Eddie Huang has a lot going on. This past spring, he reopenedBaohaus on St. Marks Place, and it subsequently became an unofficial Knicks playoff headquarters. He has a podcast, Canal Street Dreams, and a Substack. And today, Tuesday, June 16, Come Undone,
his fiction book debut, publishes. He wrote the final version of the novel in just five days.
“I only do things that I really love,” he tells Eater, “and when you really love something, it’s easy. I just locked myself on the communal office floor. I told my wife, I’m clocking out for five days. When I arise, the book will be done. And it was done.”
The author, TV personality, and filmmaker, who jump-started his culinary career with his Taiwanese bun shop BaoHaus in 2009 and rebooted it in February, moved back to NY with his family a year ago following a stint in LA.
Come Undone is auto-fictional — the protagonist, manchild Hubie, hosts a globe-trotting food show, which mirrors Huang’s Vice series, Huang’s World. The book is a rom-com, he says, “about two toxic, emotionally unavailable people making things right.” The woman who cracks Hubie open is Janine, self-possessed and hard to read, who refuses to play along with his pattern of avoidance.
Crafting the story required his wife, Natashia Perrotti’s weigh-in. The first two drafts kept the protagonist at arm’s length. “She read both versions and said, ‘I can see the inspiration for every character in here except yours. Your character is the only one that’s not as close to you as it should be.’” He took it as a challenge. “There are some crappy parts about me, but it’s fine. I acknowledge it. I see it. And it’s not who I’m going to be forever.”
His editor, Chris Jackson — who has worked with Huang since Fresh Off the Boat — pushed in the same direction. “After the first draft of Fresh Off the Boat, he sat me down for almost six hours and went through the whole manuscript. He kept pointing to sections and saying, ‘You’re being elusive here. You’re trying to get out the back door without actually saying what you feel.’” Huang says he got there about 65 to 70 percent in Fresh Off the Boat, but “I did it 100 percent here.”
The book goes places the TV show couldn’t. “I wasn’t allowed to tell this story for a decade on television,” he says — how boys shaped by domestic violence and unhappy families become men who struggle to sustain real connection.
He describes it as being about “the generational debt that immigrant parents place on the heads of their children.” On the surface, he says, you can seem to have everything and truly have nothing. He wants readers to take away what happens when you decide to stop running from the urge to make your life mean something.
Come Undone is out today from One World, $29.
