Come out this Wednesday, July 23 at 7PM to see two great local authors at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street: Jennifer De Leon, editor of Wise Latinas, and Celeste Ng.

Ms. Ng, who lives in Cambridge, is the author of Everything I Never Told You, a haunting, beautiful novel about family ties and the secrets we keep…even (and especially) from those we love the most.  I emailed with Celeste about her new book and her upcoming readings (she’s doing two events: one at Brookline Booksmith and another at Newtonville Books on July 29!)

Brookline Hub: The central tragedy in your debut novel involves the death of a young woman. As the story begins, her family—her parents and two siblings—do not immediately realize she’s missing.  Why did you decide to start there—with her absence?

Celeste Ng: There’s a saying in writing that you need to start in medias res—“in the middle of things.” To me, the middle of things was the moment of Lydia’s disappearance, where we could watch her family discover her absence and then begin to grapple with it. Of course, the story ultimately loops back to reveal all the events leading up to Lydia’s death, but I wanted to announce her death right up front, to keep the focus of the book on how this happened, not whether or not she lives or dies.  And because we readers know more than Lydia’s family, we see everything that happens in a different light than the characters themselves do.

BH: Much of your story is concerned with how looks can be deceiving, and how truly difficult it can be to really know someone else.  Even the people who are supposed to be the closest—members of the same family—can have trouble “seeing” each other clearly. Why do you think our vision of other people—even of our own children, our spouse, our parents—is so skewed?

CN: Think about looking through a microscope: it can be incredibly disorienting to see something in extreme close-up.  Things that appear smooth are suddenly revealed to have craters and crags.  A strand of hair has scales, like a dragon’s leg. Skin looks like a desert landscape criss-crossed with canyons.  That’s sort of what happens when we try to “see” people that we know well and love: we see a little too closely, and it can be very, very hard to get a true picture.

BH: Your novel is set in the late 1970’s. Was there a reason you chose this time period rather than the present day?

CN: As I started to write about this family, it became clear that the 1970s was an era that highlighted all of the issues they struggled with. Interracial marriages are much more common today, for instance, but in the 1970s, a mixed-race couple like James and Marilyn would really have stood out. And Marilyn’s desire to become a doctor felt much more poignant in that era: it would have been a much harder path for her as a woman coming of age in the 1950s. The sciences would be a choice for her daughter, but not her for, which makes her position all the more bittersweet.

BH: Why do you think Lydia, the middle daughter, was the favored child? This was a surprising choice to me, as I usually associate the oldest or the youngest (the ‘baby’ of the family) with being the favorite (full disclosure: I’m an only child so have limited experience with the concept of favorite children!) Why do you think parents—who are supposed to love all their children—have favorites?

CN: We love hierarchy—it just seems to be part of human nature.  Given two things, we’ll almost always like one better than the other.  So I guess it’s not surprising that many parents have favorite children!  In the Lee family, there were only two children for a long time—Nath and Lydia—and of the two, Lydia was both parents’ favorite, for different reasons: Marilyn sees Lydia as “just like” her (and loves that) while James sees Nath as “just like” him (and hates that). By the time Hannah arrives, Lydia’s status as the “favorite” is pretty much set.

BH: Is it inevitable that even well meaning parents will try to imprint their hopes and dreams and beliefs on their children? Is that a problematic tendency that should be reined in or is it simply human nature to want your children to have everything that you did not?

CN: We always want better lives for our children—I think that’s just part of being a parent. But our perception of what’s “better” isn’t always accurate. My son is only three, but I’m already seeing how very hard it is to walk the line between guiding your child and letting your child find his or her own way. The more I think about this, the more I think Philip Larkin may have said it best in “This Be the Verse.”

BH: According to your bio, you grew up in a family of scientists.  As a writer, what was that like? Did you ever feel any pressure to follow in their footsteps?

CN: My parents did hope I’d go into science—it’s what they knew and what they loved—but they always encouraged me to read, too. Our house was crammed with books when I was growing up, and I was always making up stories and poems, so when I finally got serious about writing, they weren’t terribly surprised. I think growing up in a scientific family actually helped to shape me as a writer: science and writing are both about looking closely at the world and trying to figure out why things happen. Science, at its heart, believes there is a logic to the way the world works, and that if we try hard enough, we can understand it and articulate it. That’s really what fiction does, too.

BH: Who are some of your favorite fiction writers? What are you reading now?

CN: The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison are all on my all-time-favorites list.  I’ve read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas more times than I can count—I used to re-read it every time I took a trip.

Right now, I’m reading Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings, Brittani Sonnenberg’s Home Leave, and Elizabeth Gilbert’sThe Signature of All Things.  And I’m starting my book tour, so I downloaded all the Harry Potter books to re-read while I’m traveling.

BH: What do you have planned for the event at the Brookline Booksmith?

CN: I’ll be reading with Jennifer De Leon, who is the editor of Wise Latina, an anthology of essays by Latinas on their experiences in higher education. Jenn is a friend and colleague as well—we both teach at Grub Street—and I’m thrilled to be appearing with her. Her own essay in Wise Latinas, as well as many other essays in the anthology, explores her relationship with her mother and different views and expectations of women’s roles. That’s a theme in my novel as well—the mother, Marilyn, has very conflicted feelings about her position as a wife and mother versus the career she longed to have.  So Jenn and I will each read from our books, then have a discussion and Q&A session about writing, women, the career/family divide—and probably much more!

—Jennifer Campaniolo