A Woman and a Blob Walk Into a Bar. Author Maggie Su Can Tell You the Rest.

Vi, the protagonist of Maggie Su’s debut novel, Blob, lives a subterranean life. She stumbles out of her basement apartment and reports to work at a hotel, late and unkempt. Since her last relationship ended, she pines for love but pushes people away. So when she encounters a gelatinous blob, “the size of a dinner plate,” outside a bar one night, Vi sees an opportunity: craft the ideal boyfriend without any of the baggage.  

In writing Blob, Maggie Su takes a canny approach to examining the pressures that cause people to double down on their bad behaviors. As she put it, Su sought out “not to explain she’s this way because of this,” but to instead examine the ways the character’s “difference, her otherness, has been something she’s kept and held for so long.” Vi is mired in her internal life, and Su forces her protagonist to confront—and rewrite—the core narratives that Vi uses to justify her acts of self-sabotage. Funny, original, and charming, Blob ponders the shape-shifting potential of love. Earlier this year, Su and I met over Zoom to discuss first loves, transforming in relationships, and the canon of significant blobs.

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MICHAEL COLBERT: Where are you calling from? 

MAGGIE SU: I’m in South Bend, Indiana. My partner is a visiting assistant professor at Notre Dame, so we’re here for a few years.

COLBERT: How are you feeling at this point as you prepare for your debut to land on earth?

SU: It’s exciting. I’m trying not to think about it too much. I was in grad school for eight years and I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid, so it feels surreal. I always said, “Oh, if one person reads it and connects with it, I’m good.” And I already have that, so whatever happens now, happens.

COLBERT: It’s a great read. How did you land on this idea of this Blob, and Vi’s relationship to it?

SU: It was spring of 2020 and I had just finished my exams, so I had been reading a hundred books for a year. I was both contained physically, and I felt like I had so much built up with my writing mojo, because I hadn’t been writing for a year. I lived in a basement apartment much like Vi, and I was very isolated. I felt like I had to confront things in the same way Vi has to confront things through this Blob, and that’s where it came from. 

I was always really interested in blending speculative elements in fiction with realism, and using that to get at things from a sideways point of view. And a year earlier I had written a short story and then a 10-minute play that was very silly, Bob the Blob. I came back to the idea and I was like, “I think there’s more here for me to play with.” And when I was in that confined situation where I was like, “Okay, I need to write my dissertation. I have nowhere to go,” it started happening, and I think the Blob actually offers some hope for me.

COLBERT: I am dying to know what your relationship to Flubber is like. Are you familiar with that movie?

SU: Yes. I haven’t seen it in a long time. I did watch E.T., which was a little bit more what I was thinking about. The cover looks like a kind of snot, and someone was like, “Oh, it looks too much like a certain other bodily fluid.” And I was like, “Oh no, let’s not go there.” But it’s been fun to see how people are imagining and visualizing Blob. 

COLBERT: Well, in many ways, it feels to me like an extremely honest love story in that it examines how people in love look to transform either personally or to transform their partners. How would you characterize the book’s outlook on love?

SU: I will be honest, I fought that subtitle for maybe a year with my editor, because I think it’s very much a self-love story, a story of self-discovery. In the acknowledgements, I talk about my dissertation advisor, Leah Stewart, and during the process of writing she was like, “You’re being so hard on Vi.” Learning to love this really unlikable, flawed character was really a process for me. It’s corny, but it was about learning to love those parts of myself and learning to see how people can change and grow. She’s really reeling from this breakup and she thinks that Bob the Blob is going to be this savior, and I really wanted to give her what she thought she wanted. But I wanted to give her that relationship for her to realize that she needs to work on herself first, and find that forgiveness and also understand the circumstances in which she’s been created. I do think that this book has a lot of sweetness to it, and I think it ultimately comes from a very optimistic point of view in terms of people changing and learning to love themselves.

COLBERT: Well, you bring up this idea that I think about a lot in fiction, which are stories where characters’ lives are a mess and they continue to make bad decisions. And I’m curious about what elements of Vi’s character you wanted to unravel through the messes of her life. I think the book arrives at this point where you realize that the most important relationship is the self, that she can’t show up in these relationships until she does so for herself.

SU: I was really interested in digging into a flawed, unlikable character. I think growing up biracial, Taiwanese-American, I just feel like the stereotypes of Asian American women are often very neat, organized, they have their life together, and that wasn’t my experience. So, I wanted to show the messiness, especially in the Midwest growing up, because I didn’t see a lot of representation of myself. I wanted to create a character who wasn’t flawed in a quirky, cute way, but who was flawed in a way that was messy and sexually stunted. I wanted there to be humor in the book, but also not shy away from the dirtiness and the grime and how uncomfortable she feels with herself. 

COLBERT: I was really interested in how she struggled with her upbringing and how her parents didn’t share parts of her culture with her. How do you understand her feelings of pride and shame evolving through the novel? Because it’s really subtly done. 

SU: I have a part of the book where I say the dad is the “anti-Asian stereotype.” He’s not necessarily overbearing, he’s not overly concerned with her grades or anything like that, and that was my experience growing up. But I think in all parental relationships, there’s a disconnect between how you want to be perceived and how your parents perceive you. And there’s also this recognition that she has, like, “I love these people so much and they will never understand me.” I think there’s just a limit to how much we can really know each other and the things we have to accept about families. And Vi, in particular, her depression and anxiety has made her so self-focused. She’s so concerned with her own pain that sometimes it’s hard for her to see her mom’s going to therapy, they’re moving into a new house, they’re having their own transformation, and she’s still stuck looking inward. So when she’s able to finally get outside of herself and look at these people that she loves so much, she’s able to let go. 

When you don’t come from a lot of money or maybe first-generation immigrant parents, there’s a lot of things that go unspoken. So her feelings around sex and romance are very influenced by the media, which is really funny, because you see that in Bob, right? He’s very influenced by the media that he’s consuming. And I think in many ways, Vi is really watching these rom-coms, reading these romance novels, and creating these ideas. But her parents are just not discussing it. They’re like, “Don’t think about it. Don’t be too anxious. Don’t engage in that way.” So I really like that you picked up on the shame and pride, and I think there’s just a lot that goes unspoken in their family, but I think in the end she comes to—spoiler—accept that about her family.

COLBERT: Yeah. I want to go back to the romantic relationships, because I think that becomes a very central way in which those questions play out for her. So many characters in the book use relationships as a means to an end. Rachel wants a boy so she’s not alone. Elliot needs a beard. Vi and her ex, Luke, are constantly shifting and squirming under the other’s vision and then obviously there’s Blob, who Vi shapes in her vision. And with so many competing models for how to be with others, I’m curious, how does anyone arrive at a place where they grow healthily?

SU: I think something I’ve always been interested in is, how do people connect? I was a very strange child and I didn’t have a lot of friends and I was always so curious, how is it possible that people are able to make connections and have conversations and learn how to love each other when it seems like we can’t ever fully know or understand another person? I think you see so many ways in which Vi’s idea of love or her idea of having a relationship is way more about herself than it ever is about the other person. With Luke, there’s this feeling that if this person leaves, then there’s never going to be anyone else who’s ever going to be able to feel that way about me. I think with first loves, especially when you have been isolated and friendless and have had trouble connecting, the first person who says, “I want to be with you,” you just feel like that’s it. This book is very much a product of my 20s, and so it’s fun. People are telling me like, “Oh, it’s like the messiness of the 20s.” And I see a lot of media thinking about that. I’m thinking about Fleabag or these kinds of shows that deal with trying to find someone when you’re so self-absorbed in your own pain and trauma.

COLBERT: Well, I think you touched on this, but there’s a really potent fear for Vi about losing that first love. There’s this feeling of, “I’ll never feel this way again.” Right? And that fear is a really, really powerful motivator and I thought you explored that in very rich ways. On the other hand, she sees violence inherent to her love with Luke. So, molding the Blob and seeing how he comes into his own, does that become a way for her to heal from that script, or does it re-inscribe it for her?

SU: That’s a great question. I think she follows a similar pattern with both Luke and Bob, and I think it’s so hard for her. I love that you’re picking up on the fear that’s underlying everything. And that’s why the flashbacks were important for me, not to explain she’s this way because of this, but to explain the ways in which I feel like her difference, her otherness, has been something she’s kept and held for so long, and the ways in which that makes her so afraid to be vulnerable, the ways that makes her want to control the people around her and not necessarily see them as people. A lot of it does go back to her feelings of racial otherness, but also just not fitting in and pushing people away and then wanting them back.

COLBERT: Well, the Blob gives you such a tool to literalize that, right? She can make the man of her dreams, she can tie him down. She asks him, “If I made you legs, would you leave?” It’s a way to explore those questions in often funny or dramatic ways. There’s this one passage that I really loved. She says, “Now he’s just like everyone else. He has needs and desires beyond me, an internal life that I have no access to. He could leave without me ever knowing why.” I wonder how much anybody can solve for the mystery inherent to others. At the same time, you coupled this with her failure to listen. How does Vi learn to confront that?

SU: Yeah, she has such a problem granting other people their inner lives. She feels as though Luke is distancing himself, so she tries to get closer and closer and closer. And I think with Bob, you feel that too when she senses people are having their own inner struggles, she really can’t allow that because that’s shutting her out, right? She’s not necessarily privy to the fact that it isn’t a slight against her. It is troubling, when you love someone, to wonder what they’re thinking and not being able to know and wanting to be in their body to know everything about the person. I think that’s really what she wanted from a relationship. She was like, “If I love someone, then we should be able to just be one person.” But she realizes that it’s actually healthier to be separate people who talk sometimes, and that’s really the growth she undergoes in the novel.

COLBERT: I’d love to know what else was important to you—books, texts, media—as you wrote this. You said you were living in a basement apartment and consuming a lot of books, but this is so original and I’d love to hear about some of those influences.

SU: Thank you. Kevin Wilson, he was very kind enough to blurb it, and he wrote Nothing to See Here. I just thought that book was wonderful in terms of how it uses the conceit of the girls spontaneously combusting, and that was very much an influence of me on how I was thinking about the speculative element. Fleabag, the dinner scene in season two, especially when thinking about family dynamics. And I read a lot of Asian American literature. Ling Ma’s Severance is wonderful. Very different from this book, but I was just inspired by seeing all of these Asian American women writers using speculative elements in all of these wonderful ways. I really love Jenny Zhang’s short stories and how gritty and real they feel. I also love films. There’s a reference to The Shining in there. My partner’s really into horror movies, so I was getting into horror around that time. 

COLBERT: Oh, great. And I have to ask, have you ever staged the play that you wrote or will you ever?

SU: It was staged. I have one friend who’s seen it, and she said it was the craziest thing she’d ever seen. I think it was ridiculous. There was just an actor who was suddenly Bob the Blob, and it was fantastic. It was at the conservatory of music in Cincinnati, and it was just part of the playwriting workshop. It was a hot mess and it was really fun.

COLBERT: That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Maggie. It was really a joy to read this and to speak with you about the book.

SU: Thank you so much. To have my book read so thoughtfully and carefully is just an utter joy.