Phrases like “quiet quitting”, “stay-at-home girlfriend” and “I’m just a girl” are more than just ways to signal that you’re chronically online. Capturing a modern craving for passivity, they also served as literary inspiration for Stacey Yu’s debut novel Kitten, which chronicles the journey of Katie, a 22-year-old who, freshly graduated, cash-strapped and directionless, becomes obsessed with her older, wealthier boyfriend's family cat, Silver.

Considering the fact that Yu has spent the past several years as a successful BookTok creator, reviewing other people’s books, it’s not that surprising that her debut novel was partially informed by topics bubbling within the internet zeitgeist. As she began writing it, she realised she was responding to conversations she was having with friends around “wanting to be helpless”. “I wanted to write a book that was about awakening to your agency, being afraid of your own agency and then learning to accept it,” she says. “I feel like there is just this general malaise within our generation that prioritises passivity – I think it’s a backlash against all of the girlbossery that came before us, which obviously proved to be a lie.”

Passive is perhaps the best way to describe Yu’s protagonist, who, following her graduation from NYU, is faced with no real prospects for her future, yet appears unable to will herself to do something about it. Her only saving grace comes in the form of her boyfriend James, whom Katie doesn’t seem to particularly love, but relies on for the stability that her own life lacks. The fact that Katie is estranged from her immigrant mother, who cut her off for her decision to leave the Midwest for New York, and owes rent money to her roommate, a nepo baby who’s somehow her only real friend in the city, also doesn’t help her case. Enter the clever, furry Silver, who Yu dubs “the only self-actualised character in the novel”. When Katie, James and Silver take a trip to his family’s beach house, Katie’s infatuation with the pet grows deeper and deeper, setting off a chain of events that are wince-worthy and page-turning all at once.

Yu placed a cat at the centre of her novel precisely because of the distance between animal and human experience – and because of her own fascination with pets. “I’ve always been attracted to things with a different life force than humans,” she says. “It came really easily to me to think about a non-human yet still alive creature like a cat, and how a relationship with it could illuminate someone’s own internal dramas and struggles with being a person.” It’s true that Silver, scurrying between the young couple in James’ pristine home, places a spotlight on Katie’s own desires and insecurities. Unlike Katie, Silver isn’t expected to have a career, purpose or ambition – things Katie herself wishes she could be free of.

Silver is also free from the posturing that comes with entering James’ affluent bubble, where the protagonist feels hopelessly out of place. Everything from James’ grocery shopping habits to his effortless banter with his parents demonstrates the couple’s wealth gap, a major source of friction in their relationship. “There’s such a seductive element to being introduced to new levels of class and integrating within it, but then it’s also gross and disturbing because class rules everything around us, invisibly,” says Yu.

The racial difference in their relationship – James is white, and Katie is Asian American – is conveyed more subtly, which, according to the author, was intentional. “There are so many novels that are about non-white people struggling with interracial relationships,” says Yu. “I think the next step for me was to not make that the focus or the source of core tension, but something that adds colour to all of the other power dynamics that were going on.”

Yu wanted to avoid writing yet another contemporary novel about young people’s, and especially young women’s, malaise. Though Kitten has similar qualities to that growing modern canon – namely a protagonist who’s self-destructive, unlikeable and living in a moneyed, urban environment – there’s more hope and promise woven into Katie’s storyline. “In its first iteration, the book was pretty cynical and in the vein of a lot of malaise novels, but I realised pretty quickly that it wasn’t the book I wanted to write,” says Yu. “Ultimately, I wanted Katie to awaken to her life and insist on the possibilities that are available to all of us.”

That transformation also explains why forgiveness is one of the takeaways Yu hopes readers get from Kitten. Her protagonist may be consistently passive, often unreasonable and at times unhinged, but as Yu points out, she’s also 22. “I hope that it lets people look at their own lives, past mistakes or tricky relationships with a bit more grace,” she says.