Maggie; Or A Man And A Woman Walk Into A Bar by Katie Yee

Wow, just wow. There is an awful lot of emotional baggage to unpack here. First of all the title seems unnecessarily lengthy and obscure. But that is easily explained. A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with delicious food and merriment. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie. A short while after, her chest starts to ache--she initially delays investigating it, even though her mother had breast cancer at a young age. She eventually walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast is indeed cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie. Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, the narrator embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation. She overgenerously creates a “Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual” for Maggie (the other woman, not her tumor), a somewhat sardonic accounting of her soon-to-be ex-husband’s whims and quirks. She turns her children’s bedtime stories into retellings of Chinese folklore passed down by her own mother, in an attempt to make them fall in love with their shared culture—and to maybe save herself in the process. This is well written, concise, and emotionally laden in a good way--the thing I found irritating is that she does what she can to spare her husband in all ways. She hides her cancer diagnosis and spares him from being the guy who leaves his spouse when she is facing a life threatening diagnosis. She also agrees to stay in their house, which locks her in to being constantly reminded of her previous life rather than getting to start over. So I was irritated throughout.