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The Band, a debut novel by Christine Ma-Kellams

Author Interview + Book & Author Info!

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The Band

“This could very well be the first great K-Pop literary phenomenon.” —Debutiful, Most Anticipated Books of 2024

Perfect for fans of Mouth to Mouth and Black Buck, this whip-smart, darkly funny, and biting debut follows a psychologist with a savior complex who offers shelter to a recently cancelled K-pop idol on the run.

Sang Duri is the eldest member and “visual” of a Korean boy band at the apex of global superstardom. But when his latest solo single accidentally leads to controversy, he’s abruptly cancelled.

To spare the band from fallout with obsessive fans and overbearing management, Duri disappears from the public eye by hiding out in the McMansion of a Chinese American woman he meets in a Los Angeles H-Mart. But his rescuer is both unhappily married with children and a psychologist with a savior complex, a combination that makes their potential union both seductive and incredibly problematic.

Meanwhile, Duri’s cancellation catapults not only a series of repressed memories from his music producer’s earlier years about the original girl group whose tragic disbanding preceded his current success, but also a spiral of violent interactions that culminates in an award show event with reverberations that forever change the fates of both the band members and the music industry.

In its indicting portrayal of mental health and public obsession, fandom, and cancel culture, The Band considers the many ways in which love and celebrity can devolve into something far more sinister when their demands are unmet.

To purchase The Band click any of the following links: Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, Bookshop.

Interview with The Band Author, Christine Ma-Kellams

The Band combines K-Pop, mental health, and cancel culture. That’s a pretty heady combination. How did the premise of your debut novel come to you?

Back in December of 2020, when we were all stuck at home and knee-deep in a global pandemic, I discovered BTS thanks to the joint efforts of National Public Radio, the James Corden show, and Youtube. Then I discovered their fandom, A.R.M.Y., which blew my mind as much as the seven members did with their other-worldly passion and extraordinary capacity to shift not only public opinion, but the very state of the music industry. 

Around the same time, I had also been watching some of my favorite artists being “cancelled”—writers and comedians in particular. Each time it happened, it felt like a death in the family, and in some ways, it was a death of a dream, or a vision of who you thought this person was until you realize that they’re as flawed as anybody else.

But then came the harder questions of whether I was even allowed to like their work, or at least gush about it publicly. (Interestingly, these particular artists have all since then made a comeback and/or been exonerated in the court of public opinion). Pair this with my day job of being a psychologist, and it turned into the novel known as The Band. 

The Band focuses on Sang Duri, tell us about him:

He’s the eldest and “visual” member of a Kpop boy band who has achieved global domination when a viral solo single he releases swiftly gets himself canceled thanks to the ethnic tensions it reactivates among East Asia’s three superpowers (China, Japan, Korea). 

The Band also includes a psychologist with a savior complex. Tell us about that character and what led you to her specific issue?

So back when I was a freshmen in college, I took a Psych 1 course and at one point in the semester, the professor told us something to the effect of: therapy doesn’t work much of the time.

As a psych major who had long planned to become a therapist myself, this was the existential equivalent of finding out Santa isn’t real. (These days, I know that even Advil doesn’t work much of the time, so the fact that therapy isn’t a cure-all shouldn’t be that surprising or devastating, but back then I was younger and dumber).

So I changed routes, tried changing my major a bunch of times before going back to psychology (and Spanish) and opting to go the research route instead, but that feeling of wanted to save people I’ll remember forever. That sentiment drove me to create the narrator of The Band.

A part of me thinks you almost want your psychologist to have a savior complex, because at least then they believe you can be saved—otherwise, the alternative (of us being beyond repair) is too tragic.

You are a Harvard-trained cultural psychologist. What does that mean and what is your work life like?

I did two postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard. Now for my day job as an associate professor at San Jose State University, I spend most of my time teaching undergraduate and graduate students, commuting from LA to the Bay Area, advising Master’s thesis, or doing my own research on cultural differences. 

You also write short stories, tell us about that side of your writing:

Short stories were my gateway drug into writing. I love them as much as I love novels.

In fact, I’m turning my short stories into a linked collection—a novel-in-stories. When I’m knee-deep into writing my novels, short stories are like a palate cleanser: they allow me to leave the behemoth that is a novel for a few hours or a few days and try something new (not to mention totally different) on for size. 

What are you working on now?

Apart from my short story collection, I also have a completed novel that’s a prequel to The Band.

It follows the narrator—the psychologist with her own complexes—and her husband when they confront the “7-year itch” on the eve of their wedding anniversary with drastic, polyamorous measures. In the end, the story is about how nothing destroys quite like desire. 

Words of Wisdom for Aspiring Writers:

There’s no “magic bullet” in life for anything, much less writing. So write as much as you can, constantly and without fail, and when you’re not writing, read as much good writing as you can, because bad writing sometimes feels contagious.

Read outside your genre to see what techniques other people are using to propel their stories. Learn craft through osmosis but be as original as possible when it comes to character and plot—give us something we haven’t read before.

Author of The Band — Christine Ma-Kellams

In Puerto Rico, the kids at El Colegio Sagrado called me “La Chinita” because my birth name (“Xiao Ma”) was impossible to pronounce. My father, fresh out of China’s Cultural Revolution, moved there thinking that Puerto Rico was the 51st state (it said “U.S. territory” on the atlas!), to acquire a magical string of initials behind his last name—a configuration of the alphabet that he hoped would be powerful enough to make us worthy of being American. Unbeknownst to us, a Ph.D. from the Caribbean was useless in America, especially when accompanied by a Chinese accent. Difference, (studies show) can be threatening, because they violate expectancy.

These days, I have a degree in Spanish and am a psychologist by day to solve precisely this kind of childhood mystery. I received my Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and completed two postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University before my current position as an associate professor at San Jose State University. My empirical studies on culture, social perception and relationships have also been widely covered in GQ (Australia), Esquire (Middle East), Boston Globe, Vice News, Elle Magazine (UK), the Atlantic, Yahoo News, MSN News, Fox News, New York Post, and Daily Mail. My academic text, Cultural Psychology: Cross- and Multicultural Perspectives, has been adopted in classes at college campuses across the U.S. and overseas. 

Learn more about Christine by following her on social media: Website, Instagram, Goodreads, and TikTok.