Maggie Su: I Imagine This Book as a Love Letter to My Younger Self

Maggie Su is a writer with a PhD in fiction from the University of Cincinnati. Her work has appeared in the New England Review, Four Way Review, TriQuarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, Juked, Diagram, and elsewhere. She has edited for publications such as The Georgia Review, Cincinnati Review, and Indiana Review. She currently lives in South Bend, Indiana with her partner, cat, and turtle. Follow her on Instagram.

In this interview, Maggie discusses how a 10-page short story turned into her debut novel, Blob: A Love Story, her advice for other writers, and more!

Name: Maggie Su
Literary agent: Samantha Shea
Book title: Blob: A Love Story
Publisher: Harper
Release date: January 28, 2025
Genre/category: Literary Fiction
Elevator pitch: 23-year-old Vi Liu finds a sentient blob outside of a bar, takes it home, and tries to mold it into her perfect partner. Blending the familiar with the surreal, Blob is a witty, heartfelt story about the search for love and self and what it means to be human.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of transformation—literally and figuratively. Is it possible for people to change? How is our sense of ourselves shaped by past experiences? Bob the blob was created so that I could continue to grapple with these questions. Much of the other non-speculative parts of the book are inspired by my lived experience. I grew up in a Midwestern college town, had unusual pets as a child (snake, hedgehog, bearded dragon), and worked as a front desk attendant at a hotel. The characters themselves are fiction, but the world is grounded in the strange and potent details of my childhood and young adulthood. I imagine this book as a love letter to my younger self, the mess I made of my 20s, and the perfect blob who I imagined might come along and solve my problems.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

It took seven years for Blob to go from idea to publication. In 2018, I submitted a 10-page short story to my creative writing workshop in which a woman finds a blob who becomes a man. Over the summer, I took a playwriting workshop and turned that short story into a 10-minute play called “Bob the Blob.” I still wasn’t done with the idea—I knew it could be something more. I took a year away from writing to focus on reading for my PhD exams, and after I passed them, I immediately started writing the “blob novel.” I wrote the first chapters in spring 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown living in a one-bedroom basement apartment in Cincinnati. There’s no doubt that the feelings of confinement and loneliness made their way into the novel and very much inspired Vi’s apartment. During the drafting process, I also received invaluable guidance from my dissertation director, Leah Stewart. My initial ideas evolved as Vi and Bob became more than just thought experiments and I invested in their growth and development. I finished the first full draft of the novel in the summer of 2021 and spent two more years revising before the book was sold to a publisher.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

To be honest, I was surprised to receive interest in the novel from agents and editors. I didn’t have high expectations when I first sent out queries—the writing process can be isolating, and it’s easy to doubt yourself. I wondered if maybe this novel was too niche, the narrator too unlikable, the conceit too strange. It was surreal and lovely to have brilliant agents and editors reach out and talk with me seriously about my book.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

The biggest surprise in the writing process came during revision. I went through over a year of revisions with my amazing agent, Samantha Shea, and talented editors, Sarah Stein and Charlotte Humphrey. I couldn’t believe how collaborative the process was. I learned to trust their insightful comments and my own intuition. Sometimes you don’t understand how fundamental an element is to the story you’re trying to tell until someone suggests that you take it out. In justifying these elements, I was forced to develop and clarify my writing not just to my collaborators but also to myself. In other instances, their cuts were necessary and helped sharpen the plot. Without my agent and editors’ interrogations of the text, I might never have dug to that deeper level of meaning.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope readers take what they need from this book. As deeply personal as Blob is, it doesn’t belong to me anymore. In some ways, literary fiction is a deeply flawed method of communication, like a game of telephone where what I put in may be different than what comes out. But that’s also the beautiful thing about art. It exists beyond my intentions.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

A professor once told me, “No one will ever care about your writing more than you.” As bleak as it sounds, I find this advice oddly freeing. Writing is a long game, and it can’t be sustained by external validation. It’s comforting to think that I’ll keep writing even if everyone stops reading.