My Dear You by Rachel Khong [Book Review]

Rachel Khong’s My Dear You comes in weird and stays weird, with stories about race, love, ghosts, sex dolls, God, and the general inconvenience of being human. Not every story lands, but even the misses are strange enough to make you keep thinking.

I love a short story collection that comes in weird and stays weird.

Rachel Khong’s My Dear You is that kind of story collection. It’s her first journey into short fiction — her previous two books, Goodbye, Vitamin and Real Americans, are novels — and she does not ease into the form quietly. One story imagines a U.S. government program that makes everyone see other people as members of their own race and gender. Another has God deciding humanity has run its course, which is not entirely surprising. There is a cat that summons the ghosts of ex-lovers, a factory worker who gets attached to a sex doll, and people trying to figure out dating, marriage, memory, race, grief, capitalism, and what it means to be alive.

So yes. It’s doing a lot.

Strange in All the Right Ways

The impressive thing is that Khong usually knows exactly how strange she wants to be. These stories are playful and sharp, but not weird just for the sake of it. At their best, they use surreal premises to get at very ordinary human needs: wanting to be seen, wanting to love, wanting to know which version of your life you were meant to live.

That’s where My Dear You worked best for me.

Khong is especially good at writing about identity as something both deeply personal and constantly interfered with by the outside world. Race, gender, desire, family expectations, dating rituals, social hierarchy, and other people’s projections all weigh on her characters. The collection keeps asking what remains of the self when everyone else is determined to misread it.

That could easily go heavy-handed. It doesn’t. Khong has a lightness to her writing that keeps things moving — funny, profane, tender, and devastating, sometimes on the same page.

When It Doesn’t Quite Land

I enjoyed this collection, but I didn’t always feel connected to it. Some stories strike that perfect balance between high concept and humanity. Other stories tried to be too clever. I found myself appreciating the idea more than feeling the story itself.

Still, even when a story didn’t completely work for me, the attempt was hard to argue with. Khong is not handing you a neat little collection of realistic stories. She’s asking strange, sometimes uncomfortable questions about love, race, intimacy, objectification, mortality, and humanity.

The book asks its questions through typical experiences, such as bad dates, awkward friendships, and family expectations.

The Verdict

My Dear You works when the story actually lands, not just when it’s based on a good idea. While not every story landed with the same force, the collection is entertaining, thoughtful, and full of ideas worth sitting with.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for the advanced reader’s copy. All opinions are my own.