Contemporary Authors

• All about Eggs: Everything We Know about the World's Most Important Food Clarkson Potter/Publishers (New York, NY), 2017
• Goodbye, Vitamin ( novel) Henry Holt and Company (New York, NY), 2017

1. All about eggs : everything we know about the world's most important food LCCN 2016048977 Type of material Book Personal name Khong, Rachel, 1985- author. Main title All about eggs : everything we know about the world's most important food / Rachel Khong and the editors of Lucky peach. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Clarkson Potter/Publishers, [2017] Description 256 pages : color illustrations ; 23 cm ISBN 9780804187756 (hardback : alk. paper) CALL NUMBER TX745 .K53 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. Goodbye, vitamin : a novel LCCN 2016039559 Type of material Book Personal name Khong, Rachel, 1985- author. Main title Goodbye, vitamin : a novel / Rachel Khong. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Henry Holt and Company, 2017. Description 196 pages ; 22 cm ISBN 9781250109163 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3611.H66 G66 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Vogue - https://www.vogue.com/article/rachel-khong-goodbye-vitamin

  QUOTE"
  Both kinds of writing affected each other. I feel that I am an editor because of the way I ruthlessly edit my own stuff. And the writing part, I feel, brings more creativity to the journalism side of things. But I had always been doing both types of writing, because my parents are immigrants. I immigrated here when I was 2. Being a novelist was never something I could say with a straight face to my parents. That’s a crazy job. Nobody gets to do that. “Oh, you want to be a writer? You mean, you want to be a journalist.”

  Goodbye, Vitamin May Be the Best Novel You’ll Read This Summer
  Julia Felsenthal's picture
  JULY 10, 2017 9:45 AM
  by JULIA FELSENTHAL
  Goodbye_Vitamin_APPROVED.indd
  Courtesy of Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
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  “At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary,” Joan Didion once wrote. “My approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best.”

  Her essay is called “On Keeping a Notebook,” and Didion, to be clear, kept one (perhaps still does)—a place to document not what happened to her, but “how it felt to be me,” scraps of experience, sometimes factual, sometimes embroidered. A recipe for sauerkraut evokes the coziness of a boozy, rainy day on Fire Island; the sense memory of cracked crab for lunch as a child makes her “see the afternoon all over again,” no matter that the crab was almost certainly fictitious. These are reminders not of life, but of Joan. “I think we are well advised,” Didion observed (cannily enough to be endlessly quoted), “to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”

  In 2008, writer Rachel Khong began keeping a food log, a list of every meal she consumed. She was inspired in part by Robert Shields, keeper of the world’s longest diary, who recorded the goings-on of his life at five-minute intervals (to the tune of 37.5 million words). Khong hoped that by diligently tracking what she ate, she would open up a channel in her brain to remembering more: where she was; who she was with; how she was feeling. At the time she was reeling from a breakup, contending with the way a tanking relationship exposes a chasm between each partner’s memories of seemingly joint experiences. How can a person trapped in the morass of imperfect recall identify true north without signposts? “I’m terrified of forgetting,” Khong admitted in a 2014 essay that appeared in Lucky Peach, the food magazine where until recently she was an editor. “If I could remember everything, I thought, I’d be better equipped; I’d be better able to make proper, comprehensive assessments—informed decisions. But my memory had proved itself unreliable, and I needed something better. Writing down food was a way to turn my life into facts: If I had all the facts, I could keep them straight. So the next time this happened I’d know exactly why—I’d have all the data at hand.”

  The mechanics and metaphysics of recollection are also an obsessive preoccupation for Ruth, the narrator of Khong’s wonderful first novel, Goodbye, Vitamin. Ruth is a wayward 30-year-old who has devoted her nascent adulthood to making it work with Joel, her erstwhile fiancé, who recently and unceremoniously left her for another woman. For Ruth, it’s a betrayal that calls into question a decade of memories. “I realized that I could remember something and he could remember something different, and if we built up a store of separate memories, how would that work, and would it be okay? The answer, of course, in the end, was no.”

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  It was for Joel that Ruth skipped out on her last year of college; because of him that she settled for a career as an ultrasound technician. Without him, there’s not much tying her to a makeshift life in San Francisco, so when her mother asks Ruth to come home to the suburbs of Los Angeles to help care for her ailing father, Howard—recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, but before that, an alcoholic and a philanderer—Ruth has little excuse to refuse. She jettisons her possessions and drives south to reenter life in her childhood home, half daughter, half caretaker, with an adult’s ability to perceive the murky undercurrents of her parents’ marriage.

  Goodbye, Vitamin is about memory: what gets recorded; what gets outsourced; and what happens when shared memories can no longer be shared. It’s a novel about the struggle to keep track of oneself in the face of loss—in Didion-speak, about someone who is attempting to get back on nodding terms with the person she used to be. It’s also about the two extremes of the human life cycle: the bit at the very beginning, in which the parent is responsible for keeping the child’s memory; and the bit at the very end, when the child must do the same for the parent. At the novel’s outset, Howard gives Ruth a journal he kept of letters written to her in her babyhood. “Today you asked me where metal comes from. You asked me what flavor are germs. You were distressed because your pair of gloves had gone missing. When I asked you for a description, you said: They are sort of shaped like my hands.” Later, at her father’s request, Ruth begins keeping a similar account for him: “Today you held your open hand out and I shook the pills into it, same as every day. Fish oil. Magnesium. Vitamins D and C and A. Gingko Biloba. ‘Hello, water,’ you said, holding the glass against the moonlight and shaking the pills, like they were dice you were ready to roll, in your other hand. ‘Goodbye, vitamin.’”

  Wry, warmhearted, and wise, Khong’s writing can turn mid-sentence from really funny to really sad, and often back again. Her subject is disease, but she (and her characters) resist any impulse to pathologize: Howard’s counter-reality—unstable, tenderly ridiculous—is as real as the real world, another reminder of Didion, who wrote that “not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.”

  Khong’s novel will stay with you long after you turn the last page. What more can be said for a book about remembering? The author Skyped with me from her home in San Francisco to discuss keeping and not keeping a notebook, Alzheimer’s, Lucky Peach, and how she wrote Goodbye, Vitamin.

  Goodbye, Vitamin author Rachel Khong
  Goodbye, Vitamin author Rachel Khong.

  Andria Lo
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  You had a grandmother with Alzheimer’s, and you’ve written about that experience. Was she an inspiration for the book?

  I wrote that piece for this Australian online magazine, and the mag titled it, I think, “How My Relationship With My Grandmother Inspired My Book.” I was like, I didn’t approve that! My grandmother at the end of her life had Alzheimer’s, and it was mostly just bad. She for a while lived at home with my parents, so whenever I went home to see them, to see her, it was really hard to watch. It’s not a disease that ever gets better, really, so that definitely informed the book. It wasn’t, as that headline suggests, why I wrote the book. It was more this obsession with memory that inspired the book, and then her situation was a terrible coincidence that happened at the same time and helped provide some really tragic details.

  You’ve also written about keeping a food log, and trying to tie memories to food. In the novel that’s a significant plot point: Not only is Ruth’s father losing his memory, but her mother has decided to stop cooking, in part out of fear that it was the food she made, or how she made it, that caused the disease. Food and memory seem very linked for you. Did keeping the food log work?

  I started keeping the log just as an experiment, because it felt like food was a thing that I had to encounter every day, a really regular thing that I could keep track of. This mode of diary keeping, I guess, was more attractive than writing down actual diary entries, which has always seemed a) really time-consuming and b) really misrepresentative of the way you’re actually feeling. Across the board, all my old diary entries are really emo and overwhelmingly about negative things. So I just wanted this objective log that would maybe cue memories for me. It would look like nothing to somebody else. Oh, she ate oatmeal. Cool. I found, I guess, that it did work. I was remembering a lot more than I might have otherwise. I could see this list and remember: I was with this person, I ate this, we talked about this.

  The habit of journal writing has always eluded me. It’s something I feel ashamed of as a writer: Are all those memories I never wrote down lost to me?

  It is kind of horrifying. But it’s also kind of nice to always be forgetting. It’s nice to be able to have that hard drive wiped clean every once in a while. I actually started last year writing in this five-year diary. It’s really easy. You can write two or three sentences and then you’re done. It’s this exercise in perspective. It’s kind of funny to see how arbitrary moods are. I reached the one-year point and maybe I’ve had one month now of being able to look back on the past year. I was actually reading it out loud yesterday to my husband. There was an entry that was like, “I asked Eli for some floss, and he giggled really hard when he tried to give me his used floss.” It’s like, oh, it’s not a totally useful diary entry, but it’s funny to read a year later.

  This book was years and years in the making. Can you tell me a little about the path to publishing it?

  I started writing, I think, in 2010, a few years after I graduated from college. In college I was always writing short stories, and a lot of things in the third person. First person always felt kind of gross and crazy to me. I dread getting those questions about whether or not this was autobiographical. It’s easy to conflate a first-person narrator with the author. Then in 2010 I wrote a short story with Ruth, the narrator of the book. It was a completely different situation. She had the same job, she lived in San Francisco, but it was about her dating an alcoholic fisherman. I really loved writing in her voice, and I just wanted to hang out longer with this person. At the same time, I was reading a lot of these short books by women who challenged what a novel was to me. I was realizing, oh, a novel could be something like Renata Adler’s Speedboat or Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. They could be pretty short. They could have a lot of white space in them. They could not necessarily be plot driven. They could take on whatever form I wanted. That could still count as a book.

  I wrote a draft and submitted it as my M.F.A. thesis. Back then it was called Hello, Vitamin. It maybe had the same beginning and end, but the middle looks pretty different now. It was really spread out, the process of revising it, too. In that span of time a lot of things in my life changed. I moved from Florida to San Francisco. I worked in restaurants for a little bit, and then I got a job at Lucky Peach. I put the book away for maybe two years. That was fine in the end. I think that part of finishing the book for me was really just getting older, having more time to think about what I was trying to write. It was also useful to keep feeling, year after year, like a failure at finishing this book. I think that got woven into the book itself. It’s partly a book about feeling like a failure. Having those years to feel that way was helpful.

  You were at Lucky Peach for five years. Did journalism affect your fiction writing?

  Both kinds of writing affected each other. I feel that I am an editor because of the way I ruthlessly edit my own stuff. And the writing part, I feel, brings more creativity to the journalism side of things. But I had always been doing both types of writing, because my parents are immigrants. I immigrated here when I was 2. Being a novelist was never something I could say with a straight face to my parents. That’s a crazy job. Nobody gets to do that. “Oh, you want to be a writer? You mean, you want to be a journalist.”

  Then you left Lucky Peach a little bit before the magazine announced that it was going to cease publication. At that point were you finally ready to admit to your parents that you wanted to be a fiction writer? Did they come around?

  I think my parents now believe me that I can do it. They feel okay with it. But it was really scary. I had been at Lucky Peach for so long. I still really loved the job. It felt for a variety of reasons that it was time for me to go. It was a scary thing to do, but at the same time, I don’t think I could have been more ready to do it.

  How do you feel about its closing?

  I feel really sad about it. I think it’s been hard for me because I already mourned the magazine when I left. I was sad to have it not be my baby anymore. So when this news came, it was really shocking. But I had already mourned it and it was hard for me to do so again. But I don’t think that anyone should take it as representation of the limitation of food media or anything like that. I don’t think people should be discouraged from starting a new food magazine. I don’t think the things that went south with Lucky Peach can be applied to print media on the whole or anything. It had very specific reasons for shutting down.

  There’s so much of the Lucky Peach voice in this novel: an affection for trivial knowledge; this very joyful, nerdy approach to food. What’s the chicken and what’s the egg? Does this book sound like Lucky Peach? Or did Lucky Peach sound like you?

  It’s all mixed together. I never looked for a job in food journalism. It was just serendipity to fall into that job, and to help shape the publication. But I was coming at this medium from my own background, which was in creative writing and in, I don’t know, being a weirdo. So it’s hard to say which came first. And even now, rereading the book, I see places where interests found their way into Lucky Peach. Like there’s an endive trucker in the book. I wrote about it in the novel, and then three years later at Lucky Peach, I was like, hey, can I interview an endive farmer? That was its own amazing experience. I went to this farm near the Sacramento River. They had this sign for me: “California Endives Welcomes Rachel Khong.” It was the most surreal, wonderful thing. Endives are grown completely in the dark, on trays in these cold rooms. That’s why they’re pale; they don’t get any sunlight.

  Going back to something you said earlier—this idea that readers might conflate Ruth with you, which I think happens disproportionately often to women writers who write first-person novels. There are some salient differences: Ruth’s mother is an immigrant, but Ruth is not. Ruth didn’t finish college. You’re Chinese; she’s half white. You’ve said in interviews that she is a lot like you. Did you imagine these differences to create some necessary distance?

  I don’t think they were intentional. So much of it was subconscious and not intelligent at all. In terms of the background stuff, I feel like writing has always been a mix of imagination, observation—stealing things from other people—and then autobiography. In this book sometimes it’s a lot of the little details that are the autobiographical ones. The ones that are larger, that people might assume are straight-up me because they’re so specific, are the imagined ones. I like existing in that space of not being exactly my narrator. It’s just more fun to imagine someone else. If I had made her from an immigrant family like mine, that would have made it a completely different book, I think. I was like, oh, my God, I can’t make her a Chinese person! That would be super-complicated. I didn’t write a memoir. I don’t really have interest in that. It has been interesting to get these questions and try to know how to respond to them. I’m still figuring that out. I agree with you that it does feel like women get asked it more. Men, somehow, it’s just more of a given that they have imaginations they can use to create characters.

  In the book, Ruth gets a fortune cookie with a fortune that reads: “To remember is to understand.” Do you believe that?

  No, it seems completely wrong. That just seems like a bored fortune cookie writer being like, I’m just going to throw this completely untrue thing in there. I got a really good fortune recently, actually. It was like: “Good work, good life, good love, goodbye oppression.” It seemed like I could just tuck it into my book as a marketing thing.

  You said the title was originally Hello, Vitamin. Why change it?

  I wish I had an intelligent answer. It was for my thesis. I had to slap a title on it. It was Hello, Vitamin for a long time. Then it felt too happy to me at some point and I futzed with that scene. I realized it had to be a goodbye, because it felt right for this story. It’s so funny to me now, but I tried out so many different versions. Farewell, Vitamin. Good night, Vitamin. They all sound terrible now. Like hasta la vista!

  This interview has been condensed and edited.

• Macmillan - https://us.macmillan.com/author/rachelkhong

  RACHEL KHONG
  Rachel Khong
  Andria Lo
  Rachel Khong grew up in Southern California, and holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Florida. From 2011 to 2016, she was the managing editor then executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland, American Short Fiction, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, and California Sunday. She lives in San Francisco. Goodbye, Vitamin is her first novel.

• Rachel Khong Home Page - http://www.rachelkhong.com/about/

  I'm a writer living in the Bay Area. My debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin is forthcoming from Holt on July 11, 2017. (It's also out from Scribner UK on June 1, 2017.) Find me on Twitter @rachelkhong, or on Instagram @rrrrrrrachelkhong (7 Rs! Yes, I regret it).

• Chicago Review of Books - https://chireviewofbooks.com/2017/07/11/goodbye-vitamin-rachel-khong-interview/

  Why Your Memory Creates All Kinds of Relationship Problems

  BY RACHEL LEÓN
  JULY 11, 2017
  9781250109163_2929aFrom the first line of Rachel Khong’s debut novel, you know it’s going to be funny: Goodbye, Vitamin opens with a man finding the protagonist’s father’s pants in a tree.

  Ruth’s father has Alzheimer’s disease, and she has returned home after breaking up with her fiancé. This year of Ruth’s life is documented in episodic fragments as she helps care for her father and deal with the loss of her relationship. The result is a deeply felt meditation on the power and shortcomings of memory. Rachel Khong’s writing is smart, funny, and insightful, and Goodbye, Vitamin is a total pleasure to read.

  I recently interviewed Khong via email about her debut, her influences, and humor.

  Rachel León: Goodbye, Vitamin is actually your second book out this year. Your first book came out a couple of months ago. What’s the experience been like to publish your first book and first novel back-to-back?

  Rachel Khong: Publishing two books in one year was certainly nothing I ever expected or even dreamed could happen! It’s true that my first book was technically All About Eggs—a book, yes, all about eggs. It was published this past spring as the fourth in a series of books by the magazine Lucky Peach, where I was editor for five years, in collaboration with the publisher Clarkson Potter.

  But I don’t really consider myself the author of that book, so much as the editor/curator: I worked with so many brilliant, talented people to put it together, so I can’t take all the credit (or the blame!). And it was really fun—as far as learning experiences go—to test the waters of book publicity with such a fun, collaborative cookbook. Goodbye, Vitamin was many more years in the making, and so it’s a lot more personal and anxiety inducing. But the process of making each of these books was simultaneously challenging, exhausting, exciting, and exhilarating, so it’s been a treat to finally get to celebrate their being in the world.

  Rachel León: What inspired this story?

  Rachel Khong: I’ve always been interested in how memory and forgetting relates to understanding of ourselves and our pasts. And our relationships with other people, too.

  At the time I started the book, I was going through a breakup and feeling generally gloomy and skeptical about the Point of Things. And I was particularly interested in the role that memory plays in the dissolution of relationships.

  I had a lot of questions: If what one person remembered were the sunniest events of a relationship, and the other party remembered mostly the bad times—wouldn’t that always be a recipe for heartbreak? Could heartbreak be avoided if both parties’ memories were more perfect? If we could remember everything that ever happened? Or would that make all relationships impossible, because we would remember everything terrible we did to each other?

  I was interested, also, in memory as it exists in families, between parents and children. Your parents remember more than you do about your own life. Is that why those relationships, in particular, can be so confusing? I also watched my late grandmother battle Alzheimer’s in the last years of her life, and I saw memory loss manifested really acutely. Writing the book was a way to try to understand—or really just explore—the human experience of forgetting from a few different approaches.

  Rachel León: The novel is written like a series of diary entries. Why did you choose to tell the story this way?

  Rachel Khong: For the most part, things that look like conscious decisions that I chose wound up choosing me: I stumbled into the book’s form through a lot of trial and error.

  From the beginning, I knew that I wanted the novel to span a year. After I figured out that much, it was a lot of haphazard experimenting with different ways to put words down—cutting the text into different pieces, and finally arriving at the way that felt right. I don’t really think of them as diary entries so much as simply dated accounts of what happened that day—a first-person novel with more signage.

  Rachel León: I was struck by how sparse and tight your prose is. There is so much in this short novel, but it’s all compressed in a really admirable way. Can you share which authors have influenced your work?

  Rachel Khong: The books that were rolling around in my head when I started Goodbye, Vitamin were Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever, Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays. They showed me how even the slimmest of novels could have outsized impact. Writers I always go back to for this same reason—powerful sentences packed into small spaces—are Grace Paley, Amy Hempel, and Sarah Manguso.

  Rachel León: I loved how you managed to combine drama with humor, particularly while dealing with something serious like Alzheimer’s. Was it difficult to strike a balance between finding comedic situations and handling the illness respectfully?

  Rachel Khong: I don’t see Goodbye, Vitamin as a book about Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s is a horrible disease that I’ve seen firsthand; in later stages, it mostly really isn’t funny, in the slightest. To me, this is a book centered around memory, and what it’s like to be a human being with an imperfect memory. And because I was interested in writing about real people, experiencing the normal day-to-day fluctuations that come with living life, emotions had to be less than totally straightforward.

  Because people are complicated. Humor, sadness, anger, and happiness are daily parts of life—even, maybe even especially, in the face of something as terrible as disease. I wanted to incorporate them all. And, to be honest, I’m usually the person who makes an inappropriate joke in an uncomfortable situation in attempt to lighten the mood. So there’s that.

  Rachel León: Any plans for book number three?

  Rachel Khong: I started a new novel in December, and I’ve been working on it since. That felt a lot more fun than obsessing over the novel’s publication, which is unfortunately a big temptation for me. The new thing is currently too amorphous to talk about, but it’s much more plot-driven than Goodbye, Vitamin, and interested in questions of race, identity, and power—subjects that have been on my mind a lot lately.

  Note to Chicago readers: Rachel Khong will be in conversation with Camille Bordas at Volumes Bookcafe on July 13th at 7pm.

  RACHEL KHONG is the author of All About Eggs: Everything We Know About the World’s Most Important Food, which came out this past April. She was executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine and received the 2015 Karola Saekel Craib Excellence in Food Journalism Fellowship. She attended Yale University and holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Florida.

  FICTION
  Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong
  Henry Holt and Co.
  Published July 11, 2017

• Asian American Writers' Workshop - http://aaww.org/behind-the-fiction-an-interview-with-rachel-khong/

  QUOTE:
  I have a pretty militant morning routine.
  Anyway! The routine is this: a few hours before bed, I turn my phone to airplane mode. First thing in the morning, I head to one of my regular cafés, order a single cup of for-here black coffee, set my phone’s timer to an hour. My phone stays on airplane mode; I don’t allow myself the internet or email. Then I just write, without distraction, until the timer goes off. If the hour goes well, I set myself another timer for another hour. I continue writing this way until I can’t anymore, at which point I turn my phone and internet on and do a less focused type of writing.
  Behind the Fiction: An Interview with Rachel Khong
  The author of Goodbye, Vitamin talks about writing her first novel, charting lost memories, and bridging a life in fiction with a life of one’s own.

  Photo courtesy Rachel Khong. Image design by Britt Gudas
  By R.O. KWON
  AUGUST 31, 2017 | GOODBYE, RACHEL KHONG, VITAMIN
  MEDIA GALLERY

  Long before I picked up Rachel Khong’s debut novel, I’d admired her writing—her nonfiction, at first, which I’d encountered in the excellent, recently discontinued food magazine, Lucky Peach. We’d also become friends: we’re in the same San Francisco writing group, as well as an Asian women writers’ karaoke book club. So, I knew she could write the hell out of a wide-ranging exploration of pho, for instance, and that she can really sing Whitney Houston, but I was less familiar with her fiction.

  What joy, then, to find myself utterly delighted with her novel, Goodbye, Vitamin. It’s about Ruth Young, a 30-year-old woman whose father is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She moves home to help her parents, and the story Ruth tells is easily one of the best books I’ve read this year: beguiling, hilarious, and insightful, often all at once. Others agree. Lauren Groff, for one, says Rachel’s a magician, and that “we are lucky to fall under her spell at the beginning of her brilliant writing life.” I loved having this chance to ask Rachel some novel-related questions.

  —R.O. Kwon

  R.O. Kwon: Goodbye, Vitamin swung wonderfully between crushing my heart and making me laugh. How did you think about balancing charm and sorrow, comedy and pathos?

  Rachel Khong: It wasn’t a conscious effort at balance so much as it was pursuing what was palatable to me—arranging these things like furniture, until it seemed, to me, like they made sense—like a room I could live in. Only sorrow would have been like too many lamps or something—garish and obvious and uninteresting; if the book had been straight-up comedy, that wouldn’t have been interesting to me either. Trying out the different dosages of each was part of the interesting puzzle of putting this book together. In the things I most love to read, I want to laugh and I want my heart broken; I want to be frustrated then devastated, then entertained again. To me, sadness sharpens humor, and vice versa. And though I admire authors who write characters who have their cards on the table from page one, I knew that Ruth was going to be a person who only had the appearance of showing her cards, but actually held a few of them with this death grip, close to her chest—until, of course, she can’t manage to anymore.

  The first thing I noticed about Goodbye, Vitamin, and one of many reasons I love it, is its structure. It’s a hybrid diary form, with some surprises along the way, narrated in fairly short bursts. How did you find this structure? Did you always know you’d write the novel like this?

  Definitely not! I was completely in the dark as to how to write a novel; I had exactly zero grand schemes when it came to anything. Though I’d been writing (unsuccessful!) short stories for a long time, I doubted that I could ever write a novel: it seemed so unwieldy and impossible a task. What I did know, though, was that I could write sentences, and I could write paragraphs—these were things I could do. I hoped I could string these sentences and paragraphs together, and with any luck I could write a novel. This realization happened for me after I started to read books that showed me this was possible, that all it took to make a book—and a powerful, affecting book, at that—was a series of small pieces. These were books mostly written by women, episodic and impressionistic—things like Speedboat by Renata Adler and Why Did I Ever by Mary Robison and Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion. Goodbye, Vitamin doesn’t quite mimic those authors’ forms; its own ultimately emerged through a lot of experimentation and a lot of trial and error. But these books made me realize that not only could novels follow their own logic and form, the very best ones did.

  As it so happens, you’re the only person I know who kept (keeps?) a daily food log. In a Lucky Peach essay about the log, you wrote, “What I’d like to have is a perfect record of every day. I’ve long been obsessed with this impossibility, that every day be perfectly productive and perfectly remembered.” Is it a stretch to ask if this food log in any way inspired or led to Goodbye, Vitamin?

  To be honest, I hadn’t thought about that at all, but you might be onto something. I’m not sure if the log led directly to the book, but my interest (bordering on obsession) in memory certainly inspired the food log and of course inspires the book. I’m particularly interested in what we remember and what we don’t, and how that can affect—and maybe it’s even the basis of—our relationships with other people and our relationships with ourselves.

  The food log, which I started keeping in 2008, was an experiment: I’d write down the food that I ate to provide daily cues I might use to remember details about those days; in that piece, I talk about how I started it as an experiment in remembering things better, because of a relationship that had fallen apart for a reason I couldn’t understand, and maybe, problematically, couldn’t even remember. So what if I solved that problem of not remembering? Could I? The book certainly came out of that interest too—to try to make sense of this specific moment in my life, this relationship that had fallen apart, and to attempt to answer these questions I had. When a relationship falls apart, is memory to blame? If you had a perfect memory, would that make you less prone to heartbreak? And since nobody does—have a perfect memory, that is—what do we do with all this?

  Speaking of food, you used to both write and edit for Lucky Peach. I remember asking you, maybe a year ago, if you’d written a lot about food in this novel. You said no, not really, which I eventually found to be delightfully hilarious—every few pages, it seems, Ruth is braising pork or caramelizing onions or otherwise involved with very delicious-sounding food. I think what I’m getting around to asking is: is this just normal life to you? Are you continually braising pork?

  Wait, but Ruth also cooks some pretty gross-sounding food, like jellyfish! To answer your question, yes, I have braised a fair amount of pork. (I am not, however, braising pork at this very moment.) I started cooking in earnest while in graduate school in the Florida panhandle, mostly because there weren’t many restaurant options there, and also to avoid writing: I would write, cook, write, cook, repeat; I was also a part-time cook at a wine and cheese shop that was a lunch restaurant. I suspect that I think about food (eating it and cooking it) more often than the average person, but I have no way to know for sure.

  It’s funny how people have reacted differently to the amount of food in the book: people have told me they’ve been surprised by how much food is in the book, and other people have said they’ve been surprised by how little food is in the book. As with most things, it depends on the person. I tried to accurately represent how much a normal human being might think about food, especially a normal human being living at home with parents (I eat a ton when I’m home with parents), but have no idea whether or not I got that right.

  What other books did you find to be helpful or companionable while you were writing Goodbye, Vitamin?

  While writing, I loved—and love—to read works by authors that feel vastly out of my league: Amy Hempel’s stories, Grace Paley’s stories, Denis Johnson’s small, perfect books (Angels, Jesus’ Son, and Train Dreams are my favorites). After reading somewhere that Joan Didion copied out the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms over and over again to get the rhythm lodged in her brain, I read Hemingway for the first time. And of course I read Queen Joan.

  What kind of routine—or routines—do you set for your writing time?

  I have a pretty militant morning routine. Otherwise, it’s easy for writing to get away from me. Lately I’ve been working on something new that I’m not sure is any good, so it’s tempting to avoid it. But when I don’t write is when I’m unhappiest. So that can become a terrible cycle of despair. Anyway! The routine is this: a few hours before bed, I turn my phone to airplane mode. First thing in the morning, I head to one of my regular cafés, order a single cup of for-here black coffee, set my phone’s timer to an hour. My phone stays on airplane mode; I don’t allow myself the internet or email. Then I just write, without distraction, until the timer goes off. If the hour goes well, I set myself another timer for another hour. I continue writing this way until I can’t anymore, at which point I turn my phone and internet on and do a less focused type of writing.

  The writing fluctuates day to day: sometimes it flows out more easily and sometimes it’s the worst. I try to not beat myself up over the bad days, when they happen. If I’ve pushed through the hour, even if I’ve only written ten words, I’ll feel that I’ve done my job for the day. I’m not a person who spends my whole day writing. It’s hard! Plus, there are too many other things I want to do. Like read and braise pork.

  Lately, I’ve become very grateful that my immigrant parents’ grasp of written English isn’t quite 100 percent. I think this still, to some extent, helps me feel more free to write what I like. I imagine that writing a novel centered on fictional parents could feel extra fraught—is it? Or no? Are your parents going to read Goodbye, Vitamin?

  To your first question, about whether it was extra fraught to write about fictional parents: yes, a thousand times yes. People are so obsessed over this question of what is and isn’t autobiography—and I think the question is especially popular with people who don’t read much fiction, because a novel seems so mysterious: “Where did this story come from?” But my parents, who are both civil engineers and not big readers, surprised me by actually being pretty good readers of fiction—and accepting fiction as fictional, because, of course, the parents in the novel aren’t them.

  Which leads me to your second question: My parents have already read the book! I gave them the galley copy, hoping they wouldn’t read it—not suspecting they ever actually would. In the same way that we all have to learn that our parents are people independent of us, I’ve never been completely comfortable with my Asian parents knowing that I have lived a life apart from them. The book’s not very risqué, as far as books go, but there’s a lot of drinking and a fair bit of cursing, and I almost wanted to cover their ears the way you do to kids. But my parents both sent me emails after they read the book. My dad wrote: “I like it. I think you wrote very well… witty, captivating and well researched. Is the thing about kidney transplant real?? Your life experience has led you to write this original piece. Good job!”

  My mom, who had never read a novel in her life, sent me a note that said: “I do not read that much (except reading the Bible and devotion books) and research so much on the ‘American thing.’ Perhaps pa reads more and can relate more… However, it captured me to read more and I really enjoyed the feelings you put in and the vast experiences you encountered in your 31 years. I believe this book will touch many hearts as well. On the hold, I really, really like it (except the cursing words) and will read it again. This will be my favorite novel.”

  I remember, in college, meeting my friends’ parents and feeling jealous: Wow, your parents read novels? Your parents read your writing? But now I wouldn’t trade mine for anything.

  Did you always know you’d devote your life to writing? We’re both Asian, as it so happens, and I feel as though, with a lot of the writers I know who are of Asian descent, it took a little extra time to realize that a life in writing is possible. (For instance, though I took writing classes all through college, and knew it was what I loved, I majored in economics. I have a recurring nightmare about the Milton class I forwent for a senior seminar on corporate finance. What the fuck was I thinking?) Were you more enlightened than I was?

  I’m laughing imagining poor, young Reese in a corporate finance class. I actually knew pretty early on—roughly age six or so—that I wanted to be a writer, but I also knew “I want to be a writer” wasn’t a thing your immigrant parents wanted to hear. As with most things, I got my way by simply getting them used to my crazy ideas early on: “I want to be a writer. I want to be an English major. I want to quit Chinese school.” (That last one I regret a little.) Each time, it felt like torture to disappoint them—to go against what they wanted for me and for my life. But the more they got used to my ideas—which, to their credit, they always did—the more they supported me in them. I wasn’t completely sure that being a writer was possible—I didn’t have any models of writers in my life—but I knew that reading and writing were the only things I could do. I was shit at math and science. I also knew to tell my parents “I want to be a journalist,” because that seemed more like a real job, and so through high school, college, and beyond I wrote nonfiction alongside my fiction. And I’m happy, now, to have explored both kinds of writing.

• Bookforum - http://www.bookforum.com/interview/18375

  QUOTE:
  I was interested in both of those things—memory in your relationships with a romantic partner and memory when it comes to parents and children. Regardless of what kind of connection you have with someone, memory is what relationships are founded on. They’re basically all we have when it comes to relating to other people, and even when it comes to thinking about our own lives—how we narrate our own lives is based on what we remember. I came to be interested in the romantic relationship part of it kind of selfishly: I’d just had a breakup when I started this book.
  AUG 9 2017
  Bookforum talks with Rachel Khong
  Rebecca Schuh

  Rachel Khong’s debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, begins after the narrator, Ruth, has been suddenly and inexplicably dumped by her fiancé. Alone and adrift in San Francisco, a city that she has little connection to outside the failed relationship, she decides to cut her losses and move home to help her family cope with her father’s recent Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The landscape and history of Southern California drives the diary-like narrative of Ruth’s return to the Inland Empire. Jarred by the unexpected breakup and her father’s increasingly erratic behavior, Ruth spends much of her time wryly questioning the world she’s suddenly found herself adrift in, offering musings that will make you ponder basic assumptions about modern socializing and interpersonal dynamics.

  Khong is also the author of All About Eggs: Everything We Know About the World's Most Important Food, and was the executive editor of Lucky Peach. In its own way, Goodbye, Vitamin is also about food—an intimate look at how our relationship to what we eat dictates daily life. As Ruth and her mother work to create a new lifestyle for her father, Ruth ponders both the intricacy of how vitamins and minerals affect brain chemistry and how the act of cooking for family, friends, and lovers creates community. It is a novel about how families simultaneously change and stay the same when the children are grown, and how women live outside the social functions of wife, girlfriend, mother, and daughter. Filled with precise, gemlike sentences, Goodbye, Vitamin looks at loss, the minutiae of caring for family or strangers, and the fickle nature of memory.

  Khong and I recently spoke on the phone about California, the absurdity of social norms, and the process of creating her singular narrative style.

  I love that you have a 909 number. I used to live in the Inland Empire.

  It’s kind of uncool to have a 909 number. We were in Rancho Cucamonga, and whenever I met someone from LA they would be like, “Oh, you have a 909 number.” Kind of judgmentally.

  People do get judgey, but I love it! That’s part of what got me into the book so quickly. Goodbye, Vitamin takes place in California, and you were able to integrate so much of the state’s history, and observations about people’s lifestyles, really seamlessly into the story. Did you know that would be such an important part of the book when you started writing it?

  I knew right away I was going to set the book in Southern California, in the Inland Empire, because it was a place that I knew really well. There were so many things I didn’t know how to do in terms of writing a novel, but I was really familiar with a lot of the history of Southern California just through growing up there. I’m also really familiar with California on a more minute level, like being stuck in traffic on the way to LA—those sorts of things were elements that I knew I could write about very confidently. Since there was so much I didn’t know how to do, I could at least check “setting” off the list.

  That makes sense, especially since you chose such a unique form for the narrative. The story is built from Ruth’s diary-like vignettes. It’s a style I’ve seen a little in the past few years—with, say, Jenny Offill—but it seems like it’s becoming more prominent in fiction lately. How did you develop that voice?

  It really came out along the lines of the first answer, just born out of not knowing how to write a book. I always had the idea that I would just write short stories. I never thought I could manage a novel, it always seemed like such a huge project—how could I ever sit with one subject and write over a hundred pages about it? And I think that it started to seem more possible to me after I started reading these books, mostly by women, that were a lot shorter and more fragmented, that had as much white space as they had words. Back then it was pre–Jenny Offill, but it feels like maybe she and others were influenced by the same sorts of books. I’m thinking of Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, or Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever, or Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights—it just goes on and on. Reading these books, I realized that I didn't have to write a novel that looks like Moby-Dick or The Corrections. Something shorter can be just as powerful. To me, what was so impressive was how much they could fit into such a small space.

  But that said, I went through a lot of different iterations of this, it wasn’t always the way it looks now. I tried so many different versions, and when I arrived at this kind of dated short-entry thing, it felt right.

  I found it really fascinating that you were able to integrate so much about food into the book—it seemed relevant to your work at Lucky Peach. Was it a conscious decision to make a book that overlapped with your other work?

  It’s hard for me to answer that question because I feel like it’s hard for me to separate these two projects of mine. The novel started way before I got into writing about food or started my job at Lucky Peach. I think I already had a lot of food in it because food is something I think about a lot. Also, it’s a book about being at your parents’ house, and when I'm at my parents’ house I mostly think about snacks, because there’s not a whole lot to do. When I started writing the book, I was just trying to represent accurately how often a normal person thinks about food.

  I didn’t really try very hard to separate the food-writing me and the fiction-writing me. It’s all just kind of a jumbled mess in my brain. Sometimes there were elements to the novel that then found themselves in my food writing. I wrote a piece for Lucky Peach about food and memory and keeping a food blog, and that was something that I had been thinking about because of the novel—it was a big obsession of mine. Novel writing is a really long process, so exploring it through nonfiction was a way to think about it as well.

  Memory is such a big theme in the book. Ruth muses a lot about how she and her ex-boyfriend Joel each have different memories of the same event, and she wonders which one becomes the true version. It felt very connected to Ruth’s father slowly losing his memory, even though dating and parent/child relationships are very different things! How did they connect for you?

  I was interested in both of those things—memory in your relationships with a romantic partner and memory when it comes to parents and children. Regardless of what kind of connection you have with someone, memory is what relationships are founded on. They’re basically all we have when it comes to relating to other people, and even when it comes to thinking about our own lives—how we narrate our own lives is based on what we remember. I came to be interested in the romantic relationship part of it kind of selfishly: I’d just had a breakup when I started this book. It felt like I was remembering one version of our relationship and he was remembering another version, and they weren’t aligning. That was also interesting to me to think about in terms of parents and children, because your parents can remember a huge chunk of your own life that you can’t access. They remember so much more about you than you remember about yourself. What does that mean? Where do you go from there?

  Even though she’s moving home as an adult, Ruth and her father retain some of their original roles as child and parent. But she also takes on a parental role due to his illness.

  In the book, Ruth is just sort of starting that process, her dad isn’t in terrible shape yet. I didn’t want the book to be about that complete reversal—there was already so much going on in terms of things that were sad, so I guess I wasn’t ready to have that happen fully. I think that I wanted to start to explore this very basic idea, that your parents are human beings, too. When they had you or when they became parents themselves, they didn’t necessarily have their shit figured out. In the process of writing the book, more of my friends started having kids. I always kind of naively thought that something would change when you decide to be a parent—that you’d somehow be more mature or you would be more responsible—and now I see that’s really not true. You can be just as unsure of yourself, and that was something that I wanted to write about.

  And then you see absurd people you know having children, and you’re just like, “Oh my god, there’s no barrier to entry!”

  It’s always been crazy to me that you don’t need to have to go through any kind of training. You should have to read a manual or something! It’s crazy that you get children by having sex. It seems like the worst way. You should only be able to have children through protected sex!

  In the book, I loved how Ruth had the tendency to call out these social absurdities. In one scene, she’s talking about her breakup with Joel: “He told me, Ruth, don’t get me wrong, I care for you deeply. He said that! And what I thought then—and what I think now—was, That’s not something to say. That isn’t anything.” People really get away with saying these things, but they’re total nonsense.

  I’m definitely interested in calling out these very common conventional things that have no meaning. Ruth is approaching it with this newly blasted-apart sensibility, as she’s just been through this breakup, so she’s feeling skeptical of all the romantic things that have ever been said. The books that I identify with the most, or that I find myself remembering, are books that make you see a common thing in a new way, or slightly tweak the way that you’ve been thinking about the world. I’m regretting this as I say it, because it sounds way too grandiose.

  We touched on the idea of adulthood—the transition to having children, how you prepare for that—but adults now are moving in with their parents. In one part of the book, Ruth is talking about her friend Bonnie and says, “This makes me a terrible person, I know, but it comes as a relief to me that my best friend is in a not-dissimilar boat—the unmarried and careerless boat. Which is more like a canoe.” This idea of adults coming together to form a community when they’re not following the traditional path to adulthood—either through relationships, careers, or children—what about that fascinated you?

  I think it’s a pretty new phenomenon for women in their late twenties or thirties to still be coming of age. I wanted to hang out in that space a little bit, to have characters who hadn’t done the conventional thing (which isn’t even that conventional anymore—twenty- and thirty-somethings look quite different than they used to). Even though it’s much more common now, I don’t think that there are enough books about women in that in-between stage of their lives. For so long it was about the male version of that—I want the female version to exist, too. It wasn’t a huge mission I had, but it was a place that I’ve been in, and that friends of mine have been in, and talking about it seemed worth doing.

  It’s starting to be more explored not just in books, but also in television and movies. The more people who contribute to it the better, since it’s been ignored for so long.

  I’d be happy to read or watch a million more books and TV shows about a thirty something woman trying to—not even figure shit out, but just exist happily without a relationship and without kids. I’m so happy to see the influx. It’s still not enough.

  Rebecca Schuh is a writer based in Brooklyn.

• Takeout - https://thetakeout.com/meet-the-author-who-took-a-long-night-s-journey-into-eg-1798259431

  QUOTE:
  did you know that an unfertilized egg yolk is a single cell? It’s a huge, amazing cell!
  Another fact I love is particularly good for telling somebody over drinks or breakfast. So a chicken’s egg comes out of its cloaca, which is basically the chicken’s single hole used for… all things. Bonus fact: Chicken sex involves no penetration and is known as a “cloacal kiss.” So eggs come out of the cloaca, and so does poop. But! When the egg is moving along its last little stretch, right before it exits the chicken, the cloaca inverts like a sock so it doesn’t come into contact with any excrement. Which just comes as an utter delight to me.
  Meet the author who took a long night’s journey into eggs

  Kevin Pang
  3/23/17 12:00amFiled to: FOOD
  38

  Photo: Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images
  How can the mighty egg be simultaneously associated with such beauty and ugliness?

  First, the positive stuff: In pure practical applications, the egg has wider utility than just about any naturally occurring foodstuff in mother nature—essential in cakes, mayonnaise, spaghetti carbonara, soufflés, and gin fizz cocktails alike. Zoom out to culture at large, and the egg is just as important a player: Encrusted with jewels for Imperial Russians. The funnest part of Easter. An instrument of physical comedy.

  But egg’s ubiquity in our daily lives also makes it easily taken for granted. We’ve created idioms in our language that view egg in the negative connotation, synonymous with zero (when laid), embarrassment (when on the face), or risk (when placed in one basket). It’s also the preferred avatar of Twitter trolls worldwide.

  Eggs are a beautiful dichotomy, a single-celled contradiction, and it’s a rich topic for the irreverent team at Lucky Peach to riff in a book-length deep dive. (Disclaimer: I’m a contributor to Lucky Peach magazine, but not for this book.)

  In All About Eggs, out April 4, former Lucky Peach executive editor Rachel Khong embarks on a long night’s journey into oology. She and her team of experts (pun successfully avoided) make good on the book’s title promise: It is truly all about eggs, from lessons in biology to personal anecdotes and recipes from Filipino kwek kwek to lemon meringue pie. If it’s even peripherally egg-related, you will find it here. (Read an excerpt from the book about how to tell if you eggs are fresh.)

  The A.V. Club: On the first page of the book, you claim the egg is “the world’s most important food.” How so?

  Rachel Khong: This and all my other hyperbolic claims—and eggs themselves!—should be taken with a grain or more of salt. But in all honestly, what other food is even a contender? Here’s another hyperbolic claim: eggs are the Rosetta Stone of cooking. They’re often one of the first proteins a person learns to cook—at least they were for me—but they also take years to master: chefs at the highest echelon often have a signature egg dish because eggs are so complex. Eggs’ different properties of emulsifying, coagulating, and foaming make them this amazing thing to cook with. And eggs, because they’re cheap and as ubiquitous as chickens, are eaten pretty much everywhere across the globe, though a handful of cultures don’t eat eggs for religious reasons. If you are fluent in eggs, you speak the language of good food—nearly—everywhere you go.

  Rachel Khong, author of All About Eggs (Photo: Chris Ying)
  AVC: In the course of researching this book, what single fact about eggs blew your mind?

  RK: This fact elicits mostly blank stares from people, but did you know that an unfertilized egg yolk is a single cell? It’s a huge, amazing cell! If you crack the egg open and notice a tiny white dot on the yolk, that’s actually the nucleus. Which makes an ostrich yolk the largest vertebrate cell on Earth!

  Another fact I love is particularly good for telling somebody over drinks or breakfast. So a chicken’s egg comes out of its cloaca, which is basically the chicken’s single hole used for… all things. Bonus fact: Chicken sex involves no penetration and is known as a “cloacal kiss.” So eggs come out of the cloaca, and so does poop. But! When the egg is moving along its last little stretch, right before it exits the chicken, the cloaca inverts like a sock so it doesn’t come into contact with any excrement. Which just comes as an utter delight to me.

  AVC: Why is it that egg yolks in America, especially ones in upscale grocers, are generally paler than the sunflower-colored yolks I’ve seen in Europe and Asia?

  RK: This should come as no surprise, but yolk color comes from what the chickens eat. Certain foods give yolks a more orange hue, and specifically pigments related to Vitamin A (lutein and zeaxanthin), which is in marigold flowers, grass, algae, peppers, and so on. But industrial egg producers can also feed their chickens synthetic pigments that result in a specific color yolk. The DSM yolk fan is a way to measure egg yolk color. Lower numbers are a more pale yellow, higher numbers are a more orange-y yolk. As it turns out, different countries prefer different colors of yolks. Scandinavia prefers a lighter eight to nine, England and France 11 to 12, Spain and northern Europe an orange 13 to 14.

  Photo: Remy Gabalda/AFP via Getty Images
  AVC: So do eggs taste different around the world?

  RK: I haven’t done extensive enough personal research, but the yolk color certainly plays psychological tricks on you. Eggs in Paris seem more delicious than the pale egg salads of Iceland, for example. Anecdotally and not scientifically, my friend Peter Freed—who told me about Chipsi Mayai, a french fry omelet they eat in Tanzania, and for which we have a recipe in the book—thinks that eggs there aren’t as good because the chickens just roam around and eat garbage. We’ll have to conduct a more scientific study. Stay tuned for All About Eggs II: More About Eggs. Just kidding.

  AVC: What’s the most delicious bite of egg you consumed while writing this book?

  RK: I visited Paris in 2015 for the first time and went to L’Arpège, where I had Alain Passard’s classic and widely imitated chaud-froid d’oeuf au sirop d’érable, or hot-cold egg: an egg gets emptied of its contents, and the yolk is gently poached, mixed with maple syrup, sherry vinegar, and heavy cream. It’s both hot and cold as the name suggests, and the perfect bite—as amazing as all the chefs say it is.

  But I had so many comparably delicious bites while cooking and testing the recipes in this book last spring. Mary-Frances Heck, Aralyn Beaumont, and I spent an intense week cooking all the recipes in the Lucky Peach kitchen so Tamara Shopsin and Jason Fulford, our designers, could take pictures of them. We ate so many eggs.

  Two perfect bites from that week were Michael Anthony’s tamagoyaki, a perfectly rolled Japanese omelet, and Sonoko Sakai’s more rustic tamago-no-shinzo yaki—so named because it looks like a pan-fried heart. A bite of tamagoyaki—savory, salty, sweet—topped with a little bit of grated daikon and soy sauce is so, so good, incredibly balanced and utterly addictive. I want it right now.

  Photo: Gary Friedman/Getty Images
  AVC: Do you have any particular tricks for fluffy scrambled eggs?

  RK: We have two great scrambled egg recipes in the book: an easy soft scramble recipe from Caroline Fidanza of the New York restaurant Saltie, and a steamed-scrambled egg recipe from Jody Williams in Buvette, also in New York. If you like your eggs fluffy, the fluffier of the two is Buvette’s, which uses the milk wand of an espresso machine to scramble the eggs and fluffs them in the process. I realize that it’s not super practical and also voids the warranty on your espresso machine, so I get it if you don’t want to go that route, though they are delicious. If you’re doing it in a pan, cook the eggs in butter over medium heat and drag your spatula around in the pan once the eggs start to set, for big fluffy curds. The main trick is just to be sure to watch your eggs like a hawk, and to take them off the heat before they’re totally done—they will keep cooking in the pan.

  AVC: The book is done, the check’s been cashed. What is your current relationship status with the egg? Everlasting love? Indifference? Can’t stand the sight of it?

  RK: It might be surprising to hear, but after eating eggs upon eggs upon eggs in the writing of this book, I still really love eggs. The thing is, they are so versatile, and there are so many ways to cook them. You could have egg drop soup one day, then lemon meringue pie, then an Indian egg curry. From egg dish to egg dish, textures and flavor profiles can really vary. I could see myself getting sick of most things: bacon, potatoes, pasta, carrots. But eggs? Never eggs.

  All About Eggs by Rachel Khong and the team at Lucky Peach is in bookstores April 4.

the reader's shelf
Neal Wyatt
Library Journal. 143.1 (Jan. 1, 2018): p132.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Memorable Debuts of 2017

As is the tradition of this column, a group of librarians ring in the New Year by looking back at their favorite debuts from 2017.

[...]

Rachel Khong's GOODBYE, VITAMIN (Holt. 2017. ISBN 9781250109163. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781250109156) sees Ruth going back to California to help with what some call her father's "inconsistencies" and what doctors call Alzheimer's. The move is an apathetic default: Ruth has broken up with her fiance and is detached from her sonography job, which has only served to make her an expert on the fetal position. The future seems as unreal as the past, with Ruth only managing to take baby steps over the course of the novel. Diary entries starring her quirky relatives allow readers to see the anguish of a stuck-in-neutral millennial, but they also showcase the infiniteness of parental love.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wyatt, Neal. "the reader's shelf." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 132. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521049461/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=127e0569. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A521049461

QUOTE:
this well-rounded, informative cookbook has a hip vibe and quirky illustrations. It will be at home on everyone's shelf.

Publishers Weekly. 264.10 (Mar. 6, 2017): p55.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
These two cookbooks are worth shelling out for.

[...]

All About Eggs: Everything We Know About the World's Most Important Food

Rachel Khong and the editors of Lucky Peach. Clarkson Potter, $26 (256p) ISBN

978-0-8041-8775-6

This collection of essays centers on the ubiquitous egg and includes recipes from around the world, including Scotch eggs, huevos en rabo de mestiza, and China Cafe's egg foo young. For those who need the basics covered, have no fear: Khong, a contributing editor for Lucky Peach, explains how to make soft- and hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs in the style of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, and the spectrum of fried eggs (over easy, over hard, and sunny side up). The essays are truly standouts. Aralyn Beaumont contributes an essay and recipe on the poulard omelet ("puffy, souffle-like outsides are folded over mnny, buttery, lightly cooked eggs that ooze out onto the plate like a sauce"); in "The Hardboiled Detective," Harold McGee offers lessons on peeling eggs, such as the oral method, in which "you place your mouth on the narrow end [of a partly peeled egg] and blow the egg through the other." Those who sometimes cook and bake without eggs will appreciate the full egg substitute guide. In usual Lucky Peach style, this well-rounded, informative cookbook has a hip vibe and quirky illustrations. It will be at home on everyone's shelf. Photos. (Apr.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"How do you like your eggs?" Publishers Weekly, 6 Mar. 2017, p. 55. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A484973694/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0028dc27. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A484973694

Quote:
In In her tender, well-paced debut novel. . . .Khong writes heartbreaking family drama with charm, perfect prose, and deadpan humor.
Goodbye, Vitamin
Annie Bostrom
Booklist.
113.19-20 (June 2017): p52.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Goodbye, Vitamin. By Rachel Khong. July 2017. 208p. Holt, $26 (97812501091631.
When Ruth's mom, Annie, asks her to extend her visit home for Christmas by an entire year, Ruth figures
she may as well. She won't be leaving much behind in San Francisco, other than the still-stinging breakup
with her fiance, Joel. Besides, Annie needs help: Ruth's dad, Howard, has been extra forgetful and was just
told he won't be returning to his job as a university professor. Since Alzheimer's can't be diagnosed in a
living person, doctors rule out what Howard doesn't have, and everyone hopes his memory loss might cease,
or reverse itself. Annie's convinced the dementia was caused by aluminum cookware, so they subsist on
takeout and vitamins. Ruth's younger brother, Linus, is wary of Howard, having witnessed family troubles
Ruth was too wrapped up in her life with Joel to notice. Ruth's new preoccupation with memory, in its most
concrete form, gives her a different glimpse of her father and family, while they all cope with what they
know is a one-way-only illness. In he
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Goodbye, Vitamin
Publishers Weekly.
264.22 (May 29, 2017): p42+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Goodbye, Vitamin
Rachel Khong. Holt, $26 (208p) ISBN 978-1250-10916-3
Lucky Peach executive editor Khong's first novel, written in journal format, is a family drama cum breakup
story about 30-year-old Ruth, a recently single sonographer struggling to come to terms with the
Alzheimer's diagnosis received by her father, Howard. When his behavior worsens (such as wandering over
to a neighbor's porch in his underwear), Ruth quits her job in San Francisco to move back in with her
parents for a year to keep an eye on things. After Howard, a history professor, is asked to take a leave of
absence, Ruth and a few ex-students stage a fake class on the college campus in order to keep his mind
engaged, but without alerting the proper authorities. Meanwhile, Ruth starts a budding romance with coconspirator
Theo, finds her parents' signed divorce papers, and digs deeper into her father's extramarital
dalliances. Emotions heat up further when Howard's actions progress "from manageable to scary" and he
smashes plates, shouts, and throws bedroom pillows into a neighbor's pool. Because of the book's truncated
structure and the frequent descriptions of minutiae (catalogs of Ruth's boyfriends postbreakup, patrons at
the bar where she and Theo go on a date, facts about Alzheimer's disease), passages seem underdeveloped,
especially given the weighty subject matter. Though this foray into a family's attempts to cope mostly skims
the surface, it does gain depth as it progresses. Agent: Marya Spence, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Goodbye, Vitamin." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 42+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500691/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=414c54da.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500691
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QUOTE:
Khong's pithy
observations and cynical humor round out a moving story that sparks empathy where you'd least expect it.

Khong, Rachel: GOODBYE, VITAMIN
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Khong, Rachel GOODBYE, VITAMIN Henry Holt (Adult Fiction) $26.00 7, 11 ISBN: 978-1-250-10916-3
Former Lucky Peach executive editor Khong (All About Eggs: Everything We Know About the World's
Most Important Food, 2017) whisks up a heartfelt family dramedy in a debut novel that ruminates on love,
loss, and memory. Last June, Ruth Young was engaged and packing to move to a spacious apartment in
Bernal Heights, San Francisco, when her fiance, Joel, broke the news that he wasn't moving with her. Now
30, single, and still raw from the jarring breakup (and the gutting knowledge that Joel has a new,
undoubtedly cooler, girlfriend), Ruth returns to her family's home for the holidays. But instead of escaping
her past, Ruth must face another obstacle upon arriving in Los Angeles--her father, esteemed history
professor Howard Young, has Alzheimer's disease, and it's rapidly worsening. To alleviate her mother's
stress, Ruth quits her job in San Francisco--reluctantly joining "the unmarried and careerless boat"--and
moves back in with her parents to care for her irascible father, who, notwithstanding his failing memory and
bizarre behaviors (such as carrying a urinal cake in his pocket), insists he's fine. Written in chronological
vignettes spanning a year, Ruth's vivid narration reads much like an intimate diary. In an effort to stave off
her boredom at home, Ruth sleuths around her father's unkempt office, digs for evidence of an extramarital
affair, and even schemes with Howard's former students to keep him under the illusion that he's still actively
teaching. As Howard's memories fade, Ruth's rise to the surface. Recollections of her father's drinking
problem and recent infidelity send her spiraling among resentment, disgust, and (unwittingly) compassion
toward her parents. Ultimately, it's Howard's flaws that move Ruth to examine her own. Ruth and Howard
are a hilarious father-daughter duo, at turns destructive and endearing, and entries from a notebook that
Howard kept during Ruth's childhood serve as an enriching back story to their deep bond. Khong's pithy
observations and cynical humor round out a moving story that sparks empathy where you'd least expect it.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Khong, Rachel: GOODBYE, VITAMIN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934245/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=cf78ed4e.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491934245

Wyatt, Neal. "the reader's shelf." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 132. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A521049461/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=127e0569. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. "How do you like your eggs?" Publishers Weekly, 6 Mar. 2017, p. 55. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A484973694/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0028dc27. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. Bostrom, Annie. "Goodbye, Vitamin." Booklist, June 2017, p. 52. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498582686/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. "Goodbye, Vitamin." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 42+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500691/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. "Khong, Rachel: GOODBYE, VITAMIN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934245/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/books/review/goodbye-vitamin-rachel-khong.html
  Word count: 802

  QUOTE:
  Told in a diary format over the year that
  Ruth spends at home, “Goodbye, Vitamin” is a quietly brilliant disquisition on
  family, relationships and adulthood, told in prose that is so startling in its spare
  beauty that I found myself thinking about Khong’s turns of phrase for days after I’d
  finished reading.

  A Darkly Comic Novel About
  Turning 30 Without Growing Up
  By DOREE SHAFRIR JULY 28, 2017
  GOODBYE, VITAMIN
  By Rachel Khong
  196 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $26.
  In previous generations, the age of 30 was practically middle-aged; it was a
  realizable aspiration to be married, have children and own a home by then. But
  times have changed. The average age of first marriages has been creeping upward for
  years, we have children later and later, and owning a home, particularly in expensive
  cities like New York and Los Angeles, has become out of reach for all but the
  wealthiest millennials. Yet 30 still looms large over the psyches of 20-somethings, as
  though it’s the age when you’re supposed to at least be on your way to figuring it all
  out.
  Ruth, the 30-year-old protagonist of Rachel Khong’s “Goodbye, Vitamin,” most
  definitely does not have it all figured out. She’s still not over Joel, her ex-fiancé, who
  broke off their engagement in the cruelest, most passive-aggressive way possible (he
  tells her they’re going to move into a new apartment, and it’s not until the night
  before the move that he informs her she’s going to be moving into it alone;
  meanwhile, he has a new girlfriend). When she goes home to Southern California for
  Christmas for the first time in years, her mother asks if she’d be willing to live with
  them for a while, because her father is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
  3/24/2018 A Darkly Comic Novel About Turning 30 Without Growing Up - The New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/books/review/goodbye-vitamin-rachel-khong.html 2/3
  It doesn’t exactly seem like a recipe for a darkly comic yet heartfelt novel, but
  that’s exactly what “Goodbye, Vitamin” is. Told in a diary format over the year that
  Ruth spends at home, “Goodbye, Vitamin” is a quietly brilliant disquisition on
  family, relationships and adulthood, told in prose that is so startling in its spare
  beauty that I found myself thinking about Khong’s turns of phrase for days after I’d
  finished reading. Ruth’s trying to save her doomed relationship was “like trying to
  tuck an elephant into pants.” And — as will be recognizable to anyone whose ex has
  magically stopped doing the exact thing that drove one crazy the second the ex gets
  into a new relationship — Ruth reflects: “You know what else is unfair, about Joel?
  That I loosened the jar lid, so somebody else could open him.”
  Meanwhile, at home, Ruth is struggling to admit to herself how much her
  father’s mental state has deteriorated. In particularly poignant passages, Ruth reads
  the notebook her father kept while she was growing up: “Today was my birthday,
  and you asked me how old I was. When I told you 35 you seemed stunned. You asked
  me if I started at 1. Then you asked: When do we die?” As she is finding her own
  footing after a relationship that seems to have sucked away much of her own identity
  — she dropped out of college seven months before graduation to move where Joel
  was living; whatever ambitions she might have had seem to have been overwhelmed
  by his goals and desires — she is rebuilding that identity, in part through these
  recollections. She’s simultaneously developing a relationship with her father’s
  teaching assistant that always seems just on the cusp of turning into something
  more, but never quite gets there — and Ruth is the one who’s always pulling away.
  It’s refreshing to read female authors — among them, Jami Attenberg, Ottessa
  Moshfegh, and Marcy Dermansky — who are subverting the longstanding
  convention of adult men who feel stuck, who are emotionally unavailable, who find
  adulthood just out of reach, and who are often “saved” by a woman who has her life
  together. They, and now Khong, are showing that women can be screw-ups too.
  Doree Shafrir is the author of “Startup” and a writer for BuzzFeed News.
  A version of this review appears in print on July 30, 2017, on Page BR18 of the Sunday Book Review with
  the headline: Just Out of Reach.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2017/07/12/535799520/goodbye-vitamin-is-sweet-but-not-sugarcoated
  Word count: 828

  QUOTE:
  Hello, Rachel Khong. Kudos for this delectable take on familial devotion and dementia.
  'Goodbye, Vitamin' Is Sweet — But Not Sugarcoated
  July 12, 20174:54 PM ET
  HELLER MCALPIN

  Goodbye, Vitamin
  Goodbye, Vitamin
  by Rachel Khong

  Hardcover, 196 pages purchase

  A heartwarming book about Alzheimer's disease? Seriously? Rachel Khong's first novel comes adorned with rows of hot pink, orange, and yellow lemons, but a pitcher of lemonade would have been apt too, for this is a writer who clearly knows how to squeeze the sweetness out of the tart fruit life throws at you.

  We meet Khong's winsome narrator, 30-year-old Ruth Young, when she goes home for Christmas for the first time in years, after her fiancé — for whom she dropped out of college to accompany him to medical school — dumps her for another woman. Her father, Howard, a history professor, has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and her flummoxed mother asks her to stay home and help for a year. When a stranger calls to say he's found her father's newly labeled pants and shirts hanging from trees up and down the road, Ruth realizes she "can't not stay."

  So Goodbye, Vitamin is about getting over a bad breakup and reconnecting with family. But it's also about a devoted father who went into a tailspin — involving booze and an affair — when his adored firstborn left home, a situation that was exacerbated when Ruth stayed away after hearing her younger brother's distressing reports. Most of all, though, it's about memory and forgiveness, and the realization that both are selective, subjective, and unpredictable.

  But I'm making it sound too heavy. This is a much sunnier take on dementia care than, say, Alice Sebold's grim The Almost Moon, in which a resentful daughter suffocates her severely demented mother, or even Lisa Genova's empathetic, neurobiologically informative Still Alice.

  Khong's endearingly quirky novel, which takes the form of Ruth's diary of her transitional year, is filled with whimsical observations, oddball facts, and yes, even some romance. The title comes from Ruth's mother's new faith in vitamins, and her father's habit of bidding them adieu before tossing them down the hatch. Ruth spends a lot of time reading message boards on caregiver forums, inventing new yoga poses, and preparing meals that feature brain food like jellyfish and cruciferous vegetables — which her father calls "crucified." (Khong's work as a food writer and editor shows.) Still, she wonders, "What do I do all day? I don't even know."

  Most of all ... [Goodbye, Vitamin] is about memory and forgiveness, and the realization that both are selective, subjective, and unpredictable.

  The novel captures the painful disorientation that follows a blindsiding breakup, as Ruth stews over the waste of so many years. Her training as a maternity ultrasound sonographer provided no help in reading their stagnant relationship, and she's furious with her own cluelessness. But even as she moves on, troubling memories occasionally wash up "out of nowhere—like an ancient candlestick from some wrecked ship." And how's this for a great line: "You know what else is unfair, about Joel? That I loosened the jar lid, so somebody else could open him."

  Meanwhile, her father slips in and out of rationality — sometimes running off without clothes or leaving an avocado shell in the dish rack as if it were a freshly washed plate, other times lecturing cogently on California history to a devoted group of graduate students who have come up with an elaborate, screwball ruse to "keep his mind off, well, losing it" by pretending he's been reinstated to his academic position.

  Some passages evoke the wonderful offbeat sensibility of Ali Smith, channeling the Scottish writer's flair for clever wordplay and adorable interchanges, especially between children and adults. In Howard's more lucid moments, he shares a notebook in which he recorded Ruth's pearls of wisdom when she was little. "Today we went over to your mother's friend's house for dinner. We'd asked you to be polite, so you said, 'No more, please, it's horrible thank you,'" reads one entry. Even cuter: "Today was my birthday, and you asked me how old I was. When I told you 35 you seemed stunned. You asked me if I started at one. Then you asked, When do we die?"

  During the course of Ruth's homecoming year, their roles switch and she starts cataloguing her father's erratic days: "Today I cooked salmon and you said it was esculent," she writes. "Today you disappeared again, and scared the s—- out of us." As she charts their family pulling together in moments of stress, hilarity, and tenderness, she comments, "Here I am, in lieu of you, collecting the moments."

  Sweet? Yes. Sugarcoated? Perhaps. Saccharine or cloying? Not to me. Hello, Rachel Khong. Kudos for this delectable take on familial devotion and dementia.

• Washington Independent Review of Books
  http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/goodbye-vitamin-a-novel
  Word count: 718

  Goodbye, Vitamin: A Novel
  By Rachel Khong Henry Holt & Co. 208 pp.
  Reviewed by Alice Stephens
  July 31, 2017
  A young woman returns home to care for her ailing father in this millennial coming-of-age story.

  Ruth Young, the aptly named narrator of Goodbye, Vitamin, Rachel Khong’s debut novel, returns home on Christmas Eve, but not just for the holidays. Still reeling from the gutless way her fiancé broke up with her, she has quit her job to move back in with her parents and help care for her father, Howard, who has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

  This is a novel of millennials, for millennials, and by a millennial, so naturally there are no chapters, but rather brief, diary-like entries, like so:

  April 25

  “Could this be true?” I’ve called Grooms, and I’m asking. “Every day, we lose one hundred thousand brain cells.” I’ve read this in the Los Angeles Times.

  “Yes,” she says. “True.”

  The use of three separate verb conjugations to describe one single incident creates a nebulous now that isn’t quite in the present, but not quite in the past, either. The narrative, and its narrator, are in limbo, neither here nor there, neither now nor then, neither girl nor woman.

  Though the staccato structure of the narrative is ultra-contemporary, the plot is timeless: the coming-of-age story. By caring for her father and confronting his mortality and his problematic past, Ruth finally attains adulthood.

  At 30 years old, Ruth might seem a bit long in the tooth to be the protagonist in this kind of novel, but a combination of increased life expectancy and affluence has resulted in a new stage of American life that falls between adolescence and adulthood. Somebody should come up with a word for that.

  Adultescence?

  As her father recedes into a childlike puerility, Ruth gains maturity. This generational power shift is made explicit by “Today” observations that father and daughter write for each other. When Ruth was a young girl, her father filled a notebook with her precocities:

  Today you had me excavate your nose, which you’d put corn into.

  Today, while I was trying to teach you to swim, you asked how deep the pool was. When I said four feet, you looked incredulous, and said, Whose feet!

  Today we went over to your mother’s friend’s house for dinner. We’d asked you to be polite, so you said, “No more, please, it’s horrible thank you.”

  Today was my birthday, and you asked me how old I was. When I told you thirty-five you seemed stunned. You asked me if I started at one. Then you asked: When do we die?

  Today you said, apropos of nothing, “Good corpse, bad corpse.”

  By August, Ruth starts her own “Today” observations on her father’s advancing senility. “Today you washed your shoelaces. Today you spoon-fed the neighbor’s cat tuna from a can…Today you disappeared again, and scared the shit out of us.” The torch has officially been passed from father to daughter.

  Despite the abbreviated passages, the gee-whiz observations of the too-old-to-be-precocious narrator, and the meandering nature of the narrative, the book deals with serious life themes in an engaging way. Ruth has an eye for the awkward social moment and is quick with the wry quip, making even the most self-involved musings (and there are a lot of them — Ruth seems to have no interests beyond herself) palatable.

  The narrative ends before Howard reaches the most degrading and heartbreaking depths of Alzheimer’s. Ruth depicts the disease’s progress as a cutesy reversion to childhood.

  In fact, the entire narrative is imbued with a sitcom gloss that ultimately numbs the reader to the emotional crises that Ruth faces. By the end, we’re ready to say goodbye to Ruth. We know her down to her earliest memory, but we’re unsure of her future. The girl-child is now a woman-child, but still at a crossroad.

  Alice Stephens writes a regular column for the Independent, Alice in Wordland.

• SF Gate
  https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Goodbye-Vitamin-by-Rachel-Khong-11284732.php
  Word count: 966

  QUOTE:
  the real charm of the novel isn’t the plot so much as the sparkling little details
  that pop up on every page, illuminating the dark material.

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  3/24/2018 ‘Goodbye, Vitamin,’ by Rachel Khong - SFGate
  https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Goodbye-Vitamin-by-Rachel-Khong-11284732.php 2/4
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  first novel, “Goodbye, Vitamin,” San Francisco author Rachel Khong has
  managed to create an Alzheimer’s novel that is heartbreaking but also funny,
  offering a fresh take on the disease and possible outcomes both for the people
  suffering from it and their caretakers.
  Written in journal form, the novel begins: “Tonight a man found Dad’s pants in a
  tree that was lit with still-hanging Christmas lights.” This is the first entry by 29-
  year-old Ruth Young, home for the holidays in Southern California, after having
  been dumped by her boyfriend. While she knows that her father, an academic, isn’t
  as sharp as he used to be, this is the first visit upon which the extent of his dementia
  quickly becomes clear for her.
  His behavior has become so erratic and disruptive that at the college where he
  taught, they’ve pulled his classes and barred him from campus. Ruth’s brother,
  Linus, is keeping his distance, still mad about having caught him cheating on their
  long-suffering mom. The dad was also a pretty serious alcoholic. But these flaws
  aside, he was also a brilliant and charismatic man and a devoted father, and it’s
  clear that Ruth adores him. So when her mom asks her to stay after Christmas and
  help care for him, she says yes, partly out of duty, but also because she’s adrift in
  her own life, and this is as good an option as any.
  Summarized, none of this sounds remotely funny. But as Ruth settles back in at
  home, one of her father’s devoted former grad students convinces her to participate
  in a scheme whereby a bunch of students pretend to have enrolled in a class that
  he’s been enlisted to teach, a scheme intended to give him his dignity back (and
  allow them to keep learning from him). This ruse, somewhat predictably, leads to
  high jinks and a prospective romance for Ruth.
  3/24/2018 ‘Goodbye, Vitamin,’ by Rachel Khong - SFGate
  https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Goodbye-Vitamin-by-Rachel-Khong-11284732.php 3/4
  But the real charm of the novel isn’t the plot so much as the sparkling little details
  that pop up on every page, illuminating the dark material. At a party with friends
  from high school, Ruth chats with a former classmate who glorifies his status as a
  chef, and who is informed by someone else that he merely “pulled pin bones out of
  salmon” and had to wear a hairnet on his beard. Another old friend has children
  called Katrina and Sandy, and Ruth wonders if it’s a coincidence that they were
  named for hurricanes. This isn’t melodrama; it’s a novel modeled on real life, where
  humor often rubs shoulders with pathos, and Ruth’s gift as a narrator is her ability
  to observe and record it all.
  This is a trait she appears to have inherited from her father. As her year back at
  home progresses, so does his disease, his memory increasingly faulty, his moods
  ever more volatile. But he can recall specifics of Ruth’s early childhood, thanks to a
  small red notebook in which he wrote letters to her, describing the funny and
  strange things that she said, her questions as she came to understand the world
  around her. He gives her pages from this notebook, which are interspersed with the
  story of his decline, and it’s striking to watch the adult revert to behaving like a
  child alongside pages in which we see a child beginning to understand the world of
  adults.
  “Goodbye, Vitamin” never minimizes the difficulty of caring for someone with
  Alzheimer’s. But it also shows how this care can be rewarding. Stripped of his
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  accolades and the bulk of his memories, Ruth’s father is profoundly changed, and
  yet something essential remains. In the late stages of this disease, he is at once
  mysterious and familiar, separate but dependent, maddening but frequently
  adorable too, in the strange and unexpected things he says and does. You often hear
  that humans come full circle, that the very old become like young children again.
  But this novel shows, without ever being preachy, how this doesn’t have to be a
  burden, or at least how it can be one worth bearing.
  Malena Watrous is the author of the novel “If You Follow Me.” Email:
  books@sfchronicle.com
  Goodbye, Vitamin
  By Rachel Khong
  (Henry Holt; 196 pages; $26)

• Paste
  https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/07/rachel-khong-finds-the-humor-in-loss-in-her-debut.html
  Word count: 735

  Rachel Khong Finds the Humor in Loss in Her Debut Novel Goodbye, Vitamin
  By Bradley Babendir | July 13, 2017 | 3:25pm
  Photo courtesy Henry Holt
  BOOKS REVIEWS RACHEL KHONG
  Share Tweet Submit Pin
  Rachel Khong Finds the Humor in Loss in Her Debut Novel Goodbye, Vitamin
  Rachel Khong’s debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, is a story about subtraction. Ruth, less a fiancé, leaves her job and moves back home to help take care of her father, who is experiencing dementia and has lost his job as a professor at a university. At Christmas, their family is down one child; Ruth’s brother won’t come home, because he hasn’t forgiven their father for years of pain caused by infidelity and drinking.

  Ruth struggles to find her place at home until her father’s former teaching assistant contacts her, suggesting they round up some students so that her father can teach a class on California’s history. They lie and tell him that the department has asked him to lead the course, and he agrees. The students know that the class is not for credit, but Ruth’s father does not. The added wrinkle is that he isn’t allowed on campus for any reason, as the head of the department has banned him. This leads to some wonderful hijinks and high-stress moments, all of which Khong perfectly writes.

  Screen Shot 2017-07-13 at 3.17.30 PM.pngAll of this—the deception, the sickness, the loss—can get heavy. Though the book is remarkably funny, Khong’s always willing to head into the storm. Her moral radar is excellent, and instead of drawing humor from her characters’ pain, she mines it from the richness of their relationships.

  Khong also displays an exceptional talent for evoking a lifetime of ups and downs between two people in meaningful ways. When it comes to Ruth and her friend Bonnie, Khong sketches out a scene from their youth:

  The unofficial plan had been to never abandon each other. Bonnie grew boobs before I did, but we still wore our first bikinis together. We were at Huntington Beach, wearing big T-shirts over our suits. We were fourteen. Neither of us would take her T-shirt off first.

  The anecdote ends on less innocent terms—the two teenagers run away from a man on rollerblades who produces a condom and asks if they’ll show him how to use it. It’s an endearing memory turned horrifying, the type that can forge camaraderie for a lifetime.

  The most powerful of the book’s relationships is between Ruth and her father. He took notes throughout her childhood, and he begins sharing pages with her. These anecdotes form the highlights of the book, like this pitch-perfect childhood moment: “Today we went over to your mother’s friend’s house for dinner. We’d asked you to be polite, so you said, ‘No more, please, it’s horrible thank you.’” Others betray the uncertainty inherent in parenting. Khong never adorns these notes with commentary, and they achieve more gravity for it. They also stand in contrast with her father’s character in the fictional present, as the unsentimental man is struggling to adapt to his new circumstances.

  Ruth’s mother also proves rudderless and confused. She wants to help her husband, but she resorts to extreme measures with dubious results (like getting rid of their cookware, because she read that aluminum could cause dementia). If any of the characters are underdeveloped, she is. Khong attempts to capture Ruth’s mother’s anxiety over her husband’s infidelity and her children’s confusion as to why she didn’t leave him. It’s fascinating drama for the reader, but it whittles Ruth’s mother down in the process.

  The book’s biggest blind spot is money, which is rarely discussed despite some costly choices made by the characters. Ruth’s joblessness is not a real concern, nor does her dad inquire about payment for his semester of work.

  That said, most criticisms are mere quibbles. Goodbye, Vitamin is an excellent summer read, delivering both humor and emotional weight. Khong, already well-known in some circles for her work at the popular food magazine Lucky Peach, will deservedly be the summer’s breakout literary star.

• New Yorker
  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/16/goodbye-vitamin-out-in-the-open-murder-in-matera-and-insomniac-city
  Word count: 158

  QUOTE:
  magical, visual approach, which is micro in detail but universal in scope.

  Books
  October 16, 2017 Issue
  Briefly Noted
  “Goodbye, Vitamin,” “Out in the Open,” “Murder in Matera,” and “Insomniac City.”

  Goodbye, Vitamin, by Rachel Khong (Henry Holt). “More and more, I get this feeling I don’t know a thing,” says the narrator of this novel, who, after a terrible breakup, moves in with her parents to help care for her Alzheimer’s-stricken father. Despite the sad premise, the novel unfolds in quirky, diary-like bursts. Khong, a food writer and editor, dots the narrative with beautiful quotidian details, often gustatory: jellyfish lovingly prepared to stave off dementia, secrets told over a shared pomegranate. The novel’s opening sentence—“Tonight a man found Dad’s pants in a tree lit with Christmas lights”—encapsulates much of its magical, visual approach, which is micro in detail but universal in scope.

• Los Angeles Times
  http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-fo-all-about-eggs-lucky-peach-cookbook-20170405-story.html
  Word count: 1786

  QUOTE:
  The conceit of this cookbook is that it's a primer about eggs, that most basic of ingredients, the dish that many of us first learn to cook — "everything we know about the world's most important food," according to the subtitle. And the book delivers on much of that, providing 88 recipes and many stories, tips and anecdotes culled from a multicultural and multinational array of great chefs, food writers, food scientists, television personalities, physicists, novelists and more.
  Quite aside from being a useful cookbook, it's an utterly marvelous, often hilarious read.
  This is a cook's cookbook, a writer's cookbook, a reader's book.
  Cookbook of the Week: 'All About Eggs,' the last cookbook from Lucky Peach, plus an egg tart recipe
  Amy Scattergood
  By AMY SCATTERGOOD
  JUN 02, 2017 | 8:00 AM

  Cookbook of the Week: 'All About Eggs,' the last cookbook from Lucky Peach, plus an egg tart recipe
  Lucky Peach All About Eggs cook book by Rachel Khong and the editors of Lucky Peach. (Penguin Random House)

  Hindsight is a funny thing, loaded with irony and regret and a kind of impossible nostalgia, a quality that should, by definition, require more than a few months to accumulate meaning. Think about politics, of course. Think about eggs. Eggs? Well, yes, because we're talking about Lucky Peach, the recently-shuttered food magazine, and "All About Eggs," the fourth and final cookbook by the editors of that publication, which came out in April.

  So you read this last Lucky Peach cookbook, written by Rachel Khong with more than 50 ancillary contributors, in a kind of vertigo, flipping the pages — and sometimes the actual eggs — with a heady mixture of hunger, amusement and sadness. It is almost impossible not to find a double meaning spilled through the pages like curry sauce. This, of course, has always been part of the fun of Lucky Peach, a publication that was known for its mash-up assembly of excellent and irreverent writing about food, science and culture.

  inRead invented by Teads

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  The conceit of this cookbook is that it's a primer about eggs, that most basic of ingredients, the dish that many of us first learn to cook — "everything we know about the world's most important food," according to the subtitle. And the book delivers on much of that, providing 88 recipes and many stories, tips and anecdotes culled from a multicultural and multinational array of great chefs, food writers, food scientists, television personalities, physicists, novelists and more.

  Yank Sing's egg tarts.
  Yank Sing's egg tarts. (Glenn Koenig / Los Angeles Times)

  Recipe: Yank Sing's egg tarts » »
  "And so we come — almost! — to the end. Eggs existed before you and me, and eggs will outlive us all. This thought is either comforting or terrifying, depending on the sort of day you're having," writes Khong in the preface to the eighth and last chapter of the book: Immortal Eggs. This is both the tone and content that she set in the first page ("This is a book about eggs. But more than that, it's a book about mankind — it's a book about us all.") and has continued throughout, as have her fellow writers. (It should come as no surprise that Khong, who was a contributing editor and worked at Lucky Peach since its start in 2011, is also a San Francisco-based novelist: Her first novel comes out in July.)

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  That said, "All About Eggs" can read like a cacophony at times, as it's sometimes hard to figure out which voice is which, and whose recipe is exactly whose. The photographs (which along with the playful illustrations are by Tamara Shopsin and Jason Fulford), on black background and oddly stark, are cordoned off into one yellow-edged section midway through the book. This is also where you'll find the index, separate from the list of contributors, which is itself at the end of the book. All this means that you end up toggling back and forth a lot, trying to match the bits of prose with their authors.

  It should also be said that some of the recipes in the book presuppose a certain expertise. Daniel Boulud's famous "perfect" omelette farcie, for example, is both daunting on the page and in execution, and I found myself watching the legendary French chef demo the dish on YouTube before I got it right. (Even if you've already mastered the dish, I recommend doing this, also because it's enormous fun.) And the Hong Kong-style egg tart recipe from San Francisco restaurant Yank Sing required a few test runs in our Test Kitchen to get the mechanics of homemade puff pastry just right. Other recipes worked perfectly on the first go-around. This kind of inconsistency can be comforting (leave the omelet to the experts and flip to the bit about egg crystals on Mauna Loa Mars) or terrifying, depending on the sort of day you're having.

  But this also makes Khong's original point, which is that eggs are harder than they look; there is a reason that making an omelet is the cook's traditional, oft-cited rite of passage.

  Quite aside from being a useful cookbook, it's an utterly marvelous, often hilarious read. Where else can you find a few pages from Harold McGee next to a recipe for Arzak eggs, a literary anecdote about an egg collector ("Claude lived alone, a mélomane surrounded by his arias") near a bit about what to name your chicken (Barbara, or maybe Eldrida) and something called Chickens of Portlandia? Writing about a dish called Eggs Kejriwal, yet another in the procession of gifted writers notes that one will need "a processed white cheese that melts like rubber and tastes like nostalgia." Exactly. This is a cook's cookbook, a writer's cookbook, a reader's book. RIP LP.

  Cookbook of the Week: "All About Eggs," by Rachel Khong and the editors of Lucky Peach (Clarkson Potter, $26)

  YANK SING'S EGG TART

  1 hour, plus chilling times. Makes 6 to 12 tarts, depending on size.

  EGG CUSTARD

  1 cup water

  ½ cup sugar

  4 eggs

  ¼ cup evaporated milk

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  ½ teaspoon vanilla extract

  Salt

  Prepared tart shells

  1. In a saucepan, combine the water and sugar over medium heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until the sugar dissolves, 3 to 5 minutes. Remove from heat and cool the syrup.

  2. In a large bowl, whisk the eggs into the sugar syrup. Stir in the evaporated milk, vanilla and a pinch of salt. Strain the mixture through a fine-mesh strainer into a container with a pouring lip. This makes a generous 2 cups filling, which will keep up to 3 days. Cover and refrigerate for several hours before using to allow any air incorporated from whisking to dissipate before baking.

  PUFF PASTRY AND ASSEMBLY

  ¾ cup (1 ½ sticks) cold butter, cut into 1-inch cubes

  1 ½ (6.4 ounces) cups all-purpose flour, divided, more as needed

  1 egg

  2 tablespoons water

  Egg custard

  1. In a large bowl, use a pastry knife or fork to mash the butter with ¾ cup of the flour, just enough until it will clump together (there will still be bits of butter showing), to form an "oil dough." Flatten the dough out into a square and refrigerate until well-chilled, at least 20 minutes.

  2. Meanwhile, in a separate bowl, mix the egg and water into the remaining ¾ cup flour to form a "water dough." If the dough is too soft, work in extra flour, a tablespoon at a time. Knead the dough until it is soft but still tacky, then form into a square about the same size as the oil dough. Cover and refrigerate until well-chilled, at least 20 minutes.

  3. Flour a work surface and remove the water dough from the refrigerator. Roll the dough out to a rectangle twice the size of the oil dough.

  4. Take the oil dough out of the refrigerator and spread it out on top of the water dough, leaving a large enough border of the water dough to be able to fold over the oil dough entirely. Fold the sides of the water dough over the oil dough. If the dough begins to warm and soften at any time while folding, refrigerate or freeze it until it is firm and chilled again before proceeding.

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  5. Roll the entire dough out to a large rectangle about the size of a sheet of paper (8 ½ by 11 inches), and mark it into thirds. Fold each outer third over the center third, as if folding a letter, and roll the dough out into a large rectangle again. If the oil dough pops through at any time, "patch" the hole with flour to seal. Repeat three more times, chilling the dough as needed to keep it very cold.

  6. On a lightly floured work surface, roll the dough out to a 1/4-inch thickness. Cut out disks using a round cutter that are slightly larger than the diameter of your tart molds (for example, cut 4-inch rounds if using 3-inch tart shells measured at the base, with 1/2-inch sides).

  7. Lightly grease the inside of your fluted tart molds and gently press the pastry disks into the molds. Chill at least 20 minutes before baking. Meanwhile, heat the oven to 350 degrees.

  8. Fill each prepared tart shell three-fourths of the way up with egg custard.

  10. Position the tarts evenly on a baking sheet and place in the oven. Bake until the crust is puffed and lightly colored, and the filling is set (it should barely jiggle when tapped), 30 to 45 minutes. Baking times will vary depending on the size and depth of the tarts. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool for 5 to 10 minutes, then carefully tap the molds to remove the tarts.

  Each of 12 servings: Calories 227; protein 5 grams; carbohydrates 21 grams; fiber 0; fat 14 grams; saturated fat 8 grams; cholesterol 110 mg; sugar 9 grams; sodium 37 mg

  Note: Adapted from a recipe in "All About Eggs" by Rachel Khong and the editors of Lucky Peach.

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  amy.scattergood@latimes.com

  @ascattergood

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