Did you know Dakota Johnson has a book club? The actress is best known for roles in movies like The Materialists and Madame Web, but when she’s not on set, she loves to dive into a good read. She runs a virtual book club on Instagram called TeaTime Book Club, where she recommends one book a month. Previous books have run the gamut from sad girl classics to brand new releases.
For May, she’s recommending a book called My Dear You by Rachel Khong. Dakota describes it as a collection of “stellar short stories,” and it’s written by the author of Real Americans, a popular 2024 novel. The stories are strange, emotional, and thought-provoking. Many of the stories are about being Asian American, making it a perfect read to celebrate AAPI Heritage Month this May.
As the book blurb describes, “The characters in My Dear You find themselves facing extraordinary choices in scenarios that range from the everyday to the absurd: The U.S. government injects all citizens with a drug that makes them see everyone else as members of their own race and gender. God does away with humans in favor of something much better. A woman adopts a cat who conjures the ghosts of her ex-loves. A factory worker decides to befriend a sex doll she is tasked with selling.”
In an interview with People, Rachel discussed the collection of stories as a whole, from the funny to the profound.“If there’s a unifying theme, it’s the mid-life realization that life is limited and finite: that we don’t get to lead all possible lives, or go down all possible paths,” she said. “It’s about mourning that sense of possibility, but also about finding beauty in our limits.”
In writing the book, Khong also wanted to reflect on her experiences as a Malaysian immigrant who grew up in the U.S. “Though several of the stories are explicitly about race, I was interested in writing the more casual racism that I encountered in my own life as an Asian American woman,” she wrote. “It was important to me to write about Asianness in a way that felt true to my lived experience. In My Dear You, Asian characters ‘act like everyone else,’ until, often, some racist action reminds them of how they are perceived by others.”
A book of short stories is easy to throw into a tote bag to take with you to the park or while running errands. You can devour the collection start to finish, or enjoy the stories one at a time between other parts of your day. Then, find out which one is your favorite.
