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
