Read to Know Basis: Amy Lin

The author of Here After shares her surprising relationship with coffee and a lot more.

Read to Know Basis is a weekly interview series with authors. It features debut authors and established writers talking about reading, writing, and of course snacks. This series is free to all. If you like what you read considering subscribing to support the work of Unstacked, and of course go out and buy the book!

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Amy Lin

is the author of the debut memoir Here After (Zibby Books, Mar 2024) which reckons with the sudden death of Amy’s husband Kurtis who dies at 32, widowing Amy at 31, as well as Amy’s own health crisis 10 days after Kurtis’ death. His body ending, her body stuttering, the seemingly limitless pain of all of it, this is the work of Here After, which is at times poetic, at times brutal, always tender. It is as much a love story as a meditation on the ways in which Kurtis’ death shattered any set ideas Amy ever held about grief, strength, and memory.

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What are five words to describe your book?
Here After is aching, heavy, tender, sharp, hot-burning–all of which are part of the list of pains a person can experience, an unsettling list given to me by my doctor after Kurtis died.

What is the strangest thing you googled while researching/writing this book?

What book made your book possible?
Denise Riley’s unflinching Time Lived Without Its Flow considers the sudden death of Riley’s son primarily through the lens of time – the ways time warped when her son died. Philosophic, unsentimental, poetic, and an utterly unflinching consideration of pain, Riley showed me the way into the heart of Here After.

Describe your ideal reader?
Here After is for you who keep pressing a bruise even though it hurts, for you who feel impossible, for you who are afraid of what love turns you into, for you who keep wondering, as I do: how can they still be gone?

What is a piece of writing advice that you’ve received that you think is really bad? 
There are no bad ideas. 

What is a piece of writing advice that you think is really good?
There are no bad ideas.

What are you reading right now? And what book are you desperate to read next?
Currently, I’m into Some Of Them Will Carry Me, an excellent short story collection by Giada Scodellaro. The work is inventive and sharp, I don’t want my time with it to end. 

And, as soon as it releases, I will be full send for Patrick Cottrell’s Afternoon Hours of a Hermit. Cottrell’s novel Sorry To Disrupt The Peace is one of my favorite books I’ve read in the last decade: darkly hilarious modern noir, I still press this book into everyone’s hands.

What book are you an evangelist for?
Right now it is Penelope Mortimer’s novel Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is a wry, seething, exactingly clear account of a housewife who is slipping, confessing her despair to the air, caught in an airless marriage that was forced because of Ruth’s unexpected teenage pregnancy with her daughter Angela. The novel revolves around the moment Ruth is asked to help procure an illegal abortion for Angela. Written in the 1950s, Mortimer is clear on the ways that she sees a lack of choice as harmful to all involved. Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting is spare, direct, clarion: utterly essential.

What is the book everyone else hates that you’re obsessed with?
Undoubtedly it is Authority, the second book in Jeff VanderMeer’s remarkable Southern Reach trilogy. The first book, Annihilation, is high-octane and unsettling–a firestorm. In deliberate contrast, Authority is measured, a precise detective story that combs carefully through the bureaucratic consideration of the elusive and mysterious Area X. The marked difference between book one and two tends to skew readers against Authority. Yet, Authority is chilling, an essential key in the lock of Area X. As much as Annihilation is about the feeling of Area X, Authority is about the evasive, vast mystery of Area X. Authority also gave me one of the most horrifying scenes I’ve ever read: I was reading at night and I yelped out loud. I really did. 

Who is your literary crush?
She is absolutely the strange, the haunting, the incomparable Yoko Ogawa. Her novella The Diving Pool stacks strange upon strange in a way that is part hallucination, part eerie menace: I still think of its tilted, warped eye when I sit down to write.

What is one thing about you that you think people would be really surprised to know about you?
I don’t drink coffee and I have never even tasted it. I don’t find this nearly as strange as everyone else seems to, which actually might be the thing that surprises people the most.

If you could not be a writer what would you do?
Immediately call my therapist and warn him.

You’re invited to a literary potluck, what are you bringing? Could be food or drink.
A dog to pet.

Connect with Amy: Substack | Instagram | TikTok | Website

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Read to Know Basis is a weekly interview series with authors talking about reading, writing, and of course snacks. This series is free to all. If you like what you read considering upgrading to a paid subscription to support the work of Unstacked, and of course go out and buy the book!

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