Sunny's Bookshop | Sunny's Journal | Weike Wang — *Photograph of Weike Wang by Amanda Petersen*

If you’re interested in dysfunctional families – and, specifically, how to navigate a difficult relationship with your in-laws – then you need to read the recently released, Rental House by Weike Wang (the author of 2017’s Chemistry and 2022’s Joan is Okay).

Rental House follows Nate and Keru – an interracial couple who have been together since college – over the course of two vacations. The first comes on the heels of the pandemic, with Keru and Nate renting a house to share with, first, Keru’s parents, then, in a second shift, Nate’s parents. Each set of parents couldn’t be more different – Keru’s parents are strict and demanding Chinese immigrants, while Nate’s parents are anti-vaxxers, often narrow-minded, and demanding in their own ways. The second vacation comes five years later, as Nate and Keru plan an escape for just the two of them, as a kind of “second honeymoon,” only to be met with unexpected guests and conflicting expectations.

Along with tense family dynamics, Rental House also explores many of the questions that arise for a couple in midlife – whether or not to have kids, how often one should see their friends, how important a career is to your identity, and what a marriage looks like when you’ve been together for decades. All of these questions are explored by Wang with a sharp, keen eye. Further, Wang writes with a skill for both prose and humor, which results in an unputdownable novel that will leave you thinking about it long after you finish.

Below is our conversation about Rental House and the writing process:

Sunny's Bookshop | Rental House by Weike Wang | book

Nikki: How did the idea of Rental House come about?

Weike: It started during the tail end of the pandemic, when we still weren’t traveling and I think I was just getting a little crazy in New York. I think I was walking my dog and then I was like, it would be so nice if we go to Cape Cod or we go to the beach and there’s no one there. Then I was like, well why don’t I just write about it? I think writing is a way for me to explore different feelings, different thoughts, different possibilities. The writer always asks, ‘What if?’ And it snowballed from there. I’m always such an optimist with vacations, but, realistically, vacations can get really tricky, especially with family. So I thought, what could make this vacation go off the rails? And it made the most sense for a couple to welcome their parents after the pandemic, in like this “back to norm,” “back to business” [kind of way]. Then, they realize, oh maybe the pandemic was great!

Nikki: I’d love to hear how you developed Nate and Keru, as individuals and as a couple – which came first?

Weike: I definitely think I developed them as a couple first because I knew I wanted to explore midlife. I say midlife – I teach college students and they always think I’m so old. I’m 36, so I’m not really that old, but they think that. And a lot of my friends are in their 40s and we still hang out and we all feel very young. But we’re in midlife, this is our midlife. In our marriages, we’ve been together for 15 – sometimes longer – years. And I wanted to explore that and see that landscape, especially that landscape without kids. That’s a personal question to everyone, but I think, more often than not, kids are put into stories. All of my undergrads write stories with kids because I think they think that they’re supposed to. So I’m always fascinated by that because I think that it’s kind of going against the norm a little bit. So they were definitely a couple first and then I went from there.

Nikki: I want to talk more about the whole debate about whether or not to have kids, which is a big part of this novel. It intertwines so much with other themes of the novel, such as the relationship between an individual and their in-laws, as well as Nate and Keru being an interracial couple. How did you want to explore this topic in terms of it coming into play with these other themes?

Weike: Interracial marriages aren’t unique anymore, it’s pretty common now, so I think they should feature in literature. And I’m never going to not write about race because I used to do that when I first started writing – I would write these characters that were raceless and I started having issues with that. So I knew I wanted to play around with race. I think you can’t be in an interracial marriage without talking about it, that’s almost impossible. So I wanted that to be part of the couple's relationship – I wanted that to be one of these things that they keep questioning and [thinking about] how they’ve been conditioned to think differently. It causes more friction, but they still love each other. Then, the enormous gulf between their parents is just insurmountable and I wanted to explore that, too. I know a lot of people in that boat. These are not uncommon questions, I just don’t think they’ve really featured in literary fiction that often.

Nikki: Both Keru and Nate sometimes choose to be non-confrontational with their families when problems arise. How did the idea of the characters “keeping the peace” factor into how you created tension throughout the novel?

Weike: Well, as a writer, I don’t think about keeping the peace, in terms of how I always want to make my characters suffer. You can’t be a fiction writer if you can’t make your characters suffer. I was thinking about Frankenstein and everything Mary Shelley does to poor Victor, to poor Frankenstein’s monster. You can’t be a fiction writer without wanting to put your characters through hell, but also bring them out of that. We live in fraught times and there are families that are divided on issues. But you can’t just shut them out, you can’t shut these people out forever just because you disagree with them. When holidays come, you still have to hang out with them. Not just family – your neighbors, your friends, your colleagues. You can’t cancel the world because you don’t agree with them. I was interested in how characters survive this landscape. I don’t want them to quit or give up, I don't want them to wallow. I wanted them to engage with it and kind of get through it. Maybe just not the most gracefully.

Nikki: How did you decide how far to push those differences between Nate and Keru and both sets of parents? For example, Nate’s parents don’t ever say anything overtly racist, but they do say plenty of microaggressions.

Weike: I think [if Nate’s parents had made] very racist comments, that would not be believable to someone in this kind of relationship. It would just be so over the top and you could morally say, that’s wrong, like you can’t say those things. But I really like, with Nate’s parents – and honestly, with Keru’s parents, too – the gray area that I think they all dance around. And I didn’t want Keru to be one of those people who are just like, well I’m just not gonna talk to these people anymore. Because that’s just not possible. I personally like to write more microaggressions because I think those are a little more nuanced when you’re writing about domestic spaces. Like it’s never blatant, but there’s always these undercurrents. There are ways to layer the tension until it gets unsurmountable for some of the characters. So I think the way that I think about tension, the best way to build tension, is the slow burn. To keep picking away at the scab instead of ripping it off totally. I think that’s actually more realistic about how anger and resentment in a family can build.

Nikki: I want to go back to talking about Nate and Keru as a couple. You actually don’t get a lot of moments of the two of them alone together until the second half of the novel. And when you do, during the second vacation, they’re not exactly on the same rhythm and there’s some tension there. I read that as being, in part, because they’ve been together for so long, even if it’s not overtly said. How did you develop what their relationship looks like, especially in the moments where they’re alone?

Weike: I think, obviously, they’re committed to each other, it’s a marriage. And they still love each other, but it’s honestly a different kind of love than when they were in college or earlier on. I think every couple who has been in that kind of long relationship understands that. The thing with them that’s a little different is that they don’t have kids. So Keru doesn’t feel the need to always be there as the second caretaker, although they do share a dog, but she comes back and forth [between Chicago, where she’s working temporarily, and New York, where the couple reside]. So, she is a little more free that way and I saw that as giving her a career and also giving her agency. Oftentimes, I find motherhood as being written as a sort of refuge for women, a reason for them to stay at home. And I think there’s also the literal distance in their relationship and they’re trying to figure out a way to just be together and get to know each other again in this capacity of their midlife. They’re a middle aged married couple, they enjoy each other’s company, but they’re not always sitting and telling the same jokes over and over. Maybe they can pass a meal in silence. But I think, maybe because they don’t spend a lot of time together, there are things that you would say daily to your spouse in annoyance or you would get into small arguments, that would release tension. I think a lot of those are missing. So then, they go on vacation and they’re like, we have to be happy while we’re on vacation. But they haven’t resolved some of those minor issues and those are now coming up to the surface. I think they just have to keep trying with each other. I was really inspired by the book, Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox. It’s also about a childless older couple – they love each other, but they’re consistently trying to kill each other. It’s actually pretty entertaining. There’s this idea of codependency, but they’re also always in-fighting and against each other. It’s like a new phase of their marriage. But there are these questions of who picks up more of a leadership role, [what] the power dynamics [are], and that’s what they’re trying to figure out in this second turn.

Nikki: The two vacations are five years apart – how did you decide on that timeline?

Weike: Well, it’s their 30s. I’m in my 30s and I find it to be an interesting decade. You have a lot of your important questions answered, like housing, job security, schooling is usually done by then. And I think, for women in their mid to late 30s, you make the decision of whether or not you want to expand your family. Obviously that’s not the case for everyone, I was thinking on a general scale. But a lot of the decisions typically made in your 30s are for the family, while, in your 20s, you’re making more individual decisions. Then, you settle in when you’re in your 40s and deal with the decision that you made in your 30s. I think the decade is interesting and fun, I’m having a great time in my 30s.

Sunny's Bookshop | Weike Wang Interview | Quote 2

Nikki: I want to talk about the idea of female rage, which has come up a lot in fiction lately. Keru, especially in the first half, has a lot of rage that she clearly needs an outlet for. There are two key moments where she lets that rage out, one instance in which she throws a rock at a woman on the beach and another that I won’t spoil here. How did you settle on how and when to let her let out the rage?

Weike: I think the idea of throwing things is something that is comedic at the beginning for Keru and Nate, it’s sort of something that’s like, oh that’s so cute. Then it develops further for Keru. I think, for her, she has this threshold of stress that she can handle and once it reaches that, the switch turns. For this person, there’s this idea of expectation, what she’s been expected to do and then having gotten there, but still feeling underestimated. So she has a lot of internal frustration. I do think women are always conditioned to be kind, caring, and lenient, mothers especially. So having someone who is a little bit angry sometimes makes for a fun experience. It’s also a foil to Nate’s softness. I think Nate is much more of a gentle person and he has a gentle soul, which is why, later on, he’s in a slump. But Keru is so go go go go that she can’t figure out how someone could fall into a slump.

Nikki: How would you say that Rental House is in conversation with your two previous novels, Chemistry and Joan is Okay? How is it totally different?

Weike: My first two novels are in first person and I focused on one particular type of protagonist. Rental House was me trying to expand the narrative a little bit, going into Nate’s perspective too, and control time over the years. This is my first time writing in third person past, which is kind of fun – you get a bit of the distance between the characters but are also still intimate with them. I also think I engaged with issues more directly in this book, I’m a little bit more explicit with some of the issues that the marriage is going through, that the family is going through. But how they’re similar is that I’m always interested in looking at a protagonist who works, who is defined by what they do. I’m always interested in fraught ties, whether it’s within a family or within friends, as well as this idea of belonging. Nate also doesn’t feel like he belongs in his family – that’s kind of a universal experience for everyone, not just someone who is a child of an immigrant. I wanted to push that envelope a little bit more, about that being a universal experience.

Nikki: Are there any books or authors that inspired Rental House besides Desperate Characters?

Weike: It’s actually interesting because I wrote the first half really quickly, without having read anything. I was just obsessed with this vacation that I needed to write. It started with a short story and then I expanded it. The book that’s always in my head is The Corrections [by Jonathan Franzen], this two week, dysfunctional family holiday. But that’s a much bigger book and I tend to write smaller books – but I was thinking about it. I love writing about dysfunctional families, I love writing about despair, and I love writing comedy into [those things]. So, those are the kind of books I was reading.

Nikki: What contemporary books have you read lately that you just absolutely loved?

Sunny's Bookshop | Joan Is Okay by Weike Wang | book

Weike: I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs, I read through Deborah Levy’s trilogy memoirs [the Living Autobiography series]. And I was reading Paul Beatty’s The Sellout for the satire aspect and that was very good. Contemporary is hard because, right now, given the new project I’m doing, I’m kind of deep diving back into old stuff. So I was reading Kafka’s diaries – they’re really funny. If you ever feel like you’re a bad writer, you should read his diaries because he really thought he was a terrible writer. And I've been rereading Virginia Woolf.

Nikki: What can you tell us about the project you’re working on?

W: I’m trying to write a romantic friendship. I’m trying to write a story where two people are friends, but they’re both married, and it’s not an affair, but it’s something that’s kind of in between. I don’t want to go with a full on affair because I think it’s cliche. But I’ve just been thinking about friendship a lot. As you get older, friends change and cycle out. That’s something that Keru deals with in the second half of the book, she’s like, ‘Nate, we have no friends!’ And Nate is like, ‘That’s fine!’ But Keru thinks that it’s not normal. And I’ve just been thinking about, what happens when you meet someone later on in life that you feel like, if you had met earlier, you would have dated? But you still want to keep that person in your life because you enjoy the conversations and the company.

Nikki: What books do you think Nate and Keru would like?

Weike: That’s a good one. I think Nate would probably read nonfiction. Not to stereotype or anything, but he’s a scientist and he likes learning. An Immense World [by Ed Yong], or something like that, would be totally up his alley. I don't know if Keru reads. I think she would pretend to read but I’m not sure she would actually read unless it was for a book club or something like that, where she could analyze it. She would bring her notes [to the book club]. But I don’t know, maybe she’s reading romance on the side or fantasy or something completely unpredictable. I can see her – like how she hides the vibrator in her suitcase at the beginning [of Rental House] – I could see her hiding a romance book somewhere in her suitcase, pretending it doesn’t exist.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.