#ReadWithMC-Welcome to Marie Claire's virtual book club. It is a pleasure to meet you, and for the month of June we will be reading "Yellowface" by R.F. Quan. It is the poignant story of a struggling white writer who steals the manuscript of a dead Asian friend, publishes it as his own, and is troubled by the repercussions. Read an excerpt below and find out how you can participate. (1]

I know what you are thinking. A thief, a plagiarist, and perhaps a racist, because everything bad must be racially motivated. Hear me out.

It's not that bad. [Plagiarism is an easy way out, a way to cover up when you can't string words together on your own. But what I did was not easy. I rewrote most of the book. Athena's early drafts were chaotic, primitive, and littered with half-written sentences here and there. At times, I wasn't even sure where she was going with a paragraph, so I deleted it altogether. It's not like I would draw a picture and pretend it was my own. I took the sketch, to which only the uneven coloring had been added, and finished it according to the original style. What if Michelangelo had left a huge section of the Sistine Chapel unfinished? What if Raphael had to work on the rest of the building .......

The whole project is beautiful in a way. It is a literary collaboration like I have never seen before.

And what if it was plagiarism?

Athena died before anyone knew the manuscript existed. It would never have been published, and if it had been, it would have been known all along as Athena's half-baked manuscript, as overblown and disappointing as F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Last Great Man" in its current state. I gave this work a chance to come out without the criticism that always accompanies multiple authors. And for all the effort, all the time I put into this work, why shouldn't my name be on the title?

I thank Athena in my acknowledgments. My dearest friend. My greatest inspiration.

And maybe Athena would have wanted this. She was always into these trippy literary hoaxes. She loved to talk about how James Tiptree Jr. tricked people into thinking she was a man, or how many readers still assume Evelyn Waugh is a woman. 'People come to read the text with a lot of prejudices formed by what they think they know about the author,' she said. I sometimes wonder how my work would be received if I pretended to be a man or a white woman." The writing might be exactly the same, but one might be a huge bomb and the other a huge success. Why is that?

So perhaps we can see this as Athena's great literary prank, in which I complicate the reader-author relationship and provide good fodder for scholars for decades to come.

Okay, perhaps the last one is a bit of an exaggeration. If this sounds like a pang in my conscience, so be it. You would like to believe that I spent weeks being tortured and constantly struggling with guilt.

But the truth is, I was overexcited. [23] [24] For the first time in months, I was happy to be writing again; I felt like I'd been given a second chance. I knew that if I honed my craft and told a good story, the industry would take care of the rest. All you had to do was put pen to paper, and if you worked hard enough and wrote well enough, the "powers that be" would turn you into a literary star overnight.

I had begun to toy with some of my old ideas. They now felt fresh and alive, and I could come up with a dozen new directions to implement them. The possibilities felt endless. It was like driving a new car or working on a new laptop. I was absorbing all of Athena's directness and vigor in her writing. I felt, as Kanye would say, harder, better, faster, stronger. I felt like the kind of person who listens to Kanye now.

I once went to a talk by a successful fantasy writer who claimed that her fail-safe for overcoming writer's block was to read about 100 pages of very good prose. 'Good writing makes my fingers itch,' she said. 'It makes me want to imitate it just the same.'

That's exactly how I felt after editing Athena's work. She made me a better writer. It is as if, upon her death, all that talent had to go somewhere and ended up in me.

I felt like I was writing for both of us now. I felt like I was passing on the torch.

Is that justification enough for you, or are you still convinced that I am a racist thief? [But when push came to shove, I thought.

At Yale, I once dated a graduate student in the philosophy department who majored in population ethics. He was writing a paper on an improbable thought experiment, and I thought he might as well have been writing science fiction. For example, do we have a duty to the unborn of the future, or can we desecrate a corpse if it does not harm the living? Some of his arguments were a bit extreme: for example, that there is no moral obligation to follow the will of the deceased if the supreme imperative is to redistribute wealth elsewhere, or that there are strong moral objections to using cemetery grounds for housing for the poor, for example. The general theme of his study was under what circumstances someone counts as a moral agent worthy of consideration. I didn't understand much of his research, but his central argument was very compelling. [especially when the dead are thieves and liars.

And dammit, I'll tell you: taking Athena's manuscript felt like reparation, payback, for what Athena had taken from me.

From YELLOWFACE by R.F. KUANG, published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2023 by R.F. Kuang. reprinted courtesy of HarperCollinsPublishers