The middle child in a large Hmong-Australian family, Lee was born in Canberra and later moved to Melbourne, and as such dreads the question ‘Where are you from?’ – a sentiment no doubt shared by many second-generation Australians. When the sandy-haired, flannelette shirt-wearing Stevo asks the question (his character bestowed with a far less twee nickname than the others in Banana Girl – among Lee’s dramatis personae are ‘Cub’, ‘Fuzzy’, and ‘Goose’), Lee figures, ‘he may have just wanted an “I’m not from round here”, a confirmation that I was authentically exotic’.

Written with polarising frankness, Banana Girl fluctuates between a candid diary of sex, friendship, and family, and a conversational meditation on race and identity in Australia – the latter theme decidedly contributing to the stronger parts of Lee’s prose. While the lack of any conclusive reflection may frustrate some, you get the feeling that a clean dénouement isn’t really the point of Banana Girl, and that the reader is supposed to feel dizzied in tandem with Lee. ‘I feel like I’ve just run a race that went around in lots of circles, without a finishing line,’ she writes, in a description that applies equally to the notion of being in your twenties and to the experience of reading Banana Girl, in what appears to be anything but a coincidence.