Song Exploder - Book Exploder: Celeste Ng - Little Fires Everywhere

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Celeste Ng is an American writer and author of three novels. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, was published in 2017 and became a #1 New York Times bestseller. A television adaptation of the novel, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington, premiered in 2020. Little Fires Everywhere is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and centers around two families—the mothers of these families especially. One family is upper-middle class with a “typical” suburban structure: a mom, a dad, and four kids; the other is a single mom, Mia, and her daughter, who are newcomers to the town. In her conversation with Susan, Celeste discusses a flashback to how a young Mia first became interested in photography as a medium. For more, visit bookexploder.com/episodes/celeste-ng.

You're listening to Book Exploder, where authors break down a passage from their work to show us how they write. I'm Rishi K. Shereway. And I'm Susan Orlean. Today, I'm speaking with Celeste Eng, author of Little Fires Everywhere. Little Fires Everywhere is Celeste Eng's second novel. It came out in 2017 and was named Amazon's Best Novel of the Year. It was a New York Times number one bestseller, and it was turned into a TV show starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. The story is set in Shaker Heights, which is a suburb of Cleveland, and it centers around two families, really the mothers of these families especially.

One family is sort of a quote-unquote typical suburban family, a mom, a dad, and four kids. And the other is a single mom, Mia, and her daughter, who are newcomers to the town. And so, Susan, the passage that you and Celeste talk about is kind of outside the main story. It's really more of a flashback into the backstory of one of the characters. Yes, this was really an interesting passage to talk about because it is about how one of the characters, Mia, who is an artist, how she developed her technique. And a lot of what I was curious about was how do you develop an idea of how one of your characters develops as an artist. It's sort of a nesting doll kind of problem. And it was really interesting to talk to Celeste about how she did that.

Here's Celeste Eng in conversation with Susan. My first question is, when did you write this section? I tried to write the book linearly, and the book is mostly in chronological order, with one exception, which is that there are these two giant chapters of backstory in the middle of the book. And I kind of held off writing those as long as I could until I got to the point where I needed to sort of explain to myself how these characters had gotten into this position and how Mia in particular had become this person because it's right at the point of the book where we're learning about some choices that she made that are maybe morally questionable, we'll say. And so I told myself,

well, I'm just going to write this for myself. Maybe it won't make it in the book. And I wrote these very long sections. And then I felt like they belonged in the book. And I thought, can you do that? Can you pause the book and just have about 80 pages of backstory? in the middle and then resume where you were before. And I don't know. So I tried to get away with it and I liked that idea. And I thought, well, let me see if I can try and do that. So I think of the backstory as being the hinge where we learn how she became a photographer,

how she discovered photography for the first time. And once you learn these things about Mia, hopefully you rejoin the main story with this new understanding of who she is and where she comes from and more of a picture of why she does the thing she's doing. Right, right. At the junk shop in town, she spotted an old brownie starflex sitting in the corner of the front window. The camera had lost its flash and neck strap, but the shop owner assured her it would work. And as soon as Mia flipped up the little silver hood and saw the junk shop reflected in blurry miniature in the lens, she wanted it immensely.

At what point and why did you decide she was going to be a photographer? Well, I knew that Mia was going to be a visual artist of some kind. And photography was the one that I kept coming back to, partly because it seems like it would be so objective to an outsider, right? We see a photograph. We assume that's what really happened. That was real, right? But if you've taken photographs, you know that actually you're constantly making choices about what's in the frame, what's not in the frame, how you're changing your perspective, what's in focus, what's not. And I liked the idea that, that Mia might play with this very consciously, and she might sort of take something

that people would assume to be a truth-telling thing and use it for her own purposes that seemed to me to fit really well with her character. With the camera dangling from two of her mother's old silk scarves knotted together, she began to take photos, odd photos to her parents' eyes, run down houses, rusted out cars, objects discarded on the side of the road.

Some people take photographs, and then other people take photographs, and then they do collage work or they manipulate them or they change them in some way. And that, to me, really seemed like something that she would love as a person who's interested in transforming herself. One of the interesting things was that you had to invent the art that she was inventing. The photographs were only a vague approximation of what she wanted to express, and she soon found herself not only altering the prints with everything from ballpoint pen to splashes of laundry detergent, but experimenting with the camera itself, bending its limited range to her desires.

So tell me a little bit about the research you did, and I'd love to hear about the choices to make her art the way it turns out in the book. Yeah, creating the art was really fun, a kind of fun that we don't always get to have in writing. You know, we think it's like there's this bolt of inspiration and then you sit down and you start typing. And a lot of it for me is sort of more nuts and bolts figure. out how am I going to get this character from one place to another? How is the plot going to move forward? And creating the art was really fun. So I would read books about the history of photography. And then I started to look at what artists today were doing to sort of manipulate images and found that there are artists doing all kinds of interesting things, slicing images into thin ribbons

and kind of bending those so that you get a weird 3D effect, changing the negatives and making prints on different surfaces. and then I started thinking about what are all the techniques that Mia could use? What would her art be? What is she really interested in as an artist? And what I came up with were images of metamorphosis, of change and especially of transformation,

of one thing being juxtaposed with or being transformed into another. And I got that little sort of mental writer click that's almost, I don't know if this happens to you. It's sort of subconscious. And then you have to kind of go back and do some therapy on yourself and your writing and figure out, okay, why does that seem so right to me? Why does that feel like the right thing? And I realized, of course, this makes total

sense because this is a woman who, without giving any big spoilers of the book, has kind of reinvented herself. There's been a past part of her life, and it's very different from where she is now, and she's very consciously made a break in her life. And I think she's really interested in that idea of whether you can change yourself. Is that possible? So even in the passage, she's got these three photographs of a bird's corpse on the sidewalk. This particular image came because I have a horror slash morbid fascination with animals that you find dead in the suburbs because it happens so often and we don't really look at them.

And it's something that I feel like as a human I shouldn't just turn away from. I should actually kind of look at it and sort of appreciate that there are these animals that have to share a space. But I imagined her as a little girl being interested in this idea of how is this thing going to change? Funny thing to be taking a picture of, the clerk at the photomat remarked as he handed over an envelope of prints. That set had contained three images taken over successive days of a bird's corpse on the sidewalk, and he wondered briefly, not for the first time, if the right girl was a little touched in the head. We'll be right back with more after this. Was this particular passage easy to write, challenging to write?

It came really easily, but I did all of these. things in the service of trying to write this passage. I actually got this camera. I ordered it off of eBay. We had old pictures and family albums from Brownie cameras, and I know my sister had one, and that camera is gone. So I went looking for an old one because it felt really important to have that physical object and actually play with it. And so once it had arrived, I was playing with it, and I don't think I'd ever had one in my hands before. And the one I got has indeed lost its flash and it has lost its next strap, so I had to improvise something, which is where that detail came from, with the camera dangling from two of her mother's old silk scarves knotted

together. And one of the things that surprised me was I didn't know how to use the camera. It has this little lid that folds up and there's what looks like a big magnifying glass on the top and I couldn't see anything. And so then I was like going to the internet. It didn't come with an instruction manual because it's so old. And I'm Googling how do I use this. And I discovered that because it didn't have its neck strap, that's why I didn't know how to use it. The neck strap actually holds it against your belly, and that holds the lens at the right place. So if you're looking through it up close to your eye, you can't see anything. So it was this interesting process of me physically in my house trying to figure out how to use this camera, maybe the same way that

Mia would have. And I tried taking pictures with it. And it was a lot harder than I thought it was going to be because you couldn't do anything with it. You can't focus. You can't fix anything, right? kind of you have to kind of set everything up and hope that what you're seeing is what you're going to get. And then you have to, of course, send the photos to be developed. And then after a while they come back and you see whether what you captured matched what you saw, what was in your mind. I think there's a nice parallel to the writing process there too, that you see this sort of beautiful vision or whatever it is. And I feel, at least when I'm writing it down, that I'm basically just kind of hacking this poor thing to bits. And what I end up with is this is a very

loose approximation of what it was that I wanted to get. And tell me a little bit about physically what happens with your writing. Do you write longhand? Do you outline? Do you just sit down at a computer and brainstorm? I always write at the laptop because I can type a lot faster than I can handwrite. And I find that if I'm handwriting, I lose things. Like, I just can't keep up with my brain, and that's frustrating to me. So if I'm really in the flow of things, I'll sit down at the computer. I usually start off by rereading what I did the day before, just to kind of get myself in the flow or to horrify myself and say,

oh, God, I have to fix that. And then I'll start typing. And I have a suspicion that I'm constantly sort of writing and then retracing and writing and retracing. It's like I'm doing the back stitch. We had to do that a long time ago in like sewing class in middle school. Well, you go forward a little bit and then you go back. over what you did and then you go forward again and back over what you did. I think that's how it is. But, you know, when you're writing, you don't always notice how much you're erasing and how much

you're changing and how much you're jumping around. Yeah. I think the word manipulation is a very important word through the book and you mention it here. With only 12 exposures on a roll, she learned to be careful in composing her shots. And with no controls, no aperture control, no focus. She learned to be creative in the way she manipulated her camera and her scene. To me, that word has a thematic resonance. Yeah, I think you're right that it is that aspect of photography that we were getting at before, that we think of it as being this very honest or very objective. We think about photojournalism where we're like, oh, well, that's what happened.

Here's the proof. And Mia immediately from the beginning, I think, is interesting. and how she can kind of fake you out a little bit, about how she can make things look different than they actually did. She does it in her photography, obviously, in stretching the image, changing it. There's one where it's sort of a multiple exposure where she makes a woman look like she's a spider

by changing the image and having multiple exposures of her arms. But she also does sort of manipulate people as well. So it is this sort of theme that I think that manipulative, also does require a certain creativity. It requires you to be able to visualize where you're going and then visualize a more circuitous path to get people to do what it is that you want them to do. Yeah.

I mean, when I write, I often have a few words that become this sort of undercurrent through the whole book. And to me, manipulation was very much that word that was a bit of a drumbeat through the book. Yeah. Negatively and positively. It's about transformation. Manipulation is transformation.

And it's interesting, I'm assuming the roots are having to do with your hand. Yeah. It has something to do with the idea of having your hand on it. It is also a question of power. And sort of that question is sort of like, who's, you know, steering this situation the way that it's going to go. And that is, for me, one of the things that I would. was consciously trying to explore in this book is that sort of question of power. Interestingly, you could say that that's also the novelist's own experience with the book,

which is you have your hand in it. You're controlling the fates of these imaginary characters. So there's a kind of wonderful sort of meta quality to it that elevates the book in an interesting way, since I think so many books are in some way about the act of creation? I think so. I remember in grad school sort of having my mind blown by a writer saying, you know, in some ways there's a level of meta-fiction in every piece of fiction to a certain extent because every work of fiction in some way is about the act of telling as well as what it's telling about. As the writer, you are kind of very carefully presenting all the information about these characters and this story to your reader.

And you can kind of feel in some ways what the writer's agenda is. An agenda has such a negative connotation, and again, suggesting that it's manipulating you or that they're trying to get you to do something. But it's true. When you're telling the story, there is something that you want, whether it's just to tell the story chronologically, whether it's to tell it quickly, whether it's to build suspense, whatever it is. You can tell if the writer is sort of in control of the story that they're telling

and that they are very deliberately telling it to you. And it's one of the reasons that I wanted to use an omniscient voice in this book to give you the sense that there was somebody who was very consciously shaping this picture for you, shaping this story and doling out these pieces of information in the order that they felt you needed them. To me, it was a really wonderful meshing of the act of storytelling with the story. What I think I was thinking about when I wrote this was about the sort of creation of art, which is always going to be subjective.

You might read around what we're showing you, but we are presenting a particular thing. We're composing a scene as much as this photograph. And now here's Celeste Ng reading this passage from Little Fires Everywhere. At the junk shop in town, she spotted an old brownie starflex sitting in the corner of the front window. The camera had lost its flash and neck strap, but the shop owner assured her it would work.

And as soon as Mia flipped up the little silver, hood and saw the junk shop reflected in blurry miniature in the lens, she wanted it immensely. She dipped into the cat-shaped bank where she saved her allowance and began to carry the camera everywhere. She ignored the manual's suggestion that she write the Kodak Company for its helpful book How to Make Good Pictures and went by instinct alone. With the camera dangling from two of her mother's old silk scarves knotted together, she began to take photos, odd photos to her parents' eyes, run down houses, rusted out cars, objects discarded on the side of the road. Funny thing to be taking a picture of, the clerk at the photomat remarked as he handed over an envelope of prints.

That set had contained three images taken over successive days of a bird's corpse on the sidewalk, and he wondered briefly, not for the first time, if the right girl was a little touched in the head. For Mia, however, the photographs were only a vague approximation of what she wanted to express, and she soon found herself not only altering the prints with everything from ballpoint pen to splashes of laundry detergent, but experimenting with the camera itself, bending its limited range to her desires. The Starflex, like all brownies, allowed no focusing.

The shuttle cocked automatically to avoid double exposures, which the manual billed as a convenience for the amateur. All you had to do was all that you could do. Peek into the viewfinder and press the shutter. Instead of holding the camera level against her chest, per the instructions, Mia tipped it at different angles, nodded her makeshift straps higher or lower. She draped silk scarves and wax paper over the lens. She tried shooting in fog, in heavy rain, in the smoke-filled lounge of the bowling alley.

Waste of money, her mother sniffed, when Mia brought home yet another envelope of blurred and grainy photos. With each role of film, however, she began to understand more and more how a photograph was put together. what it could do and what it could not, just how far you could stretch and twist it. Though she did not know it at the time, all of this was training her to be the photographer she would become. With only 12 exposures on a role, she learned to be careful in composing her shots. And with no controls, no aperture control, no focus, she learned to be creative in the way she manipulated her camera and her scene. Little Fires Everywhere is available in hardcover, paperback, and audiobook. It was adapted into a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit. It was adapted into

a limited television series which you can watch on Hulu. You can visit us at bookexploder.com for more information. This episode was produced by Theo Balcom, Julia Botero, Susan, and myself. Our production assistant is Mary Dolan. Raina Takahashi created the Book Exploder logo. Our episode artwork is by Paula Jackson, and I made the show's theme music. Book Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. A network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts.

Find out more at Radiotopia.fm. I'm Rishi K. Sherway. And I'm Susan Orlean. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.