We have a brilliant Q&A with author Cynthia So, author of This Feast of a Life. We owe a thank you to Jacqui Sydney for creating the questions sent to Cynthia.
When the book opens, Auden has just made the New Year’s resolution to become the person I want to be. What advice would you offer to readers who are in a similar position to theirs?
I’m in my early thirties now and I’m still constantly working out who it is I want to be, so my advice is just to take your time and let yourself figure things out at your own pace. Notice the things that make you curious, pay attention to the things that you can’t stop thinking about. Don’t be afraid to try something out – it’s okay to change your mind, and sometimes you really don’t know how you’re going to feel about something until you try it. Finding community is also vital – look for ways you can engage with people who are what you want to become, and surround yourself with people who are supportive of your explorations and evolutions!
Are you more like Auden or Valerie?
I’m sure at first glance people might see me as more of an Auden, because we’re both nonbinary and we’re similar in terms of our gender expression. But I poured myself into Auden and Valerie in different ways, and I found Valerie’s voice easier to channel when I was writing the book.
Food, and in particular sharing food, is a recurring theme throughout the book. What would your dream meal be and with whom would you share it?
Honestly, pretty much every day I get to have my dream meal with my dream person – any meal made by my wife Olivia (a brilliant cook), shared with her, is an absolute dream! I’m very lucky.
Also, we recently went over to Hong Kong where a lot of my family live, and we stayed with my grandma, who is another wonderful cook. She always makes so many dishes when we’re visiting. A whole steamed fish, chicken curry, fried tofu stuffed with fish paste, lots of green veg, plenty of rice… Feasting on my grandma’s food with Olivia is such a joy. I think the only thing that could make it more perfect is if my granddad could be there. He passed away in 2020 and never got to meet Olivia. I miss him every day, and would love the chance to share a meal with him and my grandma and Olivia all together.
Do you think writing fiction with protagonists who are part of the LGBTQ+ community brings different challenges to that which features cishet characters?
It’s hard to say, since I’m queer myself and I’ve only ever written primarily about LGBTQ+ characters. The real challenge would be getting me interested in writing a story that focuses on cishet characters!
Levity aside, I do find that one of the difficulties of writing LGBTQ+ characters is the fact that there still aren’t enough of them in media, and I realise there are readers who are looking for representation that is “good” or even “perfect” in some way, because there’s this fear for example that “oh, there’s only one nonbinary character in the whole of this genre and it’s going to send a negative message if they’re a bad person”. And I get that fear! I do feel the pressure to write authentic representation, whatever that means, especially because there aren’t that many LGBTQ+ characters who are East Asian in YA. But LGBTQ+ people aren’t a monolith, and what’s the point in writing flawless characters? Each character’s story is only ever one experience of being LGBTQ+, and they’re not meant to be speak for the whole of the community. They have to be flawed, just as everyone in the world is flawed, and flaws are where the stories grow. I just have to trust that although I don’t and can’t know everything about being queer, I know how it feels for me, and I also know plenty of other queer people whose experiences I can draw from.
I’m very aware also that publishing a book about a trans/nonbinary main character means that I have to steel myself for transphobic comments on my social media, and that’s hard, but I work in the knowledge that the book isn’t for those people – it’s for the teens who will recognise themselves in the story, and for readers who are actually open to learning and understanding experiences outside of their own.
You were a contributor to publisher Little Tiger’s Proud – an anthology of LGBTQ+ short stories, published in 2019. Do you think much has changed in how popular and accessible queer fiction is over the last five years?
I do think that there’s a lot more queer UKYA than there was, and it gets talked about a lot more than before, but it seems to me that most of the time titles from the US are still more popular, and LGBTQ+ books by authors of colour often don’t get as much attention. The backlash against LGBTQ+ books is growing as well, so it’s a bit hard to tell whether we’re taking more steps forward or more steps back overall. But I’m hopeful that things will keep changing for the better.
That book, like your novels, was aimed at YA readers – would you like to write for a younger audience at some point?
I’m not going to rule it out, but I don’t have any plans to do so in the near future. I would love to, if the right story comes to me! But at the moment I find myself with a few ideas for adult romances so that may be a path I find myself going down first.
Your first YA novel, If You Still Recognise Me, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the YA Book Prize in 2023. What impact has that had on your writing?
It was truly wonderful to be recognised in that way and it was a good confidence boost, although I’m not sure how much impact it’s had on my writing itself, because I think a lot of the work of writing is actually about tuning out the rest of the world and honing in on the story within you, to be able to coax it into the form of a novel without worrying too much about other people’s expectations. Meeting fellow author Nadia Mikail at the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize event might have been the biggest impact personally – we got along so well instantly and now she’s one of my most cherished friends. It’s the closest friendship I’ve ever had with another published writer, and I find it so nourishing and inspiring!
What are you writing at the moment?
The tentative beginnings of another queer YA book – this one with fantasy elements!
