Katherine Lin: You Can't Stay Here Forever

June 13, 2023

7:00pm

Bookshop West Portal looks forward to hosting local author Katherine Lin for her debut novelYou Can't Stay Here Forever. It releases on June 13th, so we expect this to be a celebration! Tracy Chou will interview Katherine Lin about this intriguing novel that follows a San Franciscan to France. After climactic tragedy strikes at home, she finds there are some truths you can't run from, but she might find new understanding along the way.

This event is free to attend and will take place at Bookshop West Portal. No registration is necessary, but early arrival is encouraged to get your seat. 

Desperate to obliterate her past, a young widow flees California for the French Riviera in this compelling debut, a tale of loss, rebirth, modern friendship, and romance that blends Sally Rooney's wryness and psychological insight with Emma Straub's gorgeous scene-setting and rich relationships.

Just days after her young, handsome husband dies in a car accident, Ellie Huang discovers that he had a mistress--one of her own colleagues at a prestigious San Francisco law firm. Acting on impulse--or is it grief? rage? Probably all three--Ellie cashes in Ian's life insurance policy for an extended stay at the luxurious Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes, France. Accompanying her is her free-spirited best friend, Mable Chou.

Ellie hopes that the five-star resort on the French Riviera, with its stunning clientele and floral-scented cocktails, will be a heady escape from the real world. And at first it is. She and Mable meet an intriguing couple, Fauna and Robbie, and as their poolside chats roll into wine-soaked dinners, the four become increasingly intimate. But the sunlit getaway soon turns into a reckoning for Ellie, as long-simmering tensions and uncomfortable truths swirl to the surface.

Taking the reader from San Francisco to the gilded luxury of the south of France, You Can't Stay Here Forever is a sharply funny and exciting debut that explores the slippery nature of marriage, the push and pull between friends, and the interplay of race and privilege, seen through the eyes of a young Asian American woman

KATHERINE LIN is an attorney and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and Stanford Law School.

TRACY CHOU is an entrepreneur and software engineer known for her work advocating for diversity and inclusion in tech. She is currently the founder and CEO of Block Party, which builds tools for online safety and anti-harassment. She is also a co-founder of Project Include, a non-profit working to create a tech ecosystem where everyone has a fair chance to succeed. In 2013, her Medium article “Where are the numbers?” helped jumpstart the practice of tech companies disclosing their diversity data. Tracy was previously an engineer at Pinterest, Quora, and the U.S. Digital Service, has been recognized as one of TIME's Women of the Year, MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators under 35, Forbes Tech 30 under 30, and was a Terman Fellow and Mayfield Fellow at Stanford University.