Laura Federico speaks with author Rachel Khong about her new short story collection, My Dear You. They discuss the Susan Sontag quote: “What I really wanted was every kind of life, and the writer's life seemed the most inclusive” and how it’s really about desire for experience. The conversation moves through the book's central themes: midlife reckoning, ambivalence about parenthood, and the pandemic's role in forcing a confrontation with mortality and limitation. Rachel describes writing as a way to metabolize rather than resolve these questions, and fiction as a tool for approaching self-judgment with more compassion.

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My Dear You by Rachel Khong

Rachel's web site

The Cycle Book by Laura Federico

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03:49 — Is it better to desire or to be desired?

05:53 — The Susan Sontag quote: "What I wanted was every kind of life"

06:22 — Sliding doors and midlife

09:28 — Writing as compassion for what you're struggling with

15:00 — Social media as desire machine

16:24 — "Trying to become yourself in a time when it's so easy to be somebody else"

18:00 — AI and imposed technology

24:36 — Aliens, ghosts, sex dolls, and God texting all of humanity

29:00 — The pandemic paved the way for AI relationships

32:14 — Courage isn't the absence of fear: choosing curiosity alongside it

35:21 — Wendell Berry's creatures vs. machines