Author Katie Yee makes her novelistic debut with Maggie, or a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar. A mother of two young children is blindsided when her husband reveals that he is having an affair with a woman named Maggie; almost simultaneously, she learns she has breast cancer, and so she decides to name her cancer Maggie, too. Now she and her soon-to-be-ex each have a Maggie.  This novel is a vivid, authentic, utterly believable narrative that hijacked my attention from the other books I was reading. My thanks go to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the review copy. This book will be available to the public on July 22, 2025.

“They talk about women’s intuition…I never suspected a thing.”

The way that she contends with the news is completely different from how I would respond, and yet I believe her entirely. There’s no drama, no crying; at least, not when anyone is there to see her. Instead, she eats a lot and tries to maintain some dignity for herself. The scales are so badly skewed against her; Sam comes from heart stopping wealth, the sort of family that has multiple houses peppered around the U.S., and a couple of favorite places they like to stay in Europe. Our protagonist, whose name I am fairly sure is never provided, hails from the hardscrabble working class. And in leaving, her husband tells her that she can have the house as well as a generous chunk of alimony. If it were me and I were inclined to be nasty about it, all that money might stop me dead in my tracks, since clearly, the guy could get away with giving her far less if she really wanted to push him. 

So instead, she sets some hard new boundaries. She won’t tell Sam about the cancer, at least not yet. She doesn’t want the awkwardness, the one where she witnesses him struggling with what is the right thing to do, versus what he’d rather do. No, she decides, it’s not his business anymore. And then she names the cancer after his girlfriend.

Maybe she’s a little passive aggressive, but who can blame her? It’s all she has left.

This novel has some power behind it, and if this is Yee’s debut, I can hardly wait to see what she writes when she has more experience. I recommend this book to any woman that enjoys contemporary fiction, especially those that have been jilted, and to progressive-minded men as well.