I uncovered a lot of details that I wished I could include but that didn’t have a place in the novel, like the strict parietal rules at Radcliffe in the 1950s that dictated when women could be in men’s dorms. I did some general research on the different eras in the book, as well as more specific research on key topics, like the Gemini IX space mission, which Nath watches as a child, or how you made a long-distance telephone call in the 1950s. How much research did you do in general for this novel? What was the most interesting tidbit that you uncovered in your research, but were not able to use? After that, it took me three more drafts, and almost five more years, to revise. Once I quit that job, though, I ended up completing the first draft in a few months of concentrated writing. The first draft took me a little over a year-during which time I also moved from Michigan back to Boston and took (and subsequently quit) a job at a tech startup that was supposed to be 10 hours per week but ballooned to 30+. How long did it take you to complete a first draft? How long did you spend revising? Jessamyn Ward called the characters “achingly human,” and she observed that Ng’s exquisite writing is “tender and merciless at the same time.” Dan Chaon called the novel “a suspenseful and emotionally complex literary mystery novel, which weaving back and forth in time, unlocks the secrets beneath the surface of family life.”Ĭeleste Ng talked to Dead Darlings about the novel, her process, the craft of writing, and about the importance of understanding cause and effect when creating fiction or using instinct to find the right tempo. A haunting, devastating portrait of a family in crisis, it is also a powerful meditation on identity, desire, and parental pressure as well as the weight of personal history. Set in the 1970s in small town Ohio, the novel opens with the death of Lydia Lee, the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee. In The New York Times, Alexander Chee writes, “If we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now.” Her debut novel Everything I Never Told You, which was published in June by Penguin Press, has received rave reviews from Kirkus, The New York Times and a starred review by Publishers Weekly. Currently, she lives in Cambridge with her husband and son, and she teaches fiction writing at GrubStreet. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals including One Story, TriQuarterly, and Bellevue Literary Review, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize as well. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received the Hopwood Award. Author Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio before attending Harvard University.
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