New Orleans Review
So this is your debut – congratulations! How did you feel when you realized it was coming to fruition, when it started to feel real to you?
CHAN
Thank you so much. It’s been more surreal than real overall, partly because my publication date was the first week of January at a time when we were all trapped at home and everything felt like lockdown was imminent and things were very touch and go. So my pub date happened but it didn’t feel tangible. I mean, I got to see my book in local stories but it didn’t really sink in for a couple weeks because I was only seeing my husband and daughter and parents. The isolation made this feel like, “Did this really happen? I think it really happened. It’s on the internet, so clearly it’s real.”
NOR
“People on Twitter are talking about it, so it must be happening.”
CHAN
The degree to which the experience of a launch happening during a pandemic is happening online is really surreal. [There’s] a flurry of activity on Twitter and Instagram but in your daily life you only see two people. It’s been an incredibly charmed experience and I’m really lucky. Even four months later…it’s still sinking in.
NOR
Have you seen any reader reactions to your book since it’s been out and people have had a chance to respond to it? Has anybody spoken to you [in a way] that made you go, “Yes! That is exactly what I was trying to communicate!”
CHAN
I’ve received a lot of great messages and the occasional note that comes in through my publicist, but seeing some of the reviews and some of the amazing think pieces that people have written about it, it’s beyond my wildest dreams. Some of the essays that have been generated about my book, talking about it in relation to The Lost Daughter and in relation to other novels, have been amazing. One thing you can never really count on as a debut author that is really exciting is being part of a larger cultural conversation. So that part’s been thrilling. It’s been really cool to meet some readers. I can only hope there’ll be more human contact as the months go on.
NOR
I’ve read some [of your] interviews where you talked about a specific article that was inspiring to you as you were writing, and real-life events that inspired parts of your book. What was especially moving to you as an influence?
CHAN
There were probably two threads of inspiration. The emotional thread of the book was me freaking out about whether or not to have a baby. I was heading into my late thirties, and it was time biological-clock wise to make a decision about having a baby, but I didn’t feel ready and I felt this crushing pressure. The other thread was The New Yorker article I’d read a few months earlier. It provided a kernel that I didn’t necessarily think was going to spark any fiction, because I’d read it several months beforehand and I didn’t take any notes or think about it all the time; it just lodged in my subconscious because I read that piece and I felt so angry on the mother’s behalf. The article is about a mom who leaves her son at home and then after that day never gets him back. I felt like it was such an injustice that she didn’t get her son back. She has a nightmarish experience with the family court system, and it feels like they’re judging her based on this ever-changing set of standards. It felt like they were holding this woman, who was an immigrant and not a native English speaker, to this really American set of parenting ideals – ideals that a lot of parents wouldn’t pass. So I had a really good writing day in early 2014, and I think that’s when both threads of inspiration came together. All the ruminating I was doing on motherhood and then the spark from The New Yorker story.
One of the terrifying things I started reading about because of the article is that there are parenting instruction classes. They’re government mandated and they do exist. I was also struggling with how much individual power social workers and court judges have to change a family’s life forever. And I was troubled by how subjective the system seemed to be and how biased it seemed to be because of racism and class. So those were things I ended up reading more about. My book is taking those things to the extreme for the purpose of satire.
NOR
Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you become a mother during the process of writing?
CHAN
Yes! I’m sure my daughter’s going to have things to say about this. She was born in early 2017. I started the book in 2014, so a couple years after I started the project I had her, and then I barely wrote during her first year. After I got back into it, I had to pretty much rewrite everything because a lot of things I’d depicted in the book were just off. I didn’t understand how much toddlers talk, I didn’t understand their size, I didn’t understand how much they weigh. And I think Frida and Harriet’s relationship got a lot richer when I went back to rewrite with the actual experience of motherhood in mind.
NOR
That was going to be my next question – whether your intentions behind the book changed after becoming a mother. Do you think your emotional relationship to your story shifted?
CHAN
I think the project was always a lifeline for me in terms of processing a really confusing and overwhelming experience. Becoming a parent is a really wild thing to do. It’s so different than you expect it to be and it’s so hard. I mean, I’ve had a lot of privilege and a lot of help and it’s still hard! Once I became a parent, the book was also a place to put all my confused and anxious and stressed-out feelings, so I think I was a little bit gentler to myself. I judged myself a little bit less because I was working on this project about our world judging moms so harshly and moms judging each other so harshly. So when people said things to me that really bothered me or I was annoyed at a doctor or something, I funneled it away and wrote it into the book. And so it gave me a home for all the more difficult feelings.
NOR
Where do you think you show up the most in this story? Where do you personally manifest?
CHAN
That’s a really good question. It’s probably true that I show up everywhere. I’m sure there’s parts of me even in Susanna and Gust or the other moms. Certainly it’s all coming from one brain so there’s probably bits of me in all of the characters but I did draw a lot on my own childhood to depict Frida’s childhood. So growing up in a mostly white community and what that was like, and the sort of tormented feelings that I had growing up as a little Chinese girl feeling out of place. That was stolen from my life.
NOR
When I was reading this book, there was not a moment where I wasn’t uncomfortable, which felt very intentional. And the more I read about people’s responses to it, they seemed to be connecting that to the idea of this book as dystopian. You’ve had a lot of comparisons to other books. To me it kind of felt like Never Let Me Go, if you’ve read it, which is an odd near-dystopian book. Do you think of your book as dystopian? How do you feel it fits into the hallmarks of dystopian literature?
CHAN
I am so glad you brought up Never Let Me Go because that was such a big inspiration for me. Part of the big inspiration was this really unsettling mood, and the fact that the book is really elegant and beautiful but also quite sinister and sad. I was really hoping to achieve even a little bit of that magic in my own book. But I don’t think my book fits properly into dystopian fiction, speculative fiction, or sci-fi. It doesn’t fit neatly into a category, but it uses elements from those genres. To me it’s hilarious that the Library of Congress categorized this book as sci-fi, because I barely know how to use a computer. I just got a new iPhone last week, and I had to have someone transfer all the data for me, and erase the [old] phone for me, and I was completely freaked out by it, when they could not have made it simpler. I still found it too much to handle. I find Google Docs quite stressful. I find Twitter quite stressful. I like thinking and writing about technology, but using it in my life? I barely know how to use the internet.
NOR
That’s so interesting, when so much technology pops up in your writing.
CHAN
I think I have a tortured relationship with it, because I feel bad every second I’m online. I know I have to post stuff. Email is one thing because it’s been part of my life for a long time, but time spent scrolling and posting pictures, it’s broken my brain in a lot of ways. I need to start writing fiction again soon, and I need to repair my broken brain and my broken attention span from these months when as we were launching the book, I had to be way more online than I had been before, and I had to keep up with stuff. I have generally never done that; I post on my Instagram account maybe four times a year! So this is a different experience of the internet and everything’s really fast and I don’t know how to get my concentration back. I’m really struggling with that at the moment.
NOR
You also have a very strong sense of humor in your writing.
CHAN
Thank you for that; I’m glad you enjoyed the humor. The marketing for the book is definitely not humor forward. The humor is more of a surprise to readers than anything else because it’s not leading with that, but I’m so glad it resonated with you.
NOR
Was it something you did intentionally, or does it come naturally through you?
CHAN
If you can imagine this, the book we sold was even more sad and even more violent and dark than the one we published. So we added in more humor and warmth. Certainly the version I signed with my agent was way darker. More people died! It was very grim. My agent Meredith, who is a genius, worked with me on edits to add more lightness and balance. We also wanted to develop the relationships between the moms so that they weren’t so punishing. I’m so glad you found it funny. Humor is one of those things that is riskier than anything else in fiction because it’s so subjective. You’re just alone, trying to make yourself feel amused for years. The humor I think is necessary in this book because parenting is just full of mishaps. I think the kind of social satire I was writing required a degree of absurdity. Mostly I was trying to make absurd our culture, which has so many instructions for parents about anything. A lot of the wilder ideas do have their roots in real life.
NOR
Can you share any of the extra-dark stuff that got cut out?
CHAN
(Spoiler alert.) There were more suicides in the original manuscript and I think there was a very dramatic fire that got cut. My editor said, “I don’t think you need that.” It’s helpful to learn restraint, because my inclination is to make it darker and darker and have people suffer more and more. My stomach for that in fiction, my pain threshold, is pretty high, so I’m now starting to learn that it’s okay to have a scene of gentleness and connection with the ones with lots of tears.
NOR
I always wish that with books – you know how movies do deleted scenes? – you could see deleted chapters.
CHAN
My deleted chapters are probably [in the] hundreds or thousands, many plastic storage bins full of stuff that’s been cut. They’re all in my parent’s basement. One day I’ll have to recycle them, but I’m not ready yet. The funny thing about my old drafts is that it probably took two or three years before they were even legible to other people. I know there are people who write their first drafts in chapters and just revise in an orderly way, but I write in a really messy, blobby, chaotic way and then I have to take a long time rewriting and cleaning it up. It’s not a very efficient process. I also write longhand, so that makes everything much slower.
NOR
You write longhand?
CHAN
I think I [do that] because I started writing in college and I started drafting in a notebook first. I’m always trying to get back to that really pure place, when I had the first love of writing fiction. It’s a continual search to get back to that innocent place.
NOR
You started the journey for this in 2014, and we’re in 2022 now, with this astronomical number of laws restricting reproductive rights. Do you think people reading your book now will be reading it through that lens?
CHAN
My book coming out in 2022, at a time when Roe v. Wade is probably going to be overturned, with state abortion bans getting increasingly crazy, and all these new regulations on families like what’s happening in Texas where the governor is trying to punish families with transgender children and police parenting in this way that has nothing to do with the welfare of children and everything to do with who’s in power, I think that has made my book feel more realistic than I intended. I knew the book would be timely, [but] I didn’t think it would be this timely. In 2014, it was hard to imagine a world where so many things would be going wrong at the same time. 2014 had a lot of problems but it wasn’t quite this dark. When I got pregnant with a daughter, I never imagined she would be growing up in a world without Roe v. Wade. Or that we would have to think about which state we live in so that she will have a full range of choices as a person in control of her own body. The threat to Roe v. Wade never felt this real to me until I became a parent. It’s required some homework on my part because I hadn’t expected to be talking about the history of abortion in America during book promo, but it has turned out to be a regular topic. My book isn’t strictly about abortion rights, but it’s part of this larger umbrella about women’s rights and government treatment of women. One book I’d recommend that is about abortion rights is Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh. Her book tackles the abortion debate in America in a human and surprising way.
Authors don’t have a lot of control over their book after it comes out. My agent told me, “You wrote the book of your heart and you don’t have any control over the rest of the process.” So yeah, I wrote the book of my heart, it’s really dark and really weird and it means something different now even from the time we sold it. The world has changed so much in just a couple of years. Aside from what’s happening with women’s rights and how Child Protective Services has been weaponized by certain Republican lawmakers, parents have been home with their children and under pressure in a really specific way because of the pandemic. It was always hard to be a parent, but the crushing pressure of parents has been talked about a lot more. So that’s part of the conversation too.
NOR
Do you think you’d want to keep writing about the same topic going forward? Or do you think you might want to move in a different direction?
CHAN
I am flattered by anyone who might ask about a sequel. It’s incredible that anyone thinks I’m capable of that. I definitely think there’s more stories to tell from this world, but I might need a pause to try and do something else. It was a hard book to work on, emotionally. It was necessary for that point in my life; I am interested though in stretching artistically, maybe writing some short stories. I mean, I haven’t written anything but this book since 2014. Every ounce of life energy went into this novel. So I’m curious to see where my imagination will go next once I make my brain function again.
NOR
How about the TV show that’s coming out? Is that an exciting project to work on in the interim?
CHAN
There are several big steps that have to happen before it becomes actualized. I’ve signed on as an executive producer; it’s been really exciting to watch and learn how the story gets translated to a totally different thing. Screenwriting is its own art form. What our screenwriter is doing is so beyond my skill set. It’s fascinating to see. If I am able to generate more tendrils of ideas, I might give them to her and see how that goes. I am interested in writing more about motherhood, I am interested in writing about technology. I’ve been asked in some interviews if I’m planning to write realist fiction, if I’m planning to write dystopian fiction, and I honestly don’t know. I wish I were the kind of person who had several novels planned out ahead of time, but my brain doesn’t work that way.
NOR
You said previously that this book started with a “good writing day.” How do those, and the rest of the writing process, happen for you?
CHAN
I wish I were a writer who sat down and wrote every day and had diligent practice. I have generally never been a write-every-single-day person. I aspire to be but I think a lot of times if you stick by that rule, [you] will constantly feel a sense of failure. What I do, and I tend to advise people of this, is whatever works. Take three months off; you’re still a writer. If you write every single day, that’s great. I definitely went through really intense periods of work, but when I sit down to write I’m honestly scribbling and a lot of it is nonsense that gets thrown away. Sometimes I will write for three hours and come across one phrase that will lead to another set of thoughts. It’s very unplanned. I’m operating more on instinct than on anything else. I’m trying not to listen to all the anxious voices in my head.
NOR
What would you tell someone about to read this book for the first time?
CHAN
I’m just thankful to anyone reading it. I’ve been warning people it is not the most relaxing read, but I hope that it’s worthwhile. I don’t think it’s the perfect beach read. When people have been posting, they’re reading it next to the pool. I’m like, “Good luck guys!” I do hope people feel seen by the book in whatever way they engage with the story. I hope they end up reflecting on the way our world treats women and mothers and the injustices that a lot of families face. It’s been really rewarding to have my book enter this larger conversation. It’s something I don’t spend too much of my daily life thinking about, because I’m still over here trying to get my daughter out the door in the morning and doing laundry, so a lot of aspects of my daily life are still enmeshed in parenting a young child, but it’s been really exciting having the book no longer be mine. When I sit and think about the number of people who’ve been reading it, it’s kind of mind boggling.
NOR
So while your book is being made into a television series, do you watch television yourself?
CHAN
All I do is watch TV. I have a small child and we can’t really go anywhere in the evening, so all we do is watch TV. I’ve been trying to mention Yellowjackets in every interview, even though it has nothing to do with my book, just because I’m obsessed with it. It’s partly nostalgic because I’m the same age as the older characters, so all the music in the flashback scenes is familiar, and the way they dress as high school seniors. I think that show is so crazy and so smart. The storyline is so out there. I think it’s so well done and the casting is perfect. When I started this project, the other show that I was binge-watching was Top of the Lake, the Jane Campion TV series with Elizabeth Moss. That’s a really dark show and I ended up watching six or seven episodes in one sitting, which put me in a really dark headspace.
NOR
Like the perfect one to write your book.
CHAN
Yeah, it’s well done but it put me in this dark brain-space and made me more ready to take risks. I’m excited for Made for Love Season Two, based on the book by Alissa Nutting. Season One was so good and I’m excited to see what they do with the second one. But it’s impossible to keep up with everything. I’m obsessed with the show Succession too. Season Four cannot come soon enough. We also inadvertently watch a lot of children’s television. My daughter got into the My Little Pony show on Netflix, which is so weird. I’m trying to She-Ra, but that isn’t going anywhere. We’re trying to not have her engage with Barbie Princess stuff much because it’s so limiting in terms of gender conformity, but it’s hard to resist princess culture, it’s everywhere.
NOR
I was proudly raised in the Barbie Princess tradition, and although I loved them, I can see why that would be a smart move on your part.
CHAN
You can’t escape it! All her friends play with Barbies. Our Barbie blinders have all broken down now. She’s big into unicorns right now but she’s still big into princesses and big into pink stuff. My husband is dismayed but it’s hard to outrun the culture.
NOR
Do you have any book recommendations right now? I know you’ve answered this question before, but in case it’s changed…
CHAN
Thank god it’s changed because that means I’ve actually been reading. I recently went through this story collection, The Dangers of Smoking In Bed by Mariana Enriquez which I think is out in paperback. I’ve been recommending a book called Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones; it’s Chloé’s first memoir and it’s the best memoir you’ll ever read. Another book is Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson. It has trauma in it, but it’s really, really funny. Another one other people should look out for is The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings, which has witches and government surveillance, so it’s really my kind of thing.
NOR
Do you have a top three books of all time? Or top three authors?
CHAN
I probably have a top fifteen list of books, which is too long to list here. I really love Marguerite Duras, I really love Anne Carson, and I’m obsessed with the Scandinavian author Dorthe Nors and her book Karate Chop. There are lots of authors I love but I tend to read mostly female authors, that’s just where my taste goes. There’s a really good short story collection coming out in June called Rainbow Rainbow by Lydia Conklin. That’s going to be one of the best story collections of the year. It’s so good.
NOR
Thank you for your recommendations; everything you’ve described sounds incredible.
CHAN
Of course! Honestly, one of the most fun parts, besides meeting readers, is being able to recommend books and have anyone care. Until a couple months ago nobody was asking me for book recommendations and I love recommending books.
NOR
I saw you recommend Diane Cook’s Man v Nature and knew we had to get more.
CHAN
Isn’t it so good? We were in grad school together, Diane and Lindsay and me. Diane’s book The New Wilderness came out in 2020 and it’s excellent. The thing about it is that they published years before me. Everyone in grad school develops at their own pace. I was a creative writing major in undergrad, and I graduated college a very long time ago. So this [book] is a culmination of a life’s worth of work. I would have loved to publish my first book at twenty-eight, but that’s not how my life went. Maybe the most important thing is to keep going, because there’s no timeline for a creative life or artistic pursuits. It unfortunately doesn’t conform to the timeline you want.
NOR
I know you said you were unsure what you would do next, but is there anything overarching that’s an objective of yours? Something you know you want to explore or have within your career at some point?
CHAN
I definitely want to write more books; each just might take a long time. I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m not prolific; I’m never going to be the person who publishes a book every two years. Some of my friends actually do that; I just don’t work that quickly. I’d love to publish more short stories, but each book might take a couple of years. And I need to tell myself that’s okay. The hard thing is that if you have a first book and it’s well received that sets the bar for what the next book is going to be, so my project is to pretend that doesn’t exist, and go back to a more childlike sense of making art for its own sake, and to pretend nobody is expecting a certain thing. I need to trick myself into doing whatever I want.
NOR
Do you have any advice for young writers, or people who are becoming writers?
CHAN
My general advice is to stick with it. It is not a linear path or necessarily that quick. The other thing I would recommend is to stay off the internet as much as possible. Social media makes the comparing yourself to other writers thing much more intense. Certainly when I was in between grad school and my book, I would see everyone’s book deal announcements on Facebook and it was a little hard to deal with because I was still many years away from my first book and I felt the urgency of when it was going to be me. You just have to keep working. The hard thing with fiction is you have to write the entire book before selling it or meeting with an agent. I don’t know that I have super concrete advice besides urging people to write because it’s the thing you have to do and the thing you want to do most in the world. I could not have predicted the reception to my book, because it’s very strange. It certainly has marketable elements, but it’s a pretty weird, pretty dark book. The fact that it’s done well commercially will, I hope, open doors for other Asian writers and other writers of color to also write weird books. But the thing I wish I had known when I was in my early twenties is that it’s okay if it takes time. You don’t need to hit milestones at the same time as your friends. I’m forty-three now so not to give you a heart attack, but there’s so much pressure to have things done at a certain time. In my case, my twenties were a big mess in my personal life, and I got very little writing done because of that. I can’t get that time back. It makes my writing richer because I suffered greatly but at the time when a lot of my friends were going to grad school and publishing a lot, I was busy having my messy personal life. So my trajectory as a writer was much slower. I talk about my age a lot in interviews because there’s a narrative out there that you have to achieve everything you’re going to achieve as an artist by twenty-eight or thirty, and that pressure can be stifling for artists.
NOR
When you’re writing, is it a personal goal to be an inspiration for future Asian or POC writers?
CHAN
I don’t think I go into my writing with much of a political agenda, but I have gotten more comfortable writing Asian-American characters. I think I had trouble writing them as a college student because it took a really long time to unlearn the white gaze and unlearn the messages that writing those characters was going to limit the audience for my book. This was twenty-five years ago, when Asian-American literature was a much smaller group of books. So I do hope that I am adding to that exciting category.
NOR
Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview, and for being so open and vulnerable with your answers. I hope that now your book is out, you get to sit in that joy a little bit.
CHAN
I’ve been trying to do that more. Because the world is kind of tough right now, it’s sort of hard to hold on to the joy. I’ve had to remind myself regularly that I am proud of this. There’s an improbable number of things going wrong on any given day. I tend to think [about] that more than the success of the book, but I’m trying to remember that I did the thing I always wanted to do, and to remember to enjoy it.
Charlie Coulter is a writer living in New Orleans, a student for now, and a friend forever. Afflicted by a bad case of coffee stomach from which she will never recover, she channels this energy into short stories and essays for the most part. She loves cult classic movies, independently owned local bookstores, and being published in the New Orleans Review.
+++This interview was edited for length and clarity
