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When people ask authors where they get their ideas from, the answers are usually different for everyone. However, many writers will give one simple inspiration for many of their books: trauma. For R.F. Kuang, author of Yellowface and The Poppy War trilogy, writing novels is a form of self-care. Not only is it cheaper than therapy, but it pays her bills at the same time.

During a panel at BookCon 2026, R.F. Kuang explained how she draws from her personal life for inspiration for her novels, and not usually the good bits. “All of my work is inspired by whenever I’m having a really hard time,” Kuang admitted. “Because I like to process anything difficult I go through into fiction because it’s cheaper than therapy, and then I get paid for it. I don’t have to pay the therapist for it.”

R.F. Kuang gave some specific examples of how her real-life difficulties inspired some of her biggest books. “So, with The Poppy War trilogy, I was in Beijing as a 19-year-old working on a gap year and figuring out all these things that had happened to my family that I had been totally disconnected from growing up, and that was my way of processing it. Then I had a very weird year at Oxford, so I wrote Babel. Then we went into lockdown, and I was living on the internet, so I wrote Yellowface. And then we started our PhD programs and it was idyllic in a lot of ways. I was also massively depressed, and we were going through some really difficult personal things, Benny and I, so that’s what led to Katabasis.”

“I’m told that this is a really weird way to think about personal hardship,” Kuang admitted. “But it’s how I think about it. Every time I’m, like, on the ground, sobbing, and I think that I can’t get up, there’s this, like, part of me that splinters off, and is just really curious and is asking questions like, ‘Wow. How do we feel right now? How would we describe this if a character were feeling this way? What are the turns of phrase that would capture, I don’t know, this combination of grief and suffocation, and literally what are the mechanics of your sobbing? Where in the body does the sadness sit? How is it coming out?’ The rawness of the throat. The pain behind the eyes. And it’s just always chronicling and always grabbing these details for future use. This is either like an insane way to process your own life as art, or it’s just a great coping mechanism because it makes you legible to yourself. You put yourself on a page and hope that somebody who’s been experiencing something similar will find comfort in that.”

There is a reason why this has been on R.F. Kuang’s mind lately. “I’m saying this in the context of Taipei Story, which comes out in September.”

Watch the full R.F. Kuang spotlight panel from BookCon 2026 here:

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