Catherine Chung Discusses Writing The Tenth Muse

Photo: David Noles

In The Tenth Muse, by Catherine Chung, aged renowned mathematician Katherine, who’s on the precipice of a new mathematical discovery, muses over the details of her fascinating life. A woman of profound inner strength, she surmounts professional obstacles, betrayals, and treks the entire world to solve her own personal mystery.

Chung unpacks so much within these pages – shining a light on aspects of history not taught in high school, illuminating one female’s struggle to be taken seriously in a man’s world, and making higher mathematics understandable. Says Chung, “I knew I wanted to write a book about a woman and her intellectual life, and I knew I wanted also to write about the cost love often demands of women, but the rest of it was a puzzle that I discovered piece by piece.”

The book is written in the first-person perspective, so readers intimately experience Katherine’s life. Determining the correct voice was tricky, Chung said. “It was a first-person recollection from someone else’s point of view at first. And then it was in third person for a while. I think I basically try everything until something takes; I knew once Katherine’s voice came in that the story belonged to her.”

Even though mathematics plays a central role in Katherine’s life, what really drives her is solving mysteries, be they math or personal. She’s a sleuth, and she’s constantly searching, researching and travelling to find answers. “I think Katherine … saw math as a mystery to unravel, that she was out to solve the problem of her own existence just as much as she was out to understand the mysteries of mathematics from the very beginning.”

A running theme in Katherine’s life is that her professional life thrives while her personal life is in shambles. Having spent her youth as an Asian-American female in the 1950’s American heartland, she experienced sexism and racism early on. She found her greatest strength within herself and was unyielding with her integrity. This costs her the most important personal relationships. “I think in another time, or another circumstance, perhaps, it would have been easier for Katherine to share her life with another—not only because maybe she might have been able to be more open, but because I think her ambitions and her principles at the time made it hard for other people to be entirely open to her as well,” Chung said.

As with finding the correct voice, settling on the right title was crucial. A parable at the beginning of the book, also called “The Tenth Muse,” provided the book’s final title. While Chung wove many stories her father told throughout the book, the opening parable is the product of her imagination. 

“The story of the Tenth Muse as told in the novel is actually one I made up. I knew it would be the title once I’d written the story, but there were several ‘working’ titles for the novel before I stumbled upon it.”

Find Catherine Chung online at: www.catherinechung.com and on Twitter @chung_catherine. 

---