Rachel Khong moved to L.A., stopped chasing perfection and wrote her most wonderfully bizarre book yet

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On the Shelf My Dear You: Stories By Rachel Khong Knopf: 240 pages, $29If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.The author Rachel Khong lay on the operating table in her hospital gown, awaiting a dilation and curettage (D&C) to remove the so-called “products of conception” following a miscarriage.Her heart raced.

Suddenly, purring from the radio speakers came John Mayer’s cheeseball jam, “Your Body Is a Wonderland.”On the verge of tears, she burst out laughing.“This sucks so much,” she thought.

“But it’s also hilarious.”She’d written about this particular brand of cruelty from the universe before in the recently published short story, “Colors From Elsewhere,” a stirring pregnancy plot upended by the heroine’s rainbow discharge and an acupuncturist’s otherworldly diagnosis: She “was a literal alien” who naturally can’t reproduce.Suddenly, it all “made perfect sense.”Khong is no stranger to feeding life’s great losses and unknowables through the processing plant of fiction.“In real life, there are no answers,” she said on a sticky 99-degree Wednesday in February at the Pasadena Humane shelter.

She slipped treats to the dogs languishing under Palm Springs-style misting dispensers while volunteers read to them.Looking up with a gleaming, wide grin as if to catch her next words, Khong is deceptively calm for a bestselling author whose third book, “My Dear You,” is out this month.While the book arrives at a moment when LLMs pose an existential threat to authors (among others) Khong is finding solace in human imperfections, especially her own.

“For most of my writing life, I thought that my goal was writing a perfect story,” she said.“I don’t think of that as my job anymore.”Rachel Khong’s irresistible puzzle of a second novel sug...