She finds out her dead husband cheated on her. So she heads to France.
Katherine Lin always wanted to be a writer — but it wasn’t always on her radar as a plausible career.
“I always felt like the universe had to anoint you for a job in a creative field,” Lin says in a Zoom interview from her home in the Bay Area. “Growing up, I didn’t know a ton of Asian authors, so it was kind of like, ‘OK, this is something I would love to do, but it’s not really for me.’”
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After working in another job, though, she changed her mind. The result is her debut novel, “You Can’t Stay Here Forever,” published in June by Harper. The book follows Ellie Huang, a strait-laced San Francisco lawyer whose husband, Ian, is killed in a car crash. After his death, she discovers he had been cheating on her, and uses the money she received from his life insurance policy to flee to the south of France with her best friend, Mable “]Chou.
The novel might never have happened if it weren’t for some advice Lin received from a mentor. Lin, a Stanford Law School graduate, was on a two-year fellowship at the ACLU office in San Francisco that was coming to an end.
Related: Katherine Lin shares her favorite novels in the Book Pages Q&A
“I had this really fortuitous dinner with one of my mentors, who is a law professor,” she recalls. “He said, ‘Listen, your fellowship’s ending. You’re going to work in law for the next 40 years of your life. If there’s anything else you’ve ever wanted to do, do it now.’”
Lin, then 29, took his advice.
“I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to give myself one year and I’m going to try to write, and that’s just going to be a gift to myself, and then I’m going to go back to law,” she says.
The result of that year was the first draft of “You Can’t Live Here Forever.” She did go back to her previous career, practicing at the UC Berkeley School of Law, but kept working on her novel in the mornings, evenings, and weekends.
Although Lin’s novel centers on Ellie spiraling after the death of her husband, it was actually the character of Mable — a brash, free spirit — that came to her first.
“Honestly, there’s been nobody I’ve ever written that has come to me as clearly and loudly as Mable,” Lin says. “That’s very obvious once you get to know her because she’s a very kind of in-your-face, forceful person. She’s going to jolt your attention.”
Lin says she wanted to write a novel about complicated friendships. She was inspired, in part, by Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels quartet.
“I would bring them to work as a lawyer and I would wait for my lunch break to read them,” she says. “When my lunch break was over, I was like, ‘Damn it, I have to go back to work.’ Then I would run home, and instead of going out to happy hour, I’d read them at home.”
Ellie and Mable are very different from Ferrante’s Elena and Raffaella. But their friendship, which began when they were both college students, is just as complex — marked with love, but also bitterness.
“I definitely think there’s mutual resentment,” she says. “They both met each other when they were 18. In some ways, I think they’re calcified in each other’s memories. Ellie is 18 to Mable; Mable is 18 to Ellie. For better or for worse, they don’t see the way they’ve changed or not changed.”
In the novel, Ellie and Mable are in their late twenties — a fraught time that doesn’t often get talked about, Lin says.
“It is such a precarious time,” she says. “It’s kind of like a second adolescence because you have all of the trappings of adulthood, but you still feel sometimes that you’re 19. I was writing it during a period in my life when I was like that.”
Ellie is, of course, wracked by feelings of betrayal, but continually rejects Mable’s suggestion that she seek therapy to deal with her emotions.
“Within the Asian community, there is still such a stigma attached to therapy,” Lin says. “And Ellie flew really close to the sun in a way. She’s thinking, ‘I went to a good school. I’ve done really well for myself. I don’t need therapy. That’s for someone like Mable who’s messy and doesn’t have it figured out.’”
And Mable is dealing with her own unhappiness, Lin says, which made it easy for her to decide to flee to France with her best friend.
“She’s never found any job that she thought was perfect enough for her,” she explains. “She doesn’t have anything to stay for. She doesn’t have a relationship, she doesn’t have a job, she doesn’t have anything she really cares about.”
Much of “You Can’t Stay Here Forever” takes place at France’s Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, a playground for the wealthy that’s particularly popular with Cannes Film Festival attendees. Although Ellie is a successful attorney, she’s not quite comfortable with her new environment.
“One of the great gatekeepers of power or wealth is comfort with it,” Lin says. “Ellie is realizing, ‘OK, compared to Mable, I’m doing well, but this world has a type of opulence and wealth that I’m not accustomed to.’”
And while Ellie disdains the lifestyles of the ultra-rich, and is critical of capitalist excess, she can’t quite bring herself to leave the south of France, where the fancy food and perfectly constructed cocktails flow freely.
“She’s seeing that this is capitalism on max, that these are people who have made a ton of money,” Lin says. “But she’s also enjoying it. She’s there, she’s not leaving. It’s a hypocritical thing, and it’s something that she feels guilty and bad about, but she doesn’t leave.”
“You Can’t Stay Here Forever” deals with some heady issues — infidelity, mental health, racism — but it’s infused with humor, much of which comes in the conversations between Ellie and Mable. Lin says it was a deliberate choice to keep the novel from becoming too “gloomy.”
“I try to find a sense of humor in anything,” Lin says. “It’s just an easier way to move through life. It’s a survival technique. I’ve been in jobs where you either have to laugh at things, or you’re going to have to cry about them. It’s just an easier way to move through life.”