Yellowface

Yellowface presents a grim view of the publishing world and the act of writing professionally. It is often described as lonely and toxic, and June Hayward frequently struggles to find any real joy in her own writing process. She is writing to produce narratives that she believes will be popular with publishers and readers, pushing her focus away from her own personal narratives to what she believes others will enjoy. Athena Liu, however, seems to write with a purpose, to share her history and the forgotten history of others, giving readers personal and heartfelt narratives that resonate. She does so by drafting notes and brainstorming in Moleskine notebooks, which she keeps private from everyone. Similarly, June rediscovers the notebooks she wrote in when she was younger and witnesses the joy writing used to bring her. In both cases, notebooks are a motif that represents the personal nature of writing and the joy that comes with it when an author writes for themselves.

When June convinces Athena’s mother to not give her notebooks to Yale, she discusses the personal nature of Athena’s notes. Athena’s mother acknowledges that Athena never spoke about her work with her, and June suggests that “those notebooks are her original thoughts, raw and unfiltered […] I feel like donating them to an archive would be a violation. Like putting her corpse on display” (54). While the comparison is morbid, the point that June makes—whether or not she knows it to be true—is that Athena’s notes were personal and represent a version of her that she wasn’t willing to share with the world. They are not the final product but representations of works in progress. That privacy should be respected, and if Athena did not want to share her notes in life, then they shouldn’t be shared after her death.

Later in the novel, when June visits her mother in Philadelphia, she finds the old notebooks she filled in high school. While flipping through them, she is transported back to a time when writing had a fundamentally different effect on her:

God, I miss my high school days, when I could flip my notebook open to an empty page and see possibility instead of frustration. When I took pleasure in stringing words and sentences together just to see how they sounded. When writing was an act of sheer imagination, of taking myself away somewhere else, of creating something that was only for me (256).

Similar to Athena, June used notebooks for her own purposes. They were an escape for her, and she found joy in being able to let her imagination run wild on the page. Writing has changed for her in the years following high school. She no longer writes for herself and finds frustration in the demands placed on her. In both cases, notebooks represent the more personal nature of writing for these two authors. They contain their own private worlds in which they can either process trauma in their own time or find joy in manufactured worlds when the real one provides nothing but disappointment.