Christine Ma-Kellums is joining us today to talk about her novel, The Band. Here’s a description:
In The Band, a Korean boy band at the apex of global dominion suddenly finds one of its members cancelled after a controversial solo drudges up ancient ethnic rivalries, but when he escapes by hiding out in the McMansion of a married therapist with an illustrious history of falling for the very men she wants to save, the solution to the crisis turns out to be as disruptive as the problem.
What’s the first line Christine will underline?
“What’s also tempting to believe: that the depressed or anxious or unwell person hates themself, that their mama didn’t hug them enough or their father loved money or pussy or drank too much (the top three offenders as far as fathers go), or some other tragedy— institutional, interpersonal, or divine—befell them and rendered them neurochemically incapable of appreciating their own worth. In reality, I suspect such a person loves themself just fine, loves themself as much as I love me. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be here, because they remain the only person they would die for at a moment’s notice. What is really going on is that they are trapped inside a burning building for which there are no marked exits, a burning building they lovingly attend to and maybe sometimes even stoke, not because they are self-enabling, but because they have no other place to call home, at least not now, at least not yet. We, on the outside, don’t know much either—we have our hoses and ladders and trucks, and if we are lucky, and if we hear the alarm and get there in time, and if the wind isn’t too bad, then sometimes we get to call ourselves heroes and feel good about the initials after our names. Other times— other times we do not.”
These lines were inspired by—and a counterpoint to—something David Foster Wallace famously said in Infinite Jest when he likened being “psychotically depressed” to jumping from a tall window on fire. As a psychologist who teaches on mental health every semester, I have yet to find a better literary portrayal of the “common cold” of mental illness apart from Wallace, but I also wanted to go beyond what he did by showing what these things look like in other people who aren’t as well represented in books. As much as I loved Wallace writing, let’s not forget: he was an extraordinarily privileged white guy who embodied the persona of tortured artist to perfection, with a massive, diehard following to show for it. And as much as Wallace was in many ways an open book when it came to his own mental anguish, here’s the thing: not everyone’s suffering is as visible as his was. Not everyone can afford his level of transparency.
So I wrote The Band and featured a depressed Kpop idol at its center—who just so happens to find himself hiding in the McMansion of an American therapist with a savior complex. Like Wallace, he is tempted to end it all, not so much because he wants to die but because he wants a lull from his own mind that feels like it’s constantly on fire. Also like Wallace—who is no stranger to bad decisions (most notably, his problematic behavior towards poet/memoirist Mary Karr), he might be facing cancellation. But unlike our tortured bad boy of literary fiction, my Kpop protagonist’s signs and symptoms are not so clear, not so obvious—not even to himself.
Given my day job, I couldn’t help myself: I riddled the novel with footnotes commentating on not just the state of Kpop in the music industry or the current obsession with Korean culture, but also studies on what depression looks like cross-culturally. In a kitchen breakfast scene where the American therapist confronts the idol over his excessive sleeping—a not-so-obvious sign of depression—she gives him a diagnostic test based on a real study. In her version, she shows him the fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally (if you haven’t seen it, Meg Ryan famously simulates an orgasm over her sandwich just to prove a point) and watches to see if he laughs or cries. When he does the former, it’s a bad sign—in the original experiment, Asians also laughed (harder) in the face of depression.
Mental illness is notoriously underrepresented in fiction, and all the more so in books featuring casts who are already culturally underrepresented. But at the end of the day, I find that people remember stories better than they remember the findings from double-blind controlled laboratory studies, so I figured that the best way forward was to show, not tell, what depression looks like, in a person we least expect to see it in, from a cultural context well known for stigmatizing its existence. Because at the end of the day, mental illness is also the great (and terrifying) equalizer in many ways: it’s been around for as long as humans have and can strike anyone, anytime, anywhere. If we’re honest with ourselves, someone we know and desperately loves has it, or will at some point. The trick, then, is knowing what to do about it. Part of that is making ourselves feel less alone. That’s what books have always done for me. I hope it does the same for you.
About Christine:
Christine Ma-Kellams is a Pushcart-nominated writer, Harvard-trained cultural psychologist, and college professor who occupies the intersection where story-telling meets an empirical understanding of what makes people tick.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 textbook, Cultural Psychology: Cross- and Multicultural Perspectives, has been adopted in classes at college campuses across the U.S. and overseas. The Band is her first novel. Find Christine at https://www.christinema-kellams.com/ or on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.
Order: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Band/Christine-Ma-Kellams/9781668018378