Off the Menu by Christine Son (with author guest post and giveaway)

They smiled at each other, the kind of empathetic smile third graders and mature women alike gave when they felt bonded to each other. They didn't have any answers, and they hadn't experienced any epiphanies, yet Whitney felt as though her yoke had been lifted. If anything, Audrey was bracing the other end, and for now, that was good enough.

(from Off the Menu, page 178)

I'm not going to beat around the bush. I loved this book. I had a feeling I would love it, and I was right. When I opened Off the Menu, I thought I was going to love it for the similarities to Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (which is among my all-time favorite books). I've always been drawn to stories about immigrants and clashes with their American-born children, as I witnessed such conflict between my grandmother and my mother, who came to the U.S. from Germany when she was just 3 years old. But what really hooked me was Christine Son's honest portrayal of long-time friendships.

In Off the Menu, Son tells the story of three Asian-American women who have been friends since high school. Whitney Lee is a lawyer who'd rather pursue a music career, but her parents' expectations keep her from attempting to fulfill her dream. Audrey Henley is expected to maintain a certain image as the adopted daughter of the billionaire owner of a petroleum company, but all she wants is to become an English professor and marry her boyfriend, who is content in his job as a teacher. And Hercules Huang is a famous chef and restaurant owner who is loud and obnoxious, but only to hide her loneliness and hostile feelings toward her father.

Until they take a road trip to Audrey's parents' home in Austin, Texas, the three don't really confide in one another about their troubles, worried about what the others will think. This aspect of their friendship felt real to me, as no one wants to feel like a failure around someone they perceive to be extremely successful. But the joys of friendship come when you break down the walls and bear your vulnerable souls.

While all three women were likable, my favorite character was Jimmy Fujimoto, an artist Audrey meets at a coffee shop who travels with them on their road trip. His character is so full of life and so entertaining, and his scenes liven things up when the women are feeling down.

Son's writing pulls you in from the beginning, and she does a great job adding a bit of humor to complicated relationships. If you've been following the Off the Menu tour and reading Christine's guest posts and interviews, you'll understand when I say she's funny and sounds like someone you'd love to have as a friend. If you haven't followed the tour, you're in luck because I have the pleasure of welcoming Christine to Diary of an Eccentric for a humorous guest post about writing and inspiration. Thanks for stopping by, Christine!

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What Are You Looking at? Are You Writing About Me?

by Christine Son

The other day, a group of my friends and I went to lunch, and at the table next to us, a woman was sitting alone, looking around the restaurant. She dug furiously into her bag, checked her cell phone, clearly agitated, looked around again, checked her phone, looked, checked, looked. My friends may have noticed her, but if they did, they didn’t comment on her behavior. They were too busy talking about the drunken weekends they had all had. But I kept sneaking glances at our neighbor. What was she doing? Was she waiting for someone? If so, who? Her husband? Were they in the middle of a nasty divorce and his tardiness was the reason for their relational demise? Was she about to be interviewed for a new job while taking a lunch break from her current one? Was she the first to show up to a blind date? Why was she so angry? Was she just an unpleasant shrew? Or did she have reason to be upset? To anyone else, she might have just been a harried patron, starved to hypoglycemic irritation. But to me, she was a story, a character with hidden motivations and goals, which were clearly being stymied. And as I turned to my friends and added my own snarky comments about debauched parties and office politics, I realized that I did the same thing with them as I did the woman. I noticed their inflections, their tilts of the head, the way they used their hands to emphasize the funnier parts of their stories. I absorbed the way they laughed or snorted, how their eyes sparkled or reflected prismatic colors in the sunlight. I took in what they were wearing, how one kept adjusting the collar of her shirt and how another scrunched her never-will-be-wavy hair. And I listened to their stories, the content and details of what had transpired on their Saturday nights, but perhaps with less ridiculousness than the version they were then giving.

As a person, I’m naturally perceptive, I think. I’m quick to pick up on someone’s mood, on the fleeting looks she might give another to relay her dismay or bewilderment. I’m also fairly introspective, and will keep events and conversations in mind for a long time, often rolling them through my head repeatedly like movie scenes so that I can layer them with my observations. I linger over these things because relationships—human interactions in all their levity and curiosities—arrest me. What goes on inside a person’s head fascinates me. It’s because of these interests that I write character-driven fiction instead of mysteries or horror (and also because I spook too easily to write those genres). And when I’m in the middle of a draft, I find that these qualities kick into high gear, sometimes rendering me hypersensitive. Or at least I feel as though I’m overanalyzing everything, not just in my writing, but in life in general. I don’t know if other writers experience the same heightening of his or her senses, if a horror novelist starts to see evil lurking in the mundane. At some point, I have to stop myself from thinking that every comment or email or silence is indicative of anything more than the face value of it. That sometimes, a statement is merely the product of impulse, that unresponsiveness is the result of distraction. Why do I do attribute meaning to everything when clearly not everything carries it? It may be because in a book, there are no wasted scenes. Or insignificant dialogue. Or haphazard action. Novels are the grand distillations of life, the collection of conversations and events placed specifically to move the story forward. And through these lenses, everything in the world garners import, deserved or not. Some people call that insight. Others may call it obsessive-compulsive disorder. But it’s where I draw my inspiration, the myriad possibilities why a person acts the way she does, why she says certain things, why she looks the way she does. And so I watch. And listen. And try not to look like a freakish stalker as I absorb the kernels of the everyday that may ultimately drive an entire book.

So there you have it. Yes, I may very well be looking at you, and yes, I may be writing about you, too. But it’s because you are endlessly fascinating, a relentless source of inspiration and potential that feeds my imagination. And at the end of the day, there’s nothing more a writer can ask for.

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Would you like to read Off the Menu? Christine would love to give a copy to one lucky reader (international entrants welcome)!

All you have to do is leave a comment here AND tell me a funny or interesting story about your best friend. (Or you can tell me your favorite book about friendship.)

Deadline to enter is midnight EST on Wed. Dec. 3. Good luck!

I'd like to thank the wonderful ladies at TLC Book Tours for this wonderful opportunity!

Check out the rest of the Off the Menu stops here!

Disclosure:  I received a free copy of Off the Menu from the publisher for review purposes.