Hey y'all, it's Tin Bidermias, and this is NPR's Book of the Day.

I found this next conversation with writer R.F. Kwong about her new book, Yellowface, to be really refreshing.

That's because it takes a really novel approach to dealing with some topics that I've thought a lot about,

like cultural appropriation and who perpetrates it, and writing

unlikeable but relatable characters. In this conversation with NPR host Mary Louise Kelly,

Kwong shares her thoughts on all of the above by telling us more about her characters and the

circumstances in which they find themselves. Here, she also dishes on what it takes to write imperfect protagonists

and why she worries that she may become like her characters. Here's Mary Louise Kelly.

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The new novel, Yellowface, is about a thief, namely June Hayward, a writer, not a particularly

successful writer. The other key character is Athena Lou, a spectacularly successful writer.

Now, these two went to Yale together, They are friends, kind of, until Athena

dies by choking on a pancake with June watching and with the manuscript of her next book,

a masterpiece that no one, not even her editor, has seen yet, typed and neatly stacked in the

next room. Well, the author of Yellowface is

R.F. Kwong, and I want to say welcome to all things considered. Thanks so much for having me.

So in a nutshell, what happens next? Well, June decides to steal Athena's unpublished manuscript

and pass it off as her own, all the while passing herself

...