On Wednesday, May 13, the Yonkers Public Library, in partnership with The Library Speakers Consortium, hosted a virtual talk with author Liana Zhang about her debut novel, “Julie Chan Is Dead”.
About the Library Speakers Consortium
The Library Speakers Consortium works to change the dynamic by pooling the resources of hundreds of library systems to expand access to these author talk programs for all library patrons. The Consortium has over 400 member library systems, ranging in size from less than 100 to over two million patrons.
The Consortium creates two to four online bestselling author events per month, which are streamed to patrons of every member library. These live events have interactive question-and-answer sections where participants can ask questions directly to the author.
In the most recent illuminating chat, “On Writing a Brilliant, Dark, Diabolical Thriller,” moderated by the Library Consortium’s Operations Manager Brandon Adler, author Liana Zhang gave insights into her process, inspiration, and background as an author.
About the Novel
Liana Zhang’s debut novel, “Julie Chan Is Dead,“ is a darkly comedic thriller that centers around the titular character, Julie Chan, who finds herself thrust into the glamorous yet perilous world of her late twin sister, Chloe VanHuusen, a popular influencer. When Julie discovers Chloe’s lifeless body under mysterious circumstances, she seizes the chance to live the life she’s always envied. However, Julie soon realizes that Chloe’s seemingly picture-perfect life was anything but perfect. As events spiral out of control, Julie uncovers the sinister forces that may have led to her sister’s demise and realizes she might be the next target.
About the Author
Liana Zhang is a second-generation Chinese-Canadian who wrote her first-ever horror story in the fifth grade. After a short stint in high school as a skincare content creator, she graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in Psychology and Criminology. Zhang drew on personal experience from her time as an influencer to get into the psyche of her main character, Julie, while many of the secondary characters are based on well-known influencers and archetypes. Zhang was especially interested in how influencers platformed themselves versus how they behaved in real life.
This inspiration for this book furthered during Zhang’s own time working for a Canadian suicide crisis line. So many people she encountered struggled with a lack of connection and friendship. For her protagonist, and for many Zhang spoke to, this sense of isolation was often replaced with social media.
How the Book Came to Be
Zhang didn’t have a specific genre in mind when she began writing this novel. The chaotic plot came first, and the horror/thriller aspect came later. Likewise, she didn’t think much about pacing, instead focusing on ending each chapter on a cliffhanger and keeping the chapters short and punchy.
An incredibly insightful aspect of the chat was Zhang’s willingness to share her process and journey in creating this novel. Even after landing her book deal and quitting her full-time job, Zhang had to build a schedule and cut her writing time into segments, trusting the process and acknowledging that not all writing time will be productive writing time. “I tend to be an ideas person, I have a lot of good ideas, but many fizzle out,” Zhang remarked.
Despite that, this novel took her only two months to write—an incredible feat, as many others, even her own, have taken months and even years to complete. She credits the first-person, modern voice with making the words flow more easily, especially compared to her past work in historical fiction.
As this event took place during AAPI Month, Zhang addressed the disparity in media representation. Zhang was drawn to social media because she found more Asian representation on YouTube than traditional media; she didn’t have that feeling of “othering.”
Her media consumption also shaped her writing. “Way too much unsupervised online has skewed the line of what’s dark to me,” Zhang laughed, “I just write what I’m comfortable with.”
Zhang also demystified the publishing process. After completing her first draft and using resources like Reddit, she sent it out to beta readers and applied any edits that made sense. Zhang had no industry connections when she shopped her book out, and queried around 70 agents, finding many from her own research, including looking at the acknowledgments at the back of books. When the book was picked up for publication, it went through some changes, too. Originally titled Follow Me, then later Follow Us, the editors felt it was too generic and not searchable, and thus Julie Chan is Dead was born.
And for advice for writers? “Read as much as you can, and consume as much media as you can,” Zhang says. “Bits of inspiration can come from the most obscene or boring situations.”
The full event can still be streamed online on the Yonkers Public Library website. The next event, “How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us with Author Rachelle Bergstein,” takes place on Wednesday, May 21. More info can be found here.
