Celeste Ng, OUR MISSING HEARTS: A Novel
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[0:58]Celeste Ng is the author of our missing hearts a novel
[1:02]She is also the author of everything I never told you and little fires everywhere
[1:06]This is the second time that Celeste is on the podcast
[1:09]So you could go back and listen to our first one as well if you want more information about her
[1:14]This particular episode is from my live event with her at Temple Emanuel's Striker Center
[1:21]Celeste's first novel everything I never told you from 2014 was a New York Times bestseller
[1:26]A New York Times notable book of 2014
[1:28]Amazon's number one best book of 2014
[1:32]And it was named to best book of the year by over a dozen publications
[1:35]Everything I never told you was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award
[1:38]The Asian Pacific American Award for Literature and the ALA's Alex Award
[1:42]It has been translated into over 30 languages and is being adapted for the screen
[1:46]Her second novel Little Fires Everywhere from 2017 was a number one New York Times bestseller
[1:52]A number one indie next bestseller and Amazon's best fiction book of 2017
[1:58]It was named to best book of the year by over 25 publications
[2:01]The winner of the Ohio Entertainment Award and the Goodreads
[2:04]Reader's Choice Award in 2017 and fiction
[2:07]It's spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list
[2:10]Little Fires Everywhere has been published abroad in more than 30 languages
[2:14]And was adapted as limited series on Hulu
[2:16]starring a Reese Witherspoon and Carrie Washington
[2:20]Her third novel was published in October in the US Canada and the UK and was an instant New York Times bestseller
[2:26]Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Sheaker Heights, Ohio
[2:30]She graduated from Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan
[2:34]Now the Helen Zell Rogers Program at the University of Michigan
[2:37]Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications
[2:42]And she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts
[2:47]and a Guggenheim Fellowship among other honors
[2:50]It was a privilege to interview her again
[2:52]Hi!
[2:53]Morning!
[2:53]So nice to see you
[2:54]It's a nice to see you too!
[2:56]How's everything?
[2:57]Congratulations!
[2:58]Thank you so much!
[2:59]Well, another whirlwind publication for you and congratulations!
[3:03]It's fantastic!
[3:04]Well done!
[3:06]For anyone who has not read our missing hearts quite yet, would you mind giving a quick synopsis?
[3:12]Sure!
[3:13]It's a story of a 12-year-old boy named Bird.
[3:15]He's growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he's being raised by just his father.
[3:20]His mother, Margaret, has left the family some years before.
[3:24]And the world Bird lives in isn't exactly our world.
[3:27]It's our world is sort of like the volume turned up a little bit.
[3:29]He's living in a world that's really full of fear.
[3:32]The United States has gone through a period of crisis and they're trying to come out of it.
[3:36]And one result is that there's a lot of anti-Asian hostility.
[3:40]And this is a problem for Bird because he's mixed race.
[3:43]His mother is Chinese American and his father is white.
[3:46]And at the beginning of the book, Bird gets a letter from his mother,
[3:50]who he hasn't seen in some years.
[3:52]It's actually very mysterious.
[3:54]And he's drawn into a quest to try to find her, to try to understand what happened to his family,
[3:59]and to try to figure out who he is and how to go on in this life.
[4:03]Well, I feel like this book is so multi-layered.
[4:07]There is a commentary on basically everything that's going on, which is
[4:11]evidence by your author note at the end on all the many sources that you used,
[4:15]all about things that are going on in the political environment, all the anti-Asian sentiment
[4:21]that has happened of late nationalism so much.
[4:25]But also at the center of this whole story is books.
[4:28]So I was hoping we could start literal with the book in a book
[4:33]Nature of this and the power of books.
[4:37]And also what you said in this book, which I found so interesting,
[4:41]that as soon as a book, let me see if I can find the quote,
[4:44]you said behind them, empty bookshelves.
[4:46]Bird has never seen books on them, but there they stand, fossils of a long gone era.
[4:51]Did you know their teacher explained the year before that paper books are out of date,
[4:55]the instant they're printed, the beginning of your welcome talk,
[4:58]all of them sitting crisscross applesauce on the carpet at her feet.
[5:01]That's how fast the world changes and our understanding of it, too.
[5:06]So it talks to me about this sort of temporal quality of a book.
[5:08]Yeah, I mean, that's something that I've heard many people say.
[5:11]I am a book person myself, so obviously I'm a little bit biased against that point of view
[5:15]and I'm guessing by the giant bookshelves behind you here.
[5:18]It's like, I also have my bookshelves.
[5:20]I think there's this idea that print books are out of date or that print books are dying
[5:26]or that books generally are dying, especially the age of the internet.
[5:29]And this book was one way of exploring sort of what I thought about that
[5:33]and of realizing that stories that get passed on really do have a meaning that there is a value
[5:38]in not only the book itself, but in just passing on and remembering those stories.
[5:43]One of the things that's happening to Bird is that books and certain kinds of stories
[5:48]are being removed from his world.
[5:50]And so there's a lot of things that he can't find out,
[5:53]including his own mother's book, his mother was a poet,
[5:56]and he wants to try and find out what her work was as a way of understanding her.
[6:00]And part of the question is, you know, what do we get from stories and what do we get
[6:04]from stories that get passed on and do they change as time goes on and maybe that's even a good thing?
[6:10]It's true and I feel like it's also the only way to really capture the people that you love.
[6:16]And I feel like Bird is trying so hard to do that is to find these pieces of his mom when he is
[6:22]looking for her and how do you make someone through stay alive forever?
[6:26]Exactly. It's the stories that we tell about them.
[6:29]I mean, I realize that more and more now that I have a kid,
[6:33]but I'm also a daughter. I'm realizing that there are stories about my mother and my parents
[6:37]and the rest of my family that I don't know. And I'm trying to figure out how do I get those
[6:42]that I can get them. And then how do I pass them on to my kid? Because in a way, that's
[6:46]like you said, that's who those people are really. They can know their statistics and their names
[6:51]and their facts and their pictures, but knowing something about who they were, it often comes from
[6:56]story. So true. I feel like Bird is this little detective. So trying to find his way back and
[7:03]through and decipher all the science. So there's almost a little, not thriller, but a little bit of
[7:08]a discovery mission going on in this book as well. Yeah. He thinks of himself actually as a character
[7:14]who's on a quest. One of the things that happens in the book is he remembers a fairy tale,
[7:19]folk tale that his mother had told him. And he can't quite remember how it goes. He remembers
[7:24]a little bit of it. And he's looking for that story. And while he's doing that, he's thinking
[7:28]of himself as, you know, like the youngest son of the kingdom who's going on the quest, you know,
[7:33]or the prince who's going into the castle that hasn't been touched in years and
[7:37]sleeping beauty to try and rediscover all of those things.
[7:41]You have this wonderful scene where he's in a library and libraries also play a huge role in
[7:45]this book. But in the back closet where he discovers a card catalog, which isn't even described
[7:52]as a card catalog, it's like the heck in the day we could pull out these drawers and find things
[7:58]by topic. And then he's just wowed by sort of the vastness. He didn't realize there could be that
[8:04]many books. Yeah. I mean, I'm a library nerd. I love libraries. This will probably be clear to anybody
[8:10]who reads this book. But of course, bird has never seen a card catalog. Because I think many,
[8:14]you know, many young people now have not. We have it all in a database, which is great in many ways.
[8:18]But one thing that I loved about the card catalog was there's sort of a sense of how many books
[8:23]there are in the library. Right. And that it's all in there somewhere and you can find it. So he
[8:28]has this sudden awakening that there's so much more knowledge out there than he even knew was
[8:33]possible. And it's sort of, it's essentially a coming of age for him, but mentally.
[8:38]And the librarians and everybody say, well, we would never burn books here. We're just going to
[8:44]make them into pulp and sort of get rid of them and make them into toilet paper, whatever it is.
[8:48]But the way that the information gets banned essentially and micromanaged is sort of similar to the
[8:55]way that everybody now can customize their news feeds. Like you can actually get through life with
[9:01]just a sliver of what you choose to read and have a totally different sense of life from someone
[9:08]right next to you who gets all different news and all different inputs. And yet here they're trying
[9:13]to make this with packed, you know, the standard for everyone. So what do you make of that?
[9:19]Yeah. I think of the story in some ways about bird as a young person sort of figuring out the
[9:24]context in which he lives. He's 12 years old, as I said. And he is at that age where for a lot of us,
[9:30]we're starting to realize that there's a bigger world out there. So it's around that age. I think
[9:34]a lot of times we start to realize, oh, history did not start with me. There's actually this
[9:39]whole past. And maybe if I learned something about it, it'll inform something about how I see the
[9:44]world, right? Or how I understand it. And he's starting to understand too that his parents had a life
[9:49]before him, right? And that maybe they have a life outside of him. And I think that's what happens
[9:53]to a lot of us around that age. And I think of this as sort of like the zooming out that happens
[9:58]when you start in the...
[10:00]from childhood to adulthood. You know, you're looking through the world and you think the
[10:03]world is this big. And then you realize that actually there's all this other space outside of
[10:07]that little picture frame. And in a way, as you're saying, the idea that you can see all those books
[10:13]or all those stories or as you say all those, you know, parts of life outside of just the
[10:18]narrow window you've been choosing to look through. I think that's all the context you need to
[10:21]figure out sort of where you are, who you are, and what kind of person you want to be.
[10:27]So true. I think your book touches so much on discrimination also and has some really sort of
[10:33]upsetting moments. One in the pizza shop where the owner decides not to serve the Asian gentlemen
[10:39]who walks in. And then they have this moment which you don't understand to later where he says,
[10:44]you know, he's one of them when he's referring to bird. And then another, which sounds like it was
[10:49]like right by the striker center sort of on the upper side out my window here. But where this
[10:54]woman who looks just like bird's mom was across the street, he realizes it's not her. And as he's
[10:59]processing all of these things, a white man comes up and starts just pummeling her and kick until
[11:04]she's motionless. And he just has to stand there. So shaking, which as a reader, I felt the same way
[11:10]just reverberating from the sort of shock of this brazen attack and in the open. So tell me about
[11:17]your decision to include violence like that and and to really take some things which
[11:23]horrifically are in the news and bring them into the story. And obviously when you tell it as a
[11:28]story, it's so impactful much more so than if you just read facts, which goes back, of course, to the
[11:34]book. Yeah, I mean, that was something that I really hesitated about. Did I want to include it with
[11:39]something that I I mean, honestly, it's not something that I want to think about, but it is a part of
[11:43]of our reality. And I had started this book some years ago, well before the pandemic, well before
[11:49]even the 2016 election. But when I started seeing attacks on Asians and Asian Americans, especially
[11:57]after the start of the pandemic, it felt really important to actually look at that and include
[12:03]it. It's something that I've been aware of my whole life as a Chinese-American woman, but I think
[12:07]it was something that not everyone was aware of. And suddenly we started seeing attacks as you
[12:12]say, you know, in New York, you know, in broad daylight in San Francisco, again, in broad daylight,
[12:18]you know, often attacking elderly people out in the open. And there was an attack in particular
[12:23]that I was thinking of when I was writing the scene that you mentioned that took place in New York.
[12:27]It might be one of the ones you're thinking of in which a person was just stomped on.
[12:31]And nobody did anything, which was one of the most horrifying things about it to me,
[12:35]except for the doorman of the building that was outside who came out and closed the door.
[12:41]And I thought, oh, if we're in a space where people can really just look away,
[12:46]then we've really turned a quarter. And that's a huge, huge problem. And so in a way,
[12:51]I wanted to include this in the book partly because it is something that I'm seeing and processing
[12:55]in our world, but also because it's something that it felt important to ask people to witness
[13:01]in a way to sort of acknowledge like this is happening. And if you didn't know it was happening
[13:05]now you do. And once you do, what do we do about that in a way with sort of a way of saying to
[13:11]people, this is this is something, as you say, we might skim over it in the news. But sometimes
[13:16]when you see in a story, it can it can hit you in an emotional way that makes you engage with it
[13:22]differently. Do you feel like you were able to process some things about this through writing it?
[13:30]I mean, I feel like any book where you delve into something sort of horrific that's
[13:34]happening, whether it's the Holocaust or this sort of history of anti-Asian sentiment or whatever,
[13:41]like there is a way of using the text to sort of work your way through it. Do you feel like that
[13:45]at all or am I totally off base here? No, yes and no. I feel like in a lot of ways when I go into a
[13:51]book, it is because there's something I don't understand. And a lot of times I don't even
[13:54]understand what it is that I don't understand. By the end of the book, I might have a better
[14:00]understanding of it. But at least I feel like I've outlined sort of the questions that I'm asking
[14:04]of outlined the thing that's puzzling me. And hopefully I presented those questions to a reader too.
[14:11]Whatever answers they come up with, I think are going to be from them speaking with the book
[14:15]in a way. And I feel like for me, it's more that I've sort of set an outline around these questions,
[14:21]I've articulated them to myself. And now I can think about them a little bit more clearly.
[14:25]But I certainly don't come out at the end, you know, so you're going, well, now I understand this
[14:29]and I understand what happened, you know, that would that would be a miracle and kind of wonderful.
[14:33]But in a way, it's my way of sharing these questions with other people. Yeah, that makes sense.
[14:38]Through bird and also through Sadie, you talk about, are you right about what happens when
[14:44]children are removed essentially from their parents? And the fact that this is also happening a lot
[14:48]now. Talk to me about that element and also, you know, bird and Sadie's relationship.
[14:54]Yeah. So one of the things that's happening in this world is there are series of laws that are
[14:59]intended to kind of increase patriotism. But one of the big tenets of the law is that if
[15:05]you're seen as acting unpatriotic, the government can remove your children ostensibly to
[15:10]protect them from this unpatriotic feel. But in this world, that's often being applied against
[15:15]Chinese Americans and Asian Americans, but then really anybody who dares to speak up on their behalf.
[15:20]And this was a thing that I was thinking about from the beginning of the story.
[15:25]Well, before we started to hear about these sorts of things in the news, because as a parent,
[15:29]that's I think one of the biggest fears that that I can imagine myself as being separated from my
[15:34]child. And I had known that this had happened in different times in history. But when I started
[15:38]researching it, I realized that it had happened even more than I had understood, you know,
[15:43]obviously going all the way back to enslaved families. But with Native American boarding schools,
[15:48]or as I was called residential schools, where they were supposed to be Americanized.
[15:53]And then of course, when we started seeing news about family separations at the US Mexico border,
[15:59]it was really startling to see how history was just repeating itself. And in a way,
[16:03]I think history was repeating itself because we haven't really looked back at all of the different
[16:07]times in our past and present that this is still happening.
[16:11]In addition to having all of these themes and really thought provoking political, geopolitical
[16:18]concepts, there's also the writing of this book, which is so beautiful. And there are just like
[16:23]a handful of lines, even like sentences that I underlined. Can I just read a couple to
[16:30]mine? He should burn the letter himself. It isn't safe having anything of hers around.
[16:34]This is when bird gets a letter right in the beginning from his mom. More than this, when he sees
[16:37]his name, his old name on the envelope, a door inside him creaks open and a draft sneaks in.
[16:44]That's just a beautiful way to say that. That was amazing. You're at this about the book.
[16:49]And this is when there's all this yarn that just gets put in a tree as a demonstration.
[16:55]And you write something inside bird cracks and unravels too at the site of something so delicate
[17:00]and intricate destroyed. The doll's tremble trapped in their red net. His skin feels too small
[17:06]or his thoughts. He loved that. These are some of my favorites. Okay. This is also about the
[17:12]libraries. This is about the New York Public Library. Actually, you had a lot of New York
[17:16]specific references in here, which I appreciated from the university. Bird goes to New York.
[17:21]And for him, it's both this sort of like fairy tale land in this land of wonder where sort of
[17:25]anything can happen, which I was kind of how I feel about New York a lot of the time. This is
[17:29]not New Yorker, but it's also a world that's it's bigger than any place that he's been in. He's
[17:34]never been there before. He's never left Cambridge before. And it's it's a little bit scary for
[17:38]him too. It's just a whole new world that he has to figure out how to navigate. Actually, you talked
[17:43]about this is when you're right up here in the neighborhood. I'll just read this part too.
[17:47]In each window, the familiar stars fangled placard banners advertising the fanciness of what they had,
[17:52]not its cheapness. Hire and hire the cross streets climb as if he is scaling a ladder. This is when
[17:57]he's discovering New York 50th, 55th, 56 men and suits men with ties men and leather shoes with
[18:02]fringe tassels and smooth soles in which you had no need to run. Long ago, his father had worn
[18:08]shoes like that. And you keep going and says a department store at the length of an entire block.
[18:12]I think we're walking past burgdorffs at this point. I'll sneak dark granite polish to mirrored
[18:16]glasses if to say in this place, even stones shine like stars. And then you go through apartment
[18:22]buildings, going to get to the upper east side women here. Hold it. He said, now there are coffee
[18:27]shops, places meant to linger in billboards for whitening and straightening teeth, hotels with
[18:31]suited bell hops and hats, poised just outside. Here, people hold bags not meant to carry, but to be
[18:37]pretty dry cleaner after dry cleaner, a neighborhood of silk to delicate to wash at each door,
[18:43]burly men from the neighborhood watch, Stan Guard, 75th Street, 76 older buildings that wore
[18:49]their age gracefully, looking stayed not shabby, shops labeled gourmet and luxury and vintage.
[18:56]He likes the thought of his mother here in this beautiful place, blonde women in jogging
[19:00]tights puff beside him, ponytails bobbing as they wait for the signal to change, nannies push
[19:05]sleek strollers, the babies inside some shuously dressed one more lunch. He passes stores that make
[19:11]only picture frames, restaurants that serve only salad, shops selling pink shirts embroidered
[19:17]with tiny smiling whales. Building so tall, their tips are invisible even when he cranes
[19:22]his head so far, he nearly falls backward, anything could happen here, everything does happen here.
[19:29]It was a little bit of my love letter to New York. I mean, writing it during the pandemic where I
[19:33]wasn't able to go to New York, I was thinking about all the things in New York that are weird and
[19:38]wonderful and that, you know, it's not, it's not like a lot of other places and I wanted to study.
[19:43]I think it comes out how much I was like, oh, New York, I miss being in New York and just how
[19:49]everything is there. I mean, there's so much. Well, the way that you write about New York,
[19:55]the way you write about motherhood and separation, all of it.
[20:00]But the language that you choose to use, sort of, it's like you use analogies and times
[20:05]to really, and so many, like, wait, I don't know, like using different elements to describe
[20:11]things.
[20:12]Tell me about your writing methodology and how you come up with things.
[20:16]Do you spend a lot of time on each sentence?
[20:18]Is this honed from classes?
[20:20]Is it just from all of your successful work to date?
[20:23]Where does this all come from or is it just totally natural to you?
[20:26]I mean, I think it's been a long process, you know, and I feel like I'm still sort of
[20:30]honing my voice.
[20:31]I write by ear, honestly.
[20:34]I used to want to be a poet, and one of the things that I love is hearing language
[20:38]read aloud.
[20:39]And so when I'm writing, I'm listening to it in my head, and I'm sort of thinking
[20:43]about how it sounds.
[20:44]And sometimes it doesn't sound quite right.
[20:46]If you ever, if you are a musician, or if you ever listen to musicians tuning up, there's
[20:51]a moment where, you know, they're changing the tune, and then you hear it hit the
[20:54]right note.
[20:55]And it suddenly sounds right.
[20:56]That's kind of how writing feels to me a lot of the time.
[20:59]Well, yeah, it's not quite right.
[21:00]I don't really know if it's sharper, it's flat, but I'm going to turn it when I, oh,
[21:04]there it is.
[21:05]Right.
[21:06]And for me, it's that sense.
[21:07]And so I write, as I say, by ear, I read aloud a lot.
[21:11]But at the same time, I also, I try really hard to imagine what the world is like for
[21:17]my characters.
[21:18]I try really hard to imagine what it might feel like to be in their body, to be, for
[21:21]example, 12-year-old who is small and feeling a little overwhelmed, but also kind of dazzled
[21:26]by the biggest city that he's ever been in, right, and more people and more different
[21:31]kinds of people than he's ever been around.
[21:33]And then I also try to think about if he hadn't seen this before, what might it remind
[21:39]him of my sister used to tell me that I had a mind like a little filing cabinet.
[21:43]And anytime I saw something new, she could see me as a toddler kind of riffling through
[21:47]and looking for something to refer to.
[21:50]And in a way, I think that's sort of how I tried to write bird as well.
[21:54]He hasn't seen a lot of these things, as you say.
[21:56]He doesn't know the words for a lot of these things.
[21:58]He doesn't know the names of the story he's walking by, right?
[22:00]He doesn't know the names of the neighborhoods that he's in.
[22:03]But he's trying to, he's trying to kind of get a handle on them in some way.
[22:08]He doesn't know what a card catalog is, but he knows it's a huge piece of furniture and
[22:12]it's massive and weighty.
[22:13]Nobody can move it in.
[22:14]It's got all these drawers in it, right?
[22:16]He can, he can describe it even if he can't name it.
[22:20]And in a way, that's the voice that I wanted to try to get for the book.
[22:23]Amazing.
[22:24]Wait.
[22:25]So tell me, you said you started this before the pandemic.
[22:27]What was the whole journey with this and did you start other projects in the meantime?
[22:31]And did you, when did you know this was the next book to go and all of that?
[22:35]Yeah.
[22:36]It really started for me as I was finishing my second novel, Little Fires Everywhere.
[22:40]There's an artistic mother in that book as well.
[22:43]which is visual artist and her daughter really understands and supports the art she does.
[22:48]She thinks her mother's work is important.
[22:50]And I started to think what if there was a case where there was a creative parent and their
[22:55]child just did not fundamentally understand why their parent wanted to do this thing and
[23:01]maybe even saw it as a rival for their attention or for their affection or for their time.
[23:06]So that was the idea that I had it always began with a parent child story.
[23:12]And I started tinkering with this idea and that was in late October of 2016.
[23:18]And so it was very soon thereafter that I think we started to see a lot of really sort of scary
[23:23]things in our country really coming to the surface.
[23:25]They'd always been there.
[23:27]But we saw, of course, the presidential election we saw the rise of the far right.
[23:30]We saw huge rise in hate crimes of all kinds and kind of a normalization of a sort
[23:36]of angry jingoism, I guess, the sort of sense of us versus them.
[23:42]And that started to run into the book.
[23:44]It was weird to pretend that that wasn't in the story when it was such a big part of life
[23:51]around me.
[23:52]And so I started thinking about this novel.
[23:55]I realized that it was going to be in a world that wasn't quite like ours, but that was
[23:59]maybe ours a little bit more so.
[24:03]And I didn't know how to write it.
[24:05]I wasn't sure I wanted to write it.
[24:06]The real world was feeling dystopian enough.
[24:10]And I wasn't really sure that I wanted to write this book, let alone that I knew how
[24:14]to do it.
[24:15]And so I did.
[24:16]And it's funny that you asked, I did actually, I started another book in the meantime,
[24:19]and I wrote a whole draft of it, but I kept coming back to this one.
[24:23]And I kept coming back to Bird and his mother.
[24:26]And I would imagine things and then they would happen in real life or things would happen
[24:29]in real life.
[24:30]And it would speak to the novel.
[24:32]And I would poke at it for a while and then I'd kind of put it away and despair.
[24:37]And it wasn't really until the pandemic started that I felt like this was the book that
[24:41]I was being called to do, that was calling to me.
[24:46]I'd actually talked to my agent and we'd agreed I was going to work on this other novel.
[24:51]I would deal with Bird and his story sometime after that.
[24:54]And it was maybe April, just after everything had shut down, I emailed my agent and I
[25:00]said, I know I'm supposed to be doing this other project, but I think I need to work
[25:06]on this book.
[25:07]Like I think I'm wrestling with stuff and I need to, I need to figure this out, please
[25:11]don't be mad.
[25:12]And she wrote back and said, I actually was just going to email you the same thing.
[25:16]I feel like this is a book that feels so relevant and so timely, even though it's not
[25:20]about the pandemic, it is about how you live in a world that feels like it's falling apart
[25:25]and how you parent or try to speak to the next generation in a time of fear.
[25:30]And so it wasn't until then that I really sort of turned my full attention to it and I started
[25:34]trying to put together all of the scraps and pieces of the book and came up with what turned
[25:39]into our missing hearts.
[25:41]And so what happened to the other book?
[25:43]It's still here.
[25:44]I have the draft.
[25:46]It's safely stored in my computer and I think I've been focused, I haven't been writing lately,
[25:52]I've been focused on trying to get this book out into the world, you know, with sort of
[25:56]as much care and love as possible.
[25:58]But I'll go back to it at some point because it's, every book I start is because there's
[26:03]something that I'm trying to figure out.
[26:05]And so that book too, I have to go back and look at it and figure out what is it that
[26:09]was pulling me to that book.
[26:11]For me, the first draft is always about figuring out what questions I'm even asking, figuring
[26:16]out what the story even is.
[26:18]And so it often takes a while for me after I finish a draft, I'll go back three months
[26:25]or six months later and then I have a better sense, oh, this is, this is what I'm interested
[26:29]in.
[26:30]I'm going to focus on that in my revision.
[26:32]In this case, I've got that first draft, it's just been like two years.
[26:35]So hopefully I'll go back to it with some clear eyes.
[26:39]It's awesome.
[26:40]It's like a sculptor leaving this thing like ready to go like we have like a little sheet
[26:44]over it.
[26:45]Exactly.
[26:46]A friend of mine who's also a writer, first of this is the, the phalo period, you know,
[26:52]like if you're in agriculture, like you plant crops, but then you have to let the field
[26:55]sit for a little while to kind of get nutrients back into it to kind of, you know, replenish
[27:00]the soil.
[27:02]And I like that idea too in a way that, you know, we've, it's growing something.
[27:06]It's getting ready to grow something bigger.
[27:09]But for right now, it just needs to sit and kind of let, let nutrients soak into it,
[27:13]let, you know, all the, I don't know, worms go in and do all of their stuff.
[27:17]I think I'm trying to write a novel now too.
[27:19]I feel like now I feel better that it's not just sitting there.
[27:22]It's, it's, there's actually some stuff going on.
[27:25]It's me.
[27:26]I'll tell you what my, my analogy is, it's a little, it's not quite as nice as the phalo
[27:31]I think of it as the compost heap.
[27:33]Okay.
[27:34]You know, you throw stuff in there and you don't know exactly what it's going to do, but
[27:37]at a certain point, it'll kind of break down and it'll turn into this wonderful rich,
[27:41]nutritious thing, but it just takes a while.
[27:43]And it, it can't be rushed and it takes as long as it takes.
[27:46]So that's my rationale, but I'm discovering that I seem to take five to six years at least
[27:54]to come up with a novel.
[27:55]So maybe that's just rationalization.
[27:58]I, I'm going with it.
[27:59]I like it.
[28:00]Well, you know, okay, I was going to say I, I, um, I remember talking to the poet Elizabeth
[28:05]Rossner and she said, she said, our books take as long as they take because it takes
[28:10]us that long to become the people who can write them.
[28:13]And I really like that idea a lot too.
[28:16]The idea that it's not that the book is this thing that's not coming together.
[28:20]It's not that, you know, you're not doing the right thing.
[28:23]It's just that you and the book kind of have to grow and mature and kind of think about
[28:29]each other.
[28:30]And then eventually it comes together.
[28:31]I like that idea of looking out of the lot.
[28:33]And of course she's a poet.
[28:34]So it's beautifully said.
[28:36]Wow.
[28:37]I love that.
[28:38]That's great.
[28:39]I know in the acknowledgement, you think your son and how important he is to you and everything.
[28:44]And a minute ago, you mentioned that there are some competing.
[28:48]What if a child felt that the mother's work is sort of competing for attention?
[28:53]Do you ever feel like that with your son that your work is sort of taking over your life
[28:57]and maybe you wish as they couldn't do it yet?
[28:59]I mean, I think most working parents feel that way honestly, you know, my work is important
[29:06]to me.
[29:07]And I try to tell him both of those things that's something that I learned from my agent.
[29:09]I try to tell him, you know, I'm really glad I do my work.
[29:13]I love my work.
[29:14]It's important to me.
[29:15]I'm good at it.
[29:16]And it's meaningful to me.
[29:18]And I do think it makes me a better parent.
[29:20]But I try to also tell him, you know, I don't like being away from you.
[29:23]You know, I'm happy when I get to come home and be with you and that you are also
[29:28]one of my most important jobs, probably the most important job.
[29:32]But I don't always say that, you know, get two full of themselves.
[29:35]But I try to be honest with him that I'm a human and that I'm trying to balance things.
[29:41]I used to have this idea that as a parent and especially as a mom, because there's a lot
[29:46]of societal pressures on moms, I used to have this idea that I had to be a superhero and
[29:51]I had never let it show that I was sweating or struggling or in any way.
[29:56]And I've kind of changed my thinking on that and especially when it comes to my kid, I
[30:00]I don't want to let him know hey, sometimes things are hard. Sometimes we have to do things we don't want to. I'm doing my best. I'm human. And by extension that also means it's okay if you feel like there's too much or you feel like things are hard or all of these things like I want him to know that I don't want him to learn that when he's an adult and he realizes that actually it's really tough to keep all of your balls in the air, which it is when you're an adult.
[30:23]And so I'm trying to show him and tell him that we're all human and that we don't always know what's best. We're trying our best. But maybe we make mistakes and actually I think that was a lesson that came into the book as well. A lot of the story I think is about bird learning that his mother is also a human and is also fallible and is also struggling.
[30:45]But also trying to do her best. I know there are a lot of alsos in there, but I feel like that is part of part of what I'm trying to say to my kid is it's usually not either or it's usually both of those things and some other stuff and we're trying to figure out how to make it all work.
[31:00]Birds dad too. I mean, that's an important relationship and you know, absolutely. I'm really glad you mentioned him because I feel like because I'm a mother people tend to ask me about the mother son relationship and it's a big one.
[31:11]But his father is also there and also trying to do his best and also trying to deal with the situation in which his wife and partner is gone, in which he's raising a child and in a world that is really hostile to his son, but in ways that he himself maybe has an experience or doesn't understand. He's also trying to do his best.
[31:32]And so, I feel like that's a real, just a fussy and putting back of the books every day and doing all this for his son and if the dining rooms closed having to make this poor box of mac and cheese.
[31:45]Exactly. I feel like that. I mean, that honestly comes from, you know, parenting moments I've had where you had a plan and then everything goes sideways.
[31:54]And there is sort of a value. I think in being able to say, Okay, that was not the plan.
[31:59]I think that we're going to make the best of things and we'll try again, you know, to just acknowledge that sometimes things things don't go the way you expected and what are you going to do about it.
[32:10]You keep going.
[32:12]Yeah. No other choice.
[32:14]My last question is when you're not thinking analytically and deeply about your characters and your stories and all of this stuff.
[32:22]So, you know, to do to just relax and kick back and.
[32:25]Oh, this is a great question. Well, many. I've already been out. It is a mini interest.
[32:29]I love to do a lot of things that are that don't involve words honestly. So I do a lot of crafts. I knit and crochet. I cook. I garden.
[32:37]You know, I play video games with my kid. I love video games actually even before he was around. So I'm happy that he likes them now too.
[32:44]You know, I watched TV and I read and I do all the things that people do, but I do like to make things. And so when I really want to relax, I will go and make something, whether it is a pie or whether it is like planting bulbs in my garden, which I need to do later this week before it for us or, or, or knitting something.
[33:01]If I'm making something. I'm usually pretty happy.
[33:04]Wonderful.
[33:05]Thank you so much. And Marjorie and the striker center. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks Marjorie. Thank you to the striker center. And thank you to all of you who have tuned in. It's it's really a pleasure to get to talk with you.
[33:18]Thanks for listening to this episode of moms. Don't have time to read books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at ZB Owens and at moms. Don't have time to read books.
[33:27]Sign up for my newsletter at ZB Owens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texturesound for the sound editing. And thank you to morning moon productions for providing this fantastic intro and outroom music.