From her Publisher's web site:
A CONVERSATION WITH CELESTE NG
What compelled you to write this book?
My stories almost always begin with images—in this case, the image of a
young girl falling into deep water. I started writing to figure out how
she got there: Was she pushed? Did she slip? Did she jump? As I wrote
my way into the book, I discovered it was a story about not just the
girl but about her family, her family’s history, and everything in her
life that had led her to this point and about whether (and how) her
family would be able to go on. What seemed like the end of the story
actually turned out to be the center.
The discovery of Lydia’s death spurs so many questions for her family. How did you approach writing about loss and grief?
When you lose someone you love, especially suddenly, there’s immense
regret and immense self-doubt. It’s impossible not to ask yourself
questions: Could you have saved them in some way? Could you, by leaving
five minutes later or arriving a day earlier or saying just the right
words, have changed what happened? Inevitably, you reconsider and
reassess the relationship you had with that person, and it can be
hardest if that relationship was strained. James, Marilyn, Nath, and
Hannah each feel a lot of guilt about their relationships with Lydia—and
the ways that, deep down, they know they’ve pressured, disappointed, or
failed her—and that complicates their reactions to her death. Any act
of writing is an act of empathy: You try to imagine yourself into
another person’s mind and skin. I tried to ask myself the questions the
characters would have asked themselves.
The relationships
between the siblings—Nath, Lydia, and Hannah—are immediately
recognizable and so well drawn. They love one another, but they also get
angry, jealous, and confused and take it out on one another. Can you
speak to their dynamics? Did you draw on your own childhood?
Sibling relationships are fascinating: You have the same parents and
grow up alongside each other, yet more often than not, siblings are
incredibly different from one another and have incredibly different
experiences even within the same family. You share so much that you feel
you should understand one another completely, yet of course there’s
also enough distance between you that that’s almost never the case. It
gets even more complicated when one sibling is clearly the favorite in
the family. The family constellation can get really skewed when one star
shines much brighter than the rest.
My own sister is eleven
years older than I am. Because she was so much older, we never really
fought; I actually think our relationship was stronger because we
weren’t close in age. At the same time, though, I missed her terribly
when I was seven and she went off to college—that informed Lydia’s
feelings of abandonment when Nath heads to Harvard. And I always
idolized my sister; there’s definitely an aspect of that in Hannah’s
relationship with Lydia.
You began writing the book before
you had your son. How did becoming a parent affect your approach to your
characters and their stories, especially James and Marilyn?
Even before I had children, I often found myself focusing on parents
and children in my fiction. Yourrelationship with your parents is maybe
the most fundamental and the most powerful, even morethan friendship or
romantic love. It’s the first relationship you ever have, and it’s
probably the greatestsingle influence on your outlook and the kind of
person you become. Most of us spend our lives eithertrying to live up to
our parents’ ideals or actively rebelling against them.
When I
started writing the novel—having never been a parent—I definitely
identified morewith the children, especially Lydia. After my son was
born, though, I became much more sympatheticto Marilyn and James. I
started to understand how deeply parents want the best for their
childrenand how that desire can sometimes blind you to what actually is
best. This isn’t to say that I “switchedsides,” only that becoming a
parent made my perspective more balanced, I think, and made the bookmore
nuanced. Now I identify with the parents at least as much as I identify
with the children.
The book is set in Ohio in the 1970s. You grew up in Pennsylvania and Ohio—how did your time there inform the book?
Both of the small suburbs I grew up in—first outside Pittsburgh, then
outside Cleveland—had a small-town feel. My first elementary school was
tiny, one of those schools where the gym is also the cafeteria and the
auditorium, and on my street the neighbor kids all played together. But
more than that, I remember a distinct sense of restlessness in the air
while I was growing up, a feeling that if you wanted an exciting or
important or interesting life, you needed to escape. Pittsburgh in the
1980s and Cleveland in the early 1990s were depressed and depressing
places: a lot of closed factories, a lot of tension and unemployment, a
lot of rust. So I knew the kind of insulated, almost suffocated feeling
teenagers like Nath and Lydia—and even adults like James and
Marilyn—might have, the feeling that the place you’re in is too small.
Through
all members of the Lee family, you write touchingly and perceptively
about feeling like an outsider and being measured against stereotypes
and others’ perceptions. Can you discuss your personal experience and
how you approached these themes in the book?
My parents
came to the U.S. from Hong Kong and moved straight into the Midwest:
Indiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio. Most of the time I was growing
up, we were virtually the only Asians in the community. In my school in
Pittsburgh, for instance, I was one of two nonwhite girls, and the only
Asian, in all four grades. Like most Asian Americans, my family
experienced some outright discrimination: Once, neighborhood kids put
cherry bombs in our mailbox; another time, a man got in our faces while
we were waiting at a bus stop, spitting at us and telling us, “Go back
to Vietnam or Korea or wherever the hell you came from.”
More
insidious than those moments of outright hostility, though, and maybe
more powerful are the constant low-level reminders that you’re
different. Many of us feel different in some way, but it’s really
jarring when one of your differences is obvious at a glance—other people
can tell you’re different simply by looking at you. (It’s hard to
explain just how strange that is if you’ve never experienced it. My
husband and I had talked about it many times, but he didn’t really know
what it felt like until we went to Hong Kong and he—a very tall white
man—was surrounded by thousands of Asians.) Even when you feel like you
belong, other people’s reactions—even stares and offhand remarks—can
make you feel that you don’t, startlingly often. I drew on that to
imagine the experiences of James, Lydia, Nath, and Hannah, or at least
their reactions to those experiences. In terms of actual encounters, I
didn’t have to imagine much: They all came from life, from the girls who
throw rocks at James’s car, to the people who speak to you slower and
louder as if you might not understand English, to the woman in the
grocery store who proudly identifies the children as Chinese before
pulling her eyes into slits.
In the novel, though, I didn’t
want to explore just racial difference. There are all kinds of ways of
feeling like an outsider. For example, my mother is a chemist and my
sister is a scientist—both women in heavily male-dominated fields—and I
often feel like an outsider or an impostor myself: Am I smart
enough/experienced enough/insert-adjective-here enough? All of the
characters grapple with some version of that feeling.
Marilyn
is deeply conflicted about being a homemaker and wanting to finish her
degree and achieving more in her professional life. What did you seek to
explore through her desires and decisions?
This is a
long-standing question that most women face: How do you balance a family
and a professional life of your own? I struggle with this myself, as
does every other woman I know, and Marilyn’s situation is a magnified
version. It’s striking to remember that in her time—just a generation
ago—she had so many fewer paths open to her. But even with more options,
we haven’t gotten this figured out yet, either. We’re still actively
wrestling with the question of balance and women’s roles. Look at the
tremendous interest in
Lean In and the uproar over Anne-Marie Slaughter’s essay in
The Atlantic,
“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Recently a Princeton alumna wrote
an essay telling young female grads that the most important thing to do
in college was to find a husband. Many women were outraged—but she’s
also just published a book. The debate over what women can and should do
goes on.
You grew up in a family of scientists. What compelled you to become a writer? How did that shape how you approach writing?
I was always interested in stories—reading them, making them up,
telling them to my parents and friends. There’s an argument for nature
over nurture right there! But actually, there’s more overlap between
science and writing than you’d expect. Scientists are really interested
in figuring out how the world works and why things happen the way they
do. A science experiment is really a what-if: “Hmm, what if I put these
things together under these conditions?” I do the same thing in my
writing, only I do it with people on the page: “What if this family was
in this situation?”
What does the title Everything I Never Told You mean to you?
The title is actually an echo of one of the last lines of the book.
Everything I Never Told You refers,
on the one hand, to the secrets that the members of the Lee family keep
from one another—all the things they lock inside because they’re afraid
to say them or they’re ashamed to say them. But it also refers to all
the things they don’t say by accident, so to speak—the things they
forget to say because they don’t seem important. After Lydia’s death,
each member of her family thinks back to the last time they saw her and
what they’d have said if they knew it was the last time. The things that
go unsaid are often the things that eat at you—whether because you
didn’t get to have your say or because the other person never got to
hear you and really wanted to.
ABOUT CELESTE NG
Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists.
She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of
Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of
Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays
have appeared in
One Story,
TriQuarterly,
Bellevue Literary Review, the
Kenyon Review Online,
and elsewhere, and she is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize. She
lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.
Oprah with Cheryl Strayed, author of Book Club 2.0's inaugural selection, Wild.
