressing. But hey! Diversity is relatable and it’s a reflection of our world. When I was younger, this was enough for me to give a book an extra star in my rating out of gratitude and appreciation. I have now arrived at the belief that we all deserve more from our literature. For a book to try to appeal to everyone, it ends up appealing to no one.

I remember reading Macbeth by Shakespeare in my senior year of high school and thinking the titular character was honestly despicable. Just like morally reprehensible. A white male wannabe king who killed the real king out of political ambition goes on to commit more murder and now must face the moral, psychological, and emotional consequences of his actions. The least relatable character you’d ever read about. But what a boring way to critique a story! Was there no credit to be given to Macbeth’s rigorous themes, challenging characters, and moving tragedy? The same question applies to the character of Kylo Ren from the Star Wars sequel trilogy, which isn’t a book, but I’m going to apply my point all the same. I never understood critics or anti-stans who didn’t like the character, citing he was a “fascist crying white man-baby” and thus unrelatable, thus a bad character, and if you liked him, you’re a bad person yourself. What? What! He’s the son of freaking Han Solo and Princess Leia, the nephew of Luke Skywalker, and the grandson of freaking Darth Vader. He’s the archetypal anti-hero, wrestling with the weight of his three-peat legacy in a franchise all about legacy. [Pinches the bridge of my nose] This is not how we should be engaging with stories. With art!

Here’s my thesis: Books don’t have a responsibility to make you feel good. Some books will offer that, such as romance which has to have a happy ending according to genre convention. But even romance books shouldn’t be expected to confirm your worldview every time. The argument that a book is only good and therefore worth lauding is one that reaffirms our existing beliefs and reflects only our identities is dangerous. It makes you a complacent and passive reader. It forces you as a reader to consume and digest a story as content, instead of experience and navigate it as art. A good example of books becoming content that’s risen from our current literary moment is readers expecting an author to reaffirm their moral purview by directly condemning the “white” guy they view as “bad”. Do you need a book to tell you directly that a character is good and another character is bad? Where are your literacy skills? Books that just tick off a list of known tropes, which is the summation of BookTok marketing, are content, not art. If a book only reflected our worldview and experiences, no matter how good or correct or progressive we think it is, we’d resign ourselves to a very narrow reading life and quite frankly, a boring literary canon. If publishers knew they could please readers by simply plucking all the tropes and relatable narratives and likable character traits that challenged nothing and offended no one, they’d produce mass books like a factory on an assembly line or use AI to write their products, forgo the cost of human authors, and become multi-millionaire conglomerate companies. Oh, wait. Oop.

I used to evaluate whether a book was good depending on my proximity to the identities or emotional truths present in the story. But relatability is a gut-instinct reaction to a story. It’s surface-level. It’s not a form of deep engagement or connection. From an NYU essay on relatable literature: “We tend to think we will relate to characters who are close to us —the same age, gender, race, whatever — but a good representation of the human is going to speak to any human. The barrier of relatability fades away in a work that actively challenges convention or opens up a new experience for the reader — which puts the reader in a place ready for critical thinking.”

It’s worth mentioning that white editors, agents, and publishers who reject a book by an author of color citing “it’s not relatable enough” aligns with my argument. When these white publishing folks only seek books that reflect their direct experience and emotions, they shut out stories that could otherwise change them, provoke deeper thinking, and raise questions. We must allow ourselves to be moved by characters we aren’t similar to and by stories that we’ve never experienced before. If anything, by doing this, it reaffirms our humanity.

I’m thinking about this topic especially during the past several days, as I’ve taken up the challenge of writing a book in 30 days for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this year. I’ve been wrestling with a novel idea that’s inspired by my experience growing up in the Vietnamese American Roman Catholic community. The story features my preoccupation with theatre, gender, sexuality, and performance. It’s gonna have romance in it. It’s a really niche, deeply specific story that has excited and terrified me in equal measure. A lot of my friends and family growing up will likely find this premise upon first glance “relatable” as the majority of them are Vietnamese American Roman Catholics. But I don’t plan to write a story that affirms “our” experience growing up in this restrictive environment. I want to write a story that feels kind of blasphemous and heretical. A story that would’ve gotten me excommunicated if I still cared and was an important enough person. A whole lot of uncomfortable. Let’s see! Wish me luck (:

I challenge you to read a book that isn’t about your specific experience, that isn’t relatable at all even in feeling and emotion, that doesn’t tick all of your list of desired tropes, and let it sit with you. It’ll do you some good, promise.

Hope you have a great weekend! <3

- Teresa