Maggie

A man and a woman walk into a bar. It’s the classic start to many a joke, but in Maggie, it’s far from this. What was meant to be a date night of all-you-can-eat samosas with her husband turned out to be the night he decided to tell her of his affair with a woman called Maggie. As if that wasn’t enough, not long after this fateful dinner and the resulting departure of her husband from the family home, our unnamed narrator finds a lump in her chest, is diagnosed with breast cancer and promptly names the tumour ‘Maggie’.

What comes next is a captivating compilation of observations and vignettes over the ensuing months as our narrator’s life changes and she adjusts to a world without her husband, the rollercoaster of being a cancer patient, becoming a single parent and re-establishing her place in the world. You expect this to be an uplifting – and at times humorous – story, but Katie Yee’s writing delivers just that. Rather than getting bogged down in the heartbreak of the situation, Yee tells a story of friendship, identity reclamation, strength and resilience.

I loved how this story was told. These are not new themes, but what made it hard to put Maggie down was the fragmented style the narrator employs, which makes her so easy to relate to. Life is not linear, so it only seems natural for this story to be told in a nonlinear fashion. It gives you the opportunity to pause and reflect, to laugh and to commiserate. This is Yee’s debut novel and given the pace with which I devoured this book, I am looking forward to seeing what she comes up with next.