Throughout MY DEAR YOU, normal people go through extraordinary transformations. A government injects its people with a drug that makes them see everyone else as members of their own race and gender. A factory worker develops an unlikely friendship with the artificially intelligent sex doll she is tasked with training. God decides that humanity is a lost cause and gives each person 24 hours to decide in which animal form they will spend the rest of their days.
Along the way, characters are confronted with supernatural and otherworldly interventions, as well as the earthly, human concerns that shape our daily lives: capitalism and race, intimacy, memory, and mortality.
Playful and tender, dark and witty, each of these stories is infused with a profound sense of compassion. They express a powerful curiosity about the human experience, and the inescapable choices that meet us all: to have or not have children; to pursue connections with others in spite of life’s impermanence; how to live – and live well.
Rachel Khong is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction. Real Americans, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller. In 2018, Khong founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission District. With friends, she teaches creative writing as The Dream Side. She lives in Los Angeles.
Read: D Day, Guernica
First lines: And on the 2,556,750,000th day, God reconsidered what he had made and decided that the world would be better off if human beings were other animals entirely — if there were no such thing as human beings at all. There would be species, but there wouldn’t be races.