Indies Introduce Q&A with Maggie Su

Maggie Su is the author of Blob: A Love Story, a Winter/Spring 2025 Indies Introduce adult selection, and February 2025 Indie Next List pick.

Sophie Chen of Belmont Books in Belmont, Massachusetts, served on the bookseller panel that selected Su’s book for Indies Introduce.

Su sat down with Chen to discuss her debut title. This is a transcript of their discussion. You can listen to the interview on the ABA podcast, BookED.

Sophie Chen: Hi, my name is Sophie Chen, and I'm a bookseller at Belmont books in Belmont, Massachusetts, located right outside of Boston. I'm delighted today to be joined by Maggie Su, the author of Blob, which will be out on January 28.

Maggie Su is a writer and editor. She received a PhD in fiction from University of Cincinnati and an MFA from Indiana University. Her work has appeared in New England Review, Four Way Review, TriQuarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, Juked, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She currently lives in South Bend, Indiana, with her partner, cat, and turtle. Blob will be out on January 28. Thank you so much for joining me, Maggie.

Maggie Su: Thanks so much for having me, I’m thrilled!

SC: Yeah, love the book! It was so much fun.

MS: I'm glad you enjoyed it.

SC: For listeners that don't know about the book, this one is about a Taiwanese American girl who finds this blob behind a dumpster, takes it home with her, and starts forming it into this human person who she eventually makes her boyfriend.

What was the inspiration for the book, and how did this blob come to be?

MS: Thank you so much for that question. I started it as a short story, actually, in a fiction workshop in 2019. Then over the summer, I took a playwriting workshop, so Blob turned into a 10-minute play. Then it was the spring of 2020, we were in lockdown. I started work on Blob as a novel.

So, Blob has transformed into different forms, but the conceit of the story, which is trying to mold a blob into your perfect partner, has always kind of remained the same. I was really interested in giving this character who has really struggled exactly what she wants — which is something or someone to kind of control and mold into who she thinks she wants — and dealing with the repercussions of giving a character like that exactly what they want.

SC: I really related to the book. Like the main character, I have a Taiwanese father and a white mother, so I found a lot of it to be very relatable and very poignant — the way that race is handled in the book. I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the way that identity plays a role in the book.

MS: I'm so happy to hear that. I also have a Taiwanese father and a white mother, and grew up in central Illinois. I didn't see a lot of representation of that specific experience. I grew up very much reading the white male canon, so when I started reading Asian American literature, I was just really excited to see what contemporary Asian American writers were doing with speculative elements. I also felt like there were these master narratives in Asian American literature that I, as a second-generation biracial person, didn't necessarily relate to in terms of the immigration stories and the mother-daughter kind of relationship.

I wanted to write something that was very much in the Asian American canon, but that represented my own experience, which is of race and identity being always on the back burner — always underlying the experience — but not necessarily coming to a boil. I wanted the vignettes with the flashbacks from Vi's perspective to be these small moments. It wasn't one traumatic event that kind of formed her identity. It was all of these small, little moments of difference. And in the book, she kind of can't tell. Is it just her personality, or is this the racial otherness, and I think it's both in the book.

SC: I found it so relatable, and I really hope that other Asian American and minority readers will also find that relatable.

It's a really funny book, but it also does deal with some heavier themes like race and loss. How did you sort of balance the two, having it be a funny book, but also dealing with heavier issues?

MS: For Vi's character, her voice came through, and the defense mechanism she uses is humor: to cope with a breakup, cope with dropping out of college, her struggles to feel understood by other people. She has this internal monologue that often uses humor as a way to distance herself from things she doesn't really understand.

And then the blob: I think Bob adds levity to the book. He comes in during a low point in her life, and is this optimistic character who has a lot of earnestness. It's funny to see her engage with him. So the conceit itself helped bring some levity to some of her depression and her darker struggles.

SC: Yeah, and getting into that conceit of the blob, I'm curious what draws you to speculative fiction?

MS: I've always loved speculative fiction. I grew up reading fantasy. I'm really inspired by speculative writers like Helen Oyeyemi and Aimee Bender, who really sweetly blurbed the book. I’m just always interested in coming at things sideways. I love when people use speculative elements to think about real issues.

I've been interested in horror recently, and the ways in which people of color are using horror to think about race, using these monstrous creatures or elements or features or speculative conceits to think about these larger themes. I always loved the speculative and I’m really excited by what opportunities it's created to shift the idea of genre and literary fiction from this kind of realist mode to something that has some crossover appeal for audiences.

SC: Love that. I love hearing about what different authors’ writing process looks like. Could you tell me a little bit about that?

MS: For Blob, it was very rigid. I came up with an outline. I was teaching a screenwriting class, despite having never written a script, and so I was really inspired by the three-act structure. I was very rigid in thinking about the plot points for Blob and I outlined everything. Obviously, everything changed as I was writing it, but I was very strict: I was going to write for two hours a day, or 500 words, whichever came first. Very often two hours came first, but I used really strict thinking about cause and effect. and about plot points. I'm a very messy writer, so giving myself a container like that allowed me to play a little bit more. I felt safe within those containers.

Each chapter, I was like, “It's going to be 3,000 words. I'm going to write 500 words a day, and then I'm going to break it up into 1,000-word chunks.” I had all these different goals for myself, and I think that it helped.

There's flashbacks and all sorts of different vignettes in the novel, so it's not necessarily just a linear story, but I tried to follow what was fun within the constraints that I gave myself. Now, writing the second book, I'm being a bit looser with it.

Everyone's writing process is so different, but for me, having those constraints helps me map out where I'm going and not feel as lost when I'm confronted with the blank page — which is always terrifying.

SC: And a little bit of a bonus question: In your bio, you mentioned you have a pet turtle. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your turtle.

MS: I was so happy that you were going to ask that! I got my turtle, Leo — named after the Mutant Ninja Turtles, Leonardo — when I was 14. I'm 32 now. He's an 18-year-old turtle. We got him in Chinatown in Chicago. He was small and only had like a 1% chance of survival. But he's still here. He's gotten much bigger. He's a red-eared slider, and he likes to bask in his lamp, and he swims sideways a little bit, but he's wonderful. But if you do get a turtle, you have to know: it is a commitment.

SC: 18 years, that's a long time. That's really impressive.

MS: Yeah, he can vote, so that's good!

SC: Thanks so much for joining me today. Is there anything else that you wanted to mention?

MS: No, I just wanted to thank you so much for all the kind words about Blob. I love independent bookstores. They're so vital to our community, and I'm just really thankful for everything that you guys do.

SC: Thank you, we really appreciate that! All right, thank you so much.

MS: Thanks!

Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su (Harper, 9780063358645, Hardcover Fiction, $26.99) On Sale: 1/28/2025

Follow the author in Instagram at @litmagreject.

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