Friday, May 9, 2025
Become a Patron!For Ep. 466 we’ve got Katie Goh (@katie_goh on IG), author of Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange. It’s published by Tin House. This is a book that blends memoir and biography: biography of a fruit, that is.
I didn’t tell Katie this, but John McPhee’s slim book Oranges was one of the seminal books that made me want to write narrative nonfiction, that and McPhee’s Survival of the Bark Canoe. Katie, who is of southeast Asian and northern Irish descent, the book tackles issues of identity, colonialism, capitalism, xenophobia and racism, still life art and mythology. It’s dense, it’s expansive, it’s a really fine book.
Katie is a writer and editor based out of Edinburgh, Scotland. She’s the author of the slim book The End: Surviving the World through Imagined Disasters about disaster movies. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Extra Teeth, and VICE. You can learn more about her at katiegoh.co.uk or follow her on IG @katie_goh.
In this conversation we tackle:
- The love of being edited
- Having to selfish to be a writer
- Finding obsessions
- Issues of identity
- Style and voice
- And the trappings of mythology
On the book’s idea:
“I’ve got this essay about oranges and sad feelings”
On recording the audiobook:
“Whenever I’m editing, I read it aloud. So yeah, I’m really used to reading and being like, ‘oh, that sounds really weird.’ Or stumbling over it a bit, and being like, ‘I need to go back and tinker. It’s not quite right.’ But, yeah, it was really hard to be like, ‘Oh, I can’t actually change anything. It’s too late.’”
On the dangers of mythology:
“Mythology can be really a dangerous thing, because mythology feels like it can’t be changed, or like it’s always been something.”
On hidden histories:
“It was like, ‘wow, how many places do we walk through where something awful has taken place, and there’s nothing to remember it?’ How can we question these myths when we don’t even know the full stories?
On struggling to write about a gnarly event:
The massacre section of the book is probably the most detailed in terms of violence. I tried to write it in a way that was very like factual, where it was describing what happened in that massacre, with factual detail. I used other researchers’ work and articles at the time to try to put the scene together. I try to do it in quite an objective way, or as objective as you can as a person, and then there’s like a moment where it kind of breaks, and it’s like me questioning, like that passage that you read out because I wasn’t sure whether I should go into that much detail or not, because it was like, ‘What is the point? Am I just shocking people for the sake of it? Am I making them upset for the sake of it? Am I going to anger people for the sake of it? What’s the reason for this? I think that’s a good question to always been asking yourself.”
On discovery:
“I’d be reading six books about the Silk Roads, and there’d be one mention of the orange, and I’d be like, ‘Yes! I found that one mention of the orange! Amazing!”
On complaining:
“It really was so joyful. It was a really joyful experience to research and to write, as much as I like, complained about it at the time. Obviously, as a writer, you have to complain about writing when you’re in it.”
On the fraction of bandwidth:
“I spend a lot of time, 50% of it is the thinking and the research. I spend as much time reading these books about still life and looking at paintings, and embedding myself in thinking about this. And then the writing is — touch wood — quite quick. I feel I’m very lucky in that sense. But then the, you know, like the other 40% of the writing is actually the editing.”
On being edited:
“I love editing. I love editing myself. And other people, I work as an editor. I love being edited by other people as well. It’s such a gift as a writer to have a good editor. It completely changes your practice, and it makes you so much better. And when people complain about being edited, I’m like, ‘his is the greatest gift you could ask for. You don’t know how good you’ve got it having someone go through, picking out your mistakes before a reader does.’”
On being selfish:
“You have to be selfish to write a book, because that’s the nature of it. You have to be able to lock yourself away for four or five hours to write.”
Katie’s Rec
The Blueprints, a video game
Parting Shot: A Different Kind of Blank-Page Panic
For lots of writers, the blank page of writing often is intimidating. That blinking cursor. That giant sea of white. The possibilities are boundless and that’s part of the overwhelm.
Thanks to newspaper writing, the blank writing page doesn’t intimidate me or stump me. What gets me is the blank notebook page, the blank Rolodex.
Much of my attention of late has been ginning up sources for the next biography and I haven’t spoken to anyone yet. I have names. I have some numbers. I’ve left a number of voicemails and I’ve got nothing back yet. The idea is solid. The arc, in theory, is solid. My agent likes the idea, the arc, but I need sources. I need conversations. I need people on the record. And until I get that, I have no book, and with no book, I’m awash in panic.
This is how I felt at the start of Prefontaine. Trying to find names and numbers and emails. Placing the call. Having to sell myself in 15-20 seconds over and over again. Working up a nightmare scenario in my head about how they’re going to tell me to fuck off and that I’m a monster and an enemy of the people. This never happens. Or if it does, it’s very rare. That’s the plight of the journalist when it comes to writing nonfiction: by and large we’re not drawing from the well of personal experience, we’re reliant on the information and stories we get from people willing to go on the record, or offer background information. Without that, you have nothing, especially for a contemporary sports figure, which is what my next project is about. Figures, actually.
I’ve been filling up my new compendium with names and numbers, cataloging my travails on the days I dip into it. If I leave five voicemails in a day these days I consider that decent. Eventually someone will call you back. It’s the first five sources who become the most important. They become validation to an ever increasing roster of sources. They’re the ones who take the risk before there’s a contract, before things are certain.
From there, the snowball gains mass and momentum … but, shit, until you get people willing to help you fill up a notebook and a recorder, you’re dead in the water. You got nothin’. That’s the blank-page panic that keeps me up at night.
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