A Book(ish) Life with Christine Ma-Kellams
“So whatever that thrill is for you, find it and try to do that during your debut year as much as you can.”
Hi there, friends! I’ve been a sporadic poster this summer, but I’m here with a brand-new interview from fellow 2024 Debut Christine Ma-Kellams, the author of the riveting literary thriller, The Band. I love K-Pop and mysteries, so I was so excited to pick this one up, and it did not disappoint. I’m honored that Christine is here today, sharing some wisdom with us. Thanks, Christine!
Welcome to Book(ish)! Please introduce yourself, and share a little bit about your latest book.
I’m a psychologist by day, Kpop fan by night! My novel, The Band, was born of my love of BTS. As lit-fic meets thriller, it might be the only high-brow fan fiction that I’m aware of?
If your book had a themed scented candle made for it: what would it smell like?
Ramen! Whenever BTS does one of their live video-streams, I feel like there’s a good chance one of their members is eating ramen. The last time I was in Seoul, I was blown away by the self-serve ramen bars in some of my favorite Korean BBQ restaurants. It’s arguably one of the fastest comfort foods you can make in a microwave.
What is the best piece of advice you’ve been given in your writing career?
This isn’t advice per say, but the best “hack” to my own writing I’ve found is to read in other genres than what I write. So I’m a literary fiction type of girl, but I like to include commercial fiction, thrillers, historical, and the occasional sci fi in my TBR list. Every genre has something it excels at more than any other genre, so it’s an easy way to learn from the best and try to incorporate it into your own writing. High concept commercial books do plot really well. Thrillers have nailed down pacing. Historical, sci-fi, and fantasy all excel at world-building. Litfic has the prettiest sentences and the best sentence structure. So I try to write stories that do all of the above.
What advice would you give to future debuts?
Don’t look at the numbers–they are a special form of hell for everyone but those at the very top–and instead focus on the most enjoyable moments. I love doing book events and literary festivals because traveling and meeting new people seem more exciting than any drug on the market and more satisfying that anything I can find online. So whatever that thrill is for you, find it and try to do that during your debut year as much as you can.
What’s something you’re looking forward to?
The next novel! As far as I can tell, the best metric of success that I hope for is as a novelist is to be able to do it again. Selling a gazillion books would be great but the only reason I’d want this is so that I’d be able to be guaranteed that I could write as many books as I wanted in the future, and realistically you can do that even if you aren’t Colleen Hoover. So I’m always looking forward to my next great read and my next book…
About The Band:
A psychologist with a savior complex offers shelter to a recently cancelled K-pop idol in this “first great K-pop literary phenomenon” (Debutiful) that is perfect for fans of Mouth to Mouth and Black Buck.
Sang Duri is the eldest member and “visual” of a Korean boy band at the apex of global superstardom. But when his latest solo single accidentally leads to controversy, he’s abruptly canceled.
To spare the band from fallout with obsessive fans and overbearing management, Duri disappears from the public eye by hiding out in the McMansion of a Chinese American woman he meets in a Los Angeles H-Mart. But his rescuer is both unhappily married and a psychologist with a savior complex, a combination that makes their potential union seductive and incredibly problematic.
Meanwhile, in Seoul, the band’s music producer, Pinocchio, remembers his first brainchild: a girl group that tragically disbanded under mysterious circumstances.
The past and the present combine to ignite a spiral of violent interactions that might change the fates of both the band members and the music industry.
In its “gripping exploration of the complexities that accompany fame” (Booklist), The Band considers the many ways in which love and celebrity can devolve into something far more sinister.
About The Author:
Christine Ma-Kellams is a Pushcart-nominated writer, Harvard-trained cultural psychologist, and college professor who occupies the rare intersection where story- telling meets an empirical understanding of what makes people tick. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and completed two postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University before her current position as an associate professor at San Jose State University. Her empirical studies on culture, social perception and relationships have also been widely covered in GQ (Australia), Esquire (Middle East), Boston Globe, Vice News, Elle Magazine (UK), the Atlantic, Yahoo News, MSN News, Fox News, New York Post, and Daily Mail. Her academic text, Cultural Psychology: Cross- and Multicultural Perspectives, has been adopted in classes at college campuses across the U.S. and overseas. Her short stories and essays have appeared in ZYZZVA, Kenyon Review, Saturday Evening Post, the Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere.