Vintage But the Girl.

by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu

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.

Irreverent, witty and wise, But the Girl is a coming-of-age story about not wanting to leave your family behind

Girl was born on the very day her parents and grandmother immigrated from Malaysia to Australia. The story goes that her mother held on tight to her pelvic muscles in an effort to gift her the privilege of an Australian passport. But it's hard to be the embodiment of all your family's hopes and dreams, especially in a country that's hostile to your very existence.

When Girl receives a scholarship to travel to the UK, she is finally free for the first time. In London and then Scotland she is meant to be working on a PhD on Sylvia Plath and writing a postcolonial novel. But Girl can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of the people who raised her. How can she reconcile their expectations with her 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 made you who you are?

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Australia, Audiobook, Novels, Academia

224 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 2024

About the author

Jessica Zhan Mei Yu is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. She is a writer of fiction, essays and poetry.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

this cover is exactly what reading a book you're obsessed with feels like.

and this book is like if the unbelievably secondhand stressful parts of young adult books in which the newly magical / haunted / superhuman teenagers refuse to do their homework were interspersed with passages of brilliant analytical clarity.

it also is very debut-y, which is a nice way of saying it contains lines like the protagonist reading plath's ariel for the first time in her "oven-hot bedroom" that just make you want to curl up and die.

it's about a first-generation asian immigrant from australia, who receives a fellowship to work on her "postcolonial" novel and/or "postcolonial sylvia plath" phd in england. she doesn't really do either, is the plot.

i don't love sylvia plath and this book (perhaps intentionally?) affirmed all of my reasons for that unpopular opinion, which was both fun and annoying.

but it did have lots to say about misogyny, and some about race and privilege, and some about academia, and i found almost all of it interesting.

bottom line: i liked the good more than i disliked the bad!

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s semi-autobiographical debut is narrated by Girl – a name often used for daughters in Malaysian Chinese families. But its use also signposts the ways in which Yu sets out to challenge the coming-of-age stories revolving around white, suburban girls so often promoted as universal, excluding or marginalising the experiences of women of colour. Yu’s inventive piece expertly weaves together a commentary on the postcolonial, with academia; the work of Sylvia Plath; and Girl’s experiences as a second-generation immigrant who grew up, and still lives, in Australia. It’s now 2014, and Girl is struggling with a PhD centred on Plath’s poetry, when she’s unexpectedly awarded a grant for a short artist residency and research in London and Scotland – with the expectation she’ll be working on what she dubs her ‘postcolonial’ novel. Although in Girl’s mind “postcolonial” is essentially a euphemism for talking about “race,” something she’s noticed many of the people around her find too uncomfortable to handle.

From its opening lines onwards, Yu’s narrative mines and mirrors aspects of Plath’s writing, a figure who both repels and attracts. Like Yu, Girl fell for Plath’s The Bell Jar as a student only to find her intense identification with Plath derailed by the representation of people of colour in Plath’s work: either absent or heavily stereotyped. Yu is invested in exploring these kinds of absences here, and what it might mean for someone to be deeply attached to a body of literature in which they are somehow both “seen and unseen.” Sometimes reminding me of Shola von Reinhold’s discussion of Black readers and Virginia Woolf in LOTE.

Girl’s story’s told in a fluid, conversational, first person which often masks the underlying sophistication of Yu’s ideas. Girl eventually arrives at a writing retreat in Scotland where her time is immediately co-opted by Clementine, a white woman from a wealthy background who has perfected the persona of self-assured, bohemian artist. As Clementine’s model Girl is confronted by her memories of dealing with the “white gaze” and its ongoing impact on her life, from her challenging school years to the numerous men who’ve sought to objectify her. She also starts to reminisce about her childhood, particularly her relationship with her parents and formidable grandmother: like Plath, Girl’s mother pressured her to be an over-achiever, leaving her laden down with the weight of family expectations. This has left Girl outwardly self-effacing, someone who actively works to ‘disappear her own desires’ but inwardly conflicted and increasingly rebellious. Now Girl has to work out who she wants to be, and what the way forward for her might be. Although elements of Yu’s novel felt slightly disconnected at times, particularly the various shifts between Girl’s family’s past and her present, overall, I found this powerful and compelling, Yu’s debut’s been championed by authors like Brandon Taylor and that’s no wonder, she writes exceptionally well and the result is intelligent, intimate and insightful.

Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher The Unnamed Press for an ARC

[Shu Wei Chin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Girl is spending the summer at an artist's residency in Scotland... where she did zero writing and succumbed into the biggest existential crisis. I appreciate, I love, I adore it.
I listened to this on Audible, but I think I'll need a physical copy to annotate.

Okay so first of all, this completely summed up my experience growing up in a conservative Chinese family.

"My ah ma told me all the time that she loved me, though I don't know if you would call love what she called love.
Love is such a promiscuous, easy word in English… Love is expressed in Chinese the way a poet writes about flowers; slantwise, in riddles, in rhymes, coily. You have to read between the lines, being an intelligent interpreter of literature to really understand it.
Sometimes you have to read against the grains of the author's intention, and sometimes you're crazy for imagining that love is even there."

And then the diaspora experience too?

"... but I was so tired of being clever. I was born clever because Ma was very sharp and shrewd and Ikanyu was very thoughtful and deliberate and they had passed these qualities on to me.
And like immigrants everywhere they played without sheet music or instruments; every song they sang was improvised from start to finish. So, I had that too."

AND on top of it all, the experience of a struggling academic?

"One thing I knew about being a scholarship girl is that it is important to simulate delight at everything you’d received."
"I had ostensibly taken a year’s leave of absence from my English PhD programme to write my novel. But no one who takes time off their PhD actually forgets about it – they keep working on their research secretly while pretending they are flittering around being on leave.
That was what I was doing."

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A writer on an artist’s retreat not doing any writing but thinking a whole lot about her migrant parents and grandmother is possibly the only writer protagonist for me. If you liked The Idiot you’re highly likely to like this. I thought it was in interesting conversation with Anam too in the way it uses fiction to potentially grapple with family history and memoir.

[E.Y. Zhao · Rating 5 out of 5]

So relieved Jessica Zhan Mei Yu wrote this book about my life so I don’t have to anymore

[lila · Rating 4 out of 5]

maybe i should try reading more literary fiction. this was so sad and lovely and melancholic and random, and i have no idea if its actually any good from a more critical perspective, but i really liked it. i also kind of hated it because it made me feel uncomfortable and sad, but i think that was the point. books are weird man.

[Jodi]

DNF @ 20%—The writing was excellent, the story moved along well, and I was certain loads of people would enjoy this book. But after a while, I had the very distinct feeling that this one wasn’t for me. It happens sometimes and when it does all I can do is accept that it’s time to move on.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the book for burnt out gifted kids, and the ones carrying the dreams of immigrant parents and their struggle to give them that opportunity.

Needless to say, I had a love-hate relationship with this book. This book has unpacked the experience of being a child of immigrants so deeply that I physically had to step away from it at moments. I don't think I would do it justice trying to articulate how well it understood the dynamic between grandparents and parents who pinned every hope on their child, the endless giving from their end and how strong that love is. But also how it feels on the other side, to have parents who love you fiercely but don't know how to communicate that to you. To not know your parents beyond these acts of service. To feel claustrophobic, trying to control variables that are out of your hands to ensure their sacrifices don't go to waste. How all of this work for your future just makes you a product of everything in the past, and gives you a lot of shit to work through as a person in your early 20s.

I honestly don't have the words to make this a coherent review on that end - you just have to witness it for yourself. It also has a look at how this can affect your relationships with other people, touches on some experiences universal to all women (and fetishisation specific to asian women), and how it feels to belong to two cultures and none at all. It inverts the 'coming of age' story because when Girl goes overseas for her residency, she doesn't find her place in a different place or amongst different people, but has an introspective journey focused on the people she left back home.

I will say that it was a bit of a slog to get through. The first chapter I thought I would dnf because I really didn't connect with the writing style. It felt so emotionally cold and the first person perspective was just carrying us like a join-the-dot drawing. Some of the sentence structures threw me off because it would be a compound sentence, then complex and then stunt the narrative voice with a very random simple sentence that was quite jarring.

It did improve once you got further along, but the writing just continued to be a bit of a hurdle for me. There is a very strong author voice in the narrative and sometimes it made it feel a bit unbalanced. The anecdotes and cuts to various memories or other times was very abrupt and there was no flow to the book as a whole. It jumps to and fro a lot and would have been a 2-3 star based on the first 50% but the existential crisis was just done so well that I had to give it props.

[Bill Silva · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this immensely…the first person narrator—she’s known only as Girl—really pulled me in, and while she is sometimes maddening, sometimes sympathetic, and sometimes just pathetic, she’s always smart, witty, interesting , and fully captivating. The novel is about writing, language, family, self-discovery and realization, art…and Sylvia Plath! You could see the novel as a reimagining, updating, reflection upon Plath’s The Bell Jar…there’s more going on here, but any Plath or The Bell Jar fan will want to read this—I’m not saying you’ll agree with it all, but it will definitely give you much to think about!

[Kelsey Ellis · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's no great way to say this, but... I had absolutely 0 expectations for this book. Not that I expected it to be bad; I just hadn't heard anything about it, and I received it in a quarterly shipment of books that were chosen for me (and, historically, I've only liked about half of them).

So I was surprised at how much I loved it. The internal dialogue was so poignant and interesting that the story itself could meander somewhat aimlessly (and it did) without notice or care. There's so much I appreciated about the narrator that I hardly know where to start... She put words to things that I have only ever felt but not been able to describe. She told anecdotes without over-describing the characters with anything but their actions. She was self-reflective and self-aware in a way that I long to be but have never achieved. To me, this halfway memoir was basically a master class in journaling.

Would recommend to everyone I know. It's a quick 200-pager that provided more insights and challenging ideas than most 400+-page books I've ever read.

[Chanel Chapters · Rating 3 out of 5]

This just felt like the author was using the “character” as a puppet to voice her own opinions - it felt like a memoir, not a fictional story with fictional characters. Had Yellowface vibes.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is my sally rooney/normal people. a few unnecessary lines here and there but otherwise i’d abuse it with a highlighter

[Krys · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book put into words certain thoughts and experiences I have that feel so deeply embedded into my reality that I've never felt the need to articulate them aloud. (Like this also need to say?) For this, I sometimes felt bored or impatient with some of the more detailed descriptions which, while lyrically rendered, felt as if they were written for an (white) outsider's gaze; but, at other times, I admired the novel's careful attention to things I've never considered to be worthy of literary attention.

My Ah Ma told me all the time that she loved me. Though I don’t know if you would call ‘love’ what she called ‘love’. ‘Love’ is such a promiscuous, easy word in English. The ‘love’ in I love tomatoes is the same ‘love’ in to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. It’s strange and unnatural to say that unsayable word in Chinese unless you are a crying actress in a soap opera or a pop star with a new single to promote. Love is expressed in Chinese the way a poet writes about flowers – slantwise, in riddles, in rhymes, coyly. You have to read between the lines, be an intelligent interpreter of literature, to really understand it. Sometimes you have to read against the grain of the author’s intention and sometimes you think you’re crazy for imagining that love is even there. So, it’s hard to explain what I mean when I say she loved me – or as she said when she was especially angry at me – she sayang me.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sophisticated exploration of racism and classism in an academic setting. Girl, the narrator of this novel, is a second-generation Malaysian immigrant to Australia. She was born when her parent's plane arrived in Australia, and feels like an outsider around her Australian classmates, but also struggles to as an only child within a tightly-knit family. The novel describes six weeks that Girl spends in the UK on an academic residency: she is supposed to be working on her thesis about Sylvia Plath, and on her "post-colonial novel". This is a playful novel that questions why we make art, and what it means to study someone's work, while also examining the everyday racism of academia, and the ways that Girl is always forced to be on the outside. I found this book engaging, but I wasn't always convinced by the author's prose style, particularly in dialogue, which often felt forced or unnatural. Nevertheless, it's an engaging book.

[Luna]

Qu’est ce que ça fait d’être la fille aînée d’une famille issue de l’immigration ? Ce livre.

[Kurt Neumaier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe artist residencies are bad??

Was really catching a groove from the middle until almost the end, but I was looking forward to a lecture about Plath and the post-colonial!

[Imogen Henderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I devoured this debut novel! I felt very connected to the main character and enjoyed her perspectives on race, literature, and family.

[tali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short sentences with sharp edges that cut deep into exactly who you are, showing you that you bleed and ache just like everyone else

[Marta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an academia novel set off campus which is both funny and awkward. I enjoy this type of novels and have been thinking of The Idiot by Elif Batuman which the author admits in one of her interviews to be inspired by. Some things that I think could have been done better is leveraging the setting – with most of the story taking place in Scotland, there was definitely potential to make it a part of the “colonial / postcolonial” reflections; and balancing the plot better – the story unfolds very slowly but there is a lot of action packed in the last 30 pages which was somewhat unsettling. All in all, a quick enjoyable read and a decent debut novel!

[☽ · Rating 3 out of 5]

finally finished this book … i think if i knew more abt plath i would’ve liked it more but i was a little frustrated by how abruptly it tended to swerve btwn really nuanced interesting insightful commentary & bland obvious takes. but i will look forward to yu’s next book and i do think there are some super beautiful passages in this and that she well caricatures the well meaning white liberal and the hard clear blindness of that identity and how people of color can fall into melancholic love with that. this book did show me why it’s important to raise your kids around other nonwhite people and to praise them for things besides grades

[Soniya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt so seen by this debut novel.

"And like immigrants everywhere they played without sheet music or instruments; every song they sang was improvised from start to finish. So, I had that too, a certain kind of freedom. It was the only real resource I had been born with and I exploited it fully."

This book was made for the overachiever perfectionist burned out gifted first-generation immigrant daughters. Girl is a sleepy girl going through an existential crisis. But on a serious note, it also discusses various themes regarding about family and relationship with parents and grandmother, Malaysian and Chinese culture, literature, publishing industry, academia, "post colonialism", and more.

[Jule · Rating 5 out of 5]

crying in public transit...

a beautiful novel about identity, belonging, race, what it means to be a woman and the world of academia

[jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

will review properly once im done crying 😭

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

relatable because I also often avoid my work at all costs, which is essentially all this book is about, while still providing an interesting perspective on race and privilege and generational divides.

[Lucie · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are some truly beautiful passages about what it means to be a reader and I can’t wait to read it again one day. My only criticism is that it’s too short and I feel like the book could be 30% longer.

[Ina · Rating 3 out of 5]

(04/13) will come back with more thoughts but the ending made me ugly sob.

[bella · Rating 2 out of 5]

i fear this was not for me… maybe i need to read more of plath???!?!

[Elisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Newflash: PhD student working on Sylvia Plath loves a book about a PhD student working on Sylvia Plath. Who'd have thought it?

I was pretty certain that this would end up being a 5 star book as soon as I read the first line, which is a brilliantly funny recreation of the famous first line of 'The Bell Jar'. I haven't laughed aloud as loudly at a book in ages, let me tell you. But it isn't just a hilarious first line: it situates 'But The Girl' perfectly in a particular time and place (just as 'The Bell Jar's opening line does) and also acts as an apt summary of the novel.

In many ways, 'But The Girl' *is* a modern rewriting of 'The Bell Jar'. It follows a similarly academically gifted and disaffected protagonist as she tries to work out who she is and who she wants to be whilst also trying to enjoy a glamorous opportunity paid for with scholarship money. Some of the side characters bear resemblance to the side characters in 'The Bell Jar', as Girl herself acknowledges, and a few of the scenes strike similar chords. However, that's not all that this novel is. It is also, in many ways, a work of criticism on Plath and Plath scholars and Plath's place in the popular, cultural, and critical imaginations. I especially LOVED the elements of post-critique it incorporated and can see that (plus Jessica Zhan Mei Yu's recent and very enlightening conversation with Rita Felski) informing my own project. It questions what it means to be a fan of Plath's, particularly a non-white fan who felt personally hurt by the racism in 'The Bell Jar', and whether it's possible to be both a fan and a scholar interrogating her work. In all of these ways, I felt that this book really Spoke to me. But good literature isn't just supposed to be relatable. It's supposed to take you out of your own mind and put you into someone else's, and this novel more than succeeds at doing that too.

Despite the anonymity connoted by her (lack of) name, Girl is an incredibly vivid character whom it was a privilege to get to know. Yu brings her to life in all of her messiness - she's often lazy and makes bad decisions and bites her tongue when you wish she hadn't, but she's so clever, so empathetic, so loving, and just so complex. I enjoyed reading about her life every bit as much as I enjoyed reading her thoughts on Plath. Without spoiling anything, one of the characters in this novel creates an artwork which is presented towards the end of this novel, and when I got to that bit I just thought... wow. That's the entire book in one symbol. It's so very cleverly done, and it dug to the heart of everything I loved about Girl over the course of the story.

I obviously had an ulterior motive for reading 'But The Girl', but I honestly feel it has enough going for it that you can enjoy it without any knowledge of Plath at all. This is a book about being a second-generation immigrant and living up to your 'potential' (as defined by others) and acts of creativity and how alien it can feel to come into contact with archaic (or, to put it another way, posh British) people and institutions as much as it is a book about academia. It's a rich tapestry of everything that makes up Girl, as well as everything that she potentially could be and realises that she can't be.

I had a blast reading 'But The Girl'. It's genuinely SUCH a funny book, and not only because it drags Plath fans and Plath scholars in very knowing and truthful ways. I loved Girl's sense of humour and her ways of dealing with situations, but I also found Yu's commentary on academia hilarious. I found myself saying 'mood' aloud so many times that it's unreal (especially the part where she goes to a conference and someone is like 'wow, another girl writing a Plath thesis? Is there anything left to say about her?' Hahaha always so fun to hear that one). So, this novel really couldn't have been more up my street if it tried. Will very much be looking out for whatever Jessica Zhan Mei Yu writes next, and will be thinking of her and Girl constantly over the next few years as I navigate my own way through the complex maze of being both Plath fan and Plath scholar.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

But the Girl by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu opens with its main character Girl traveling from Australia to Scotland for an artist residency. In the backdrop is the recent disappearance of MAS370. People assume Girl knows about it because of her Malaysian parents. She plans to work on her Sylvia Plath dissertation and write a postcolonial novel, which is more challenging than it seems. Out in the world and away from her close-knit family for the first time, Girl explores questions of her identity and all of its complex facets: Australian/Malaysian, daughter, woman, friend, academic, creator. Girl negotiates a world where the complexities of her identity can’t be shed and begins to own all the pieces that make her who she is.

The writing alone made this an instant favorite. I marked what feels like a million passages; I love so many of the sentences and the way Yu frames the things she is writing about. While there is dialogue and interactions with others, we spend a lot of time in Girl’s head and her observations are so astute and at times there is dry, witty, laugh-out-loud humor.

There is so much here I want to write about and also feel I can’t adequately address. I want to mention Plath but also point out this is only one part of the many things that make this novel great. I love how Yu used Plath in a way that enhances explorations of race, how it plays out in academia and in how we read and interpret literature. The way Girl sees herself in Plath’s work and recognizes and discusses how someone that looks like her is represented is brilliant. Girl appreciates how Plath puts often hidden things out in the open. The novel definitely offers a different lens for Plath and the challenges modern readers have with oppressive aspects of backlist work. I was consistently in awe of the way Yu’s writing offered perspectives I hadn’t had before. There is a brutal and refreshing honesty in this book’s pages we don’t often see and I absolutely love.

One of my favorite books of the year so far. Highly recommended.

Thank you @unnamedpress for the #gifted ARC

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I was meant to be writing a postcolonial novel. It had been an immigrant novel first but I learned the word 'postcolonial' at university and I had started to say that was what I was writing on grant applications and the like. It was also good to say to people who asked what my book was about because it intimidated them and made them feel so bad about themselves for not knowing what it meant that they dropped the subject altogether."

A very interior novel. Girl's reflections about herself are both compelling and at the same time I found myself disagreeing with her. But she is supposed to be twenty-three and maybe not the arbiter of truth. Seriously, not much happens, and it'll probably be more interesting to artists, academics, and the like. Maybe not, though - some parts are painfully relatable - her analysis of every social interaction she has, her willingness to self-efface for the sake of avoiding conflict...