Year End

A look back and ahead

Ten years ago, I met Claire Jia, who is going to publish her debut novel next spring with Tin House Books.

My colleague Hillary read a Modern Love essay by Claire and reached out to see if she had any longer writing. A little while later, Hillary left publishing to go to law school and is now a litigator— people contain multitudes!

When she was preparing to leave, Hillary referred Claire to me and she told me she was writing a novel. It was early days but she had a little bit written, which she shared with me. I could tell it was going to be GOOD.

I started reading and editing outlines and drafts every few months. Meanwhile, our lives began to change a lot. Claire broke into TV and video game writing and I moved from NYC back to SF, where I'm from. Writing and editing the novel took a long time with so much happening.

Claire is tireless, meticulous, and extraordinarily funny. She's creative on a level that you only ever run into if you're very, very lucky. Every time new chapters arrived in my inbox, it was a rush.

The novel is about two friends, Lian and Wenyu, who grew up together in Beijing. Wenyu ends up leaving for the states and Lian stays behind. They follow each other’s lives from afar; Lian takes a traditional path of a steady job, steady boyfriend (who is quite good at badminton) and visits her parents regularly. Meanwhile, Wenyu dates a successful American startup founder and becomes an internet sensation herself. She has a popular YouTube page where she vlogs about her shiny life in California. When she returns to Beijing with her fiancee, she reconnects with Lian. They both realize despite outward appearances, they are still very much figuring out who they want to be, where they want to make their lives, and what matters most.

Claire taught me about WeChat and advertising for singles in Beijing parks and specialty Starbucks orders (red bean lattes 😍). The two main characters are young women, but I always felt an affinity for a secondary character, Chen, who is our fathers' age but searching just as much as they are.

My career changed a lot as we worked together. I now work only on nonfiction, and with a lot of people in tech who work on things that are very different than novels. But all these years Claire kept me rooted to a type of creativity that has helped in all my work.

I am so thankful to her and so happy that the novel, which is called 'Wanting' (it had many other titles over time!) will be published in a next year from such a special place, Tin House Books. Claire's editor is Elizabeth DeMeo who brought the book over the finish line. She's a force.

You can pre-order a copy just as easily as Lian and Wenyu order a red bean latte: tinhouse.com/book/wanting/

Here we are getting lunch a few years ago (I was probably telling her the book was "almost done, just a *few* more changes.."). And that's an extreme misspelling of my name on our takeout order. The Tin House copyeditors would never!

I hope everyone who reads the book enjoys it and feels all the love that went into it.