YOU HAD THE FEELING THAT ALL THE THOUGHTS WERE IN A BOX COVERED IN TAPE, AND THE TROUBLE WAS THERE WAS TOO MUCH TAPE

the novel forgoes easy emotional pay-off to present a sundappled look at memory and heartbreak. Here, the amiable protagonist leaves San Francisco in the wake of a broken engagement, and moves back to her parents’ place in Southern California, where her father Howard, a former history professor, is struggling with the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

Initially, Khong was interested in examining how recall in general shapes relationships and narratives, but ultimately focused on Alzheimer’s, which afflicted her grandmother. “[It] quickly became a part of it as a way to make that more pronounced, more immediate,” she says, reached at home in San Francisco. “I think we’re always dealing with memory loss, day-to-day, in our own lives. We don’t remember anything with perfect clarity.”

Already the author of this spring’s All About Eggs: then centred on the romantic and professional despair of a younger Ruth.

Wanting to explore the character further (“I had not figured out what her family was like at all”), Khong put aside her dream of writing a short story collection and chose to concentrate on a novel. Longform fiction, she admits, was a challenge, with much effort spent on refining Goodbye, Vitamin’s journal-style structure and providing the cast, including Ruth’s mother and brother, with room to develop. That it reads as a kind of valentine to the Golden State is the result of practicality: Khong sought a familiar setting as she experimented with the rest of the manuscript.

Filled with small moments skillfully nuanced – meals savoured; history classes, on and off campus; symptoms witnessed – these pages play to Khong’s strength with economy. day it was new trouble – trying to find the end of the tape.”

The shifting dynamic between parent and child is underscored by letters that Howard previously wrote to Ruth, creating a dialogue connecting father and daughter across decades. Khong tenderly conveys how love, and relationships – with others, oneself and the past – change over time.

Launching her career as a novelist led Khong to reflect on what makes her happy. “Really I think it is writing every day.

“It’s almost like getting out of your own head, when you can get to that really subconscious exercise of just getting in this mood, or being on a roll. That is when I am the happiest,” she says. “I wake up, have a really solid morning of writing, and then everything else is just bonus.”