The life of the author has often been framed as an idyll: brooding academia, intellectual prestige, craftsmanship forged through grandiose pain. Authors who seek to elude the general public’s fascination with their lives seem to draw more intrigue than their work. Jessica Zhan Mei Yu’s debut But The Girl delves into this, through the perspective of a nameless young Malaysian Australian writer who is increasingly troubled by her lifelong love for Sylvia Plath.
Yu’s Künstlerroman – documenting an artist’s coming of age – was shortlisted for the 2020 Victorian premier’s prize for literature in the unpublished manuscript category and was picked up for publishing by acclaimed US novelist Brandon Taylor. It follows the narrator, referred to only as Girl, as she travels from Australia to Scotland for an artists residency. Girl is meant to be writing “a postcolonial novel” and a paper on Plath; instead, she does very little writing but quite a lot of thinking – about her upbringing in Australia and her migrant parents’ struggle, but also her relationship with Plath, a writer she has obsessed over since girlhood.
