This is NPR's book of the day. I'm Kia Miyak and Atis. Ah, the void. Those moments in life where you sense

something's missing. Maybe you find an abyss somewhere between your heart, soul, and the

endless worldly obligations. How do we fill the empty spaces of our unmet desires,

especially those we're not even sure how to name? For the narrator of Esther Yee's new novel,

Y slash N, she fills the void of her unfulfilling life with fanfiction about her favorite

K-pop star, a hobby that grows

into an obsession and quests to transcend the void.

Yichats here with NPR's Elsa Chang.

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We're going to spend the next several minutes talking about obsession, the guts of it,

the contradictions of it, the suffering of it. And we're going to examine obsession through

the eyes of a Korean-American woman living in Berlin who works as a copywriter for a canned

artichoke heart business. And in this otherwise

mundane life, she finds spiritual, romantic, and intellectual awakening in her devotion to a K-pop

superstar named Moon. Now, she remains unnamed as the central character and the new novel by Esther Ye called Y-slash-N.

But maybe her anonymity is for the better, because there is something so universally recognizable in her religious fervor and loneliness,

in her distortion of reality as she admires from afar.

There is something about her that is in all of us. Esther Yee joins us now. Welcome. Hi. Hi. So for those who may not get it at first,

can you just explain the title of this book, Y slash N? Sure. The title stands for your name,

...