Published in 2023
219 pages
6 hrs 32 mins
Jessica Zhan Mei Yu is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. Her writing has been published in Best Australian Poems, Overland, Yen, The Sydney Morning Herald, The White Review and more. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Literature Award in the Unpublished Manuscript category. But the Girl is her first novel and her first essay collection, All the Stain is Tender, is set to follow.
What is this book about?
A wry and razor-sharp coming-of-age novel about belonging, alienation, and the exquisite pleasure and pain of girlhood
I used to have this line I saved and brought out for grant applications and writers festivals – that having been Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina and Esther Greenwood all my life, my writing was an opportunity for the reader to have to be me
Girl is spending the spring at an artist’s residency in Scotland. Far from her home in Australia and her tight-knight Malaysian family, she is meant to be writing a postcolonial novel and working on a PhD on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. But she can’t stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of her parents and grandmother who raised her. How can she reconcile their dreams for her with her lived reality? Did Sylvia Plath have this problem? What even is a ‘postcolonial novel’? And what if the story of becoming yourself is not about carving out a new identity but learning to understand the people who shaped you?
