What do you do in life doesn't go according to plan? That moment you lose a job, or a loved one, or even a piece of yourself. I'm Brookshields and this is now What, a podcast about pivotal moments as told by people who lived them. Each week, I sit down with a guest to talk about the times they were knocked off course and what they did to move forward.
Some stories are funny, others are gut wrench but all are unapologetically human and remind us that every success and every setback is accompanied by a choice, and that choice answers one question. Now, what anybody ever said anything that you didn't think of and you think, oh, that's that's not a bad idea, or oh all the time? And I love it, especially students I think they read the book. They'll say to me, you know, you have a lot of eggs in your first novel, and eggs are often
a sign and religion about rebirth. Did you intend that to be a rebirth? And I'm like, you know, I should say I absolutely meant that, but the truth is, I'm like, I really love that interpretation and I didn't do it consciously, but I love that you saw that and I might kind of steal that from you. And I like eggs. I like eggs. That's why they were in there. You know, I had a character who ate hard boiled eggs, and it's because I like hard boiled eggs.
But you know, when they see that meeting, I'm like, there could be something to that, And I love that idea. For me, that means that I did my job, that the work can kind of stand on its own and have meaning on its own, even if it wasn't something that I consciously meant. That voice you just heard is New York Times best selling authors celesting I asked Celeste to join this show because I loved her new book,
Our Missing Hearts. I loved it so much so that I wanted to learn everything I possibly could about the woman who wrote it. Now it sounds corny, but the entire time I was reading the book, I actually felt like I had a companion. Celeste is that talented of a writer. In addition to Our Missing Hearts, she also wrote the novels Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere, the letter of which was made into a mini series starring Carrie Washington and Reese Witherspoon. I loved
catching up with Celeste. I loved learning about her process and hearing about the now What moments that most inspired her writing. Welcome Celeste ng to Now What. This is my podcast and I can't think of a better person to to talk to. I'm I'm a huge fan well likewise, so I'm so thrilled to get to talk with you. I have to start off by saying I loved your latest book, Are Missing Hearts. It was so powerful and so heart wrenching and beautiful. How would you describe the
real idea of the book just for our listeners? I mean, I think of it as a book is really fundamentally about a mother and a son. A son who is looking for a mother who's left the family some years before, and he doesn't really understand where she's gone, why she's left him. He resents, you know, for obvious reasons that she hasn't been there, and he goes looking for her. And when he finds her through a lot of help, I think he starts to understand her and her life
and their whole relationship in a different way. And that voyage from innocence to experience, you know how, and when a child experiences that, you start writing it in two thousand sixteen. It changes you then decide you don't know how you want it to end. Talk me through a little bit about that sort of process of kind of coming into understanding where you wanted the story to go. Yeah, I had an idea of where this story was going to go, but I didn't know how to get it there.
It felt like something new to me because I realized I wasn't writing a story that was strictly realistic. My first two novels take place in the real world, in our world, and I knew that this book was going to exist in the world that wasn't exactly like our world. It wasn't you know, there aren't flying cars and robots, but it was our world with sort of the volume dialed up a little bit. All of the sort of dangers and things that feel present in our world are
very present in this world. There's a lot of nationalism, there's a lot of racism um, and there's a lot of hatred. And so when I started working on the book, I didn't know how to put it together. I didn't know if it was a place that I wanted to go, and I didn't know how to do that. And it wasn't until the pandemic hit and I think we were
living in our real lives in this atmosphere fear. I'm thinking back about how we were washing our groceries right, and we were like wiping down the mail because we just didn't know. It felt like there were threats everywhere. I started to kind of viserally understand what it might be like for these characters in this world that's also full of fear and where there's a almost invisible assassin.
Can you explain what Packed is a metaphor for? Yeah, Packed in the novel is a law or series of laws that's been passed and the country has gone through a hard time in the book, and to kind of restore order, they've passed these new laws and it stands for protecting American culture and traditions, and it kind of requires everyone to sort of behave patriotically and it allows people who are acting un American heavily in quotes to
be punished. And one of the things that entails is often the children of people who are seen as acting Unamerican are taken away. And this is often being applied in the book to people of Chinese American descent and Asian descent generally and in particular to anyone who dares
to speak up on their behalf. And so for me, it was kind of an outward manifestation of a feeling that is present today in America, the sense that people who are East Asian who don't look like they're from here, are somehow not American, that they belong somewhere else, and that their loyalties lie somewhere else. It's something that I've experienced in my own life, people assuming that about me.
And you talk about the idea of growing up and having this feeling of being visibly different from others, Can you explain how that affected you. Yeah, I'm realizing more and more how it really has shaped a lot of my experience and personality. I'm the child of immigrants from Hong Kong, so my parents are Chinese American, and I was born in the other. I'm from Ohio, but I grew up in places where there weren't very many Asian Americans, so there really were very few people who look like me,
and I realized that I stood out. I was lucky that I think I had a really happy childhood and most people were very accepting but I was very aware that nobody else looked like me. And every now and then, out of the blue, I'd have an experience where somebody would say the thing that I think most most people of color and particularly Asians know where. They say, where are you from? And I'd say, I'm you know, I'm from Cleveland, and they say, know where you really from?
And there's that sense immediately that they've decided that you're not from here, you don't belong here, and you need to explain and justify why you're here. And that was the feeling that I grew up with, and that's part of the feeling I tried to bring into the book, that sense that at any moment you might be seen as a foreigner, even if you've been here for your whole life. Any moment you might be asked for your papers exactly, and and that's a reality for many people
in the world. It's so interesting as a white young woman, or I'd like to think of myself as a young woman who grew up I can't say I wasn't privileged. I was. I was lucky, but you know, to have that be such a part, it's almost like having an entirely other existence, how unbalanced that is. Did your parents help you? How did your parents deal with that? Yeah, I recognize now how jarring and experience that must have been for them in particular, and to try to help
children my sister and may navigate through this. I think they were even more aware of it than we were. And I think they were in particular aware of the ways that there might be danger, because I think that's one of the first things you think as a parent is is my child going to be safe? And so
they would talk to us about it. They would remind us mostly that if we were misbehaving, for example, other people might assume that this is just how all Chinese people behave right And likewise, if we did something good, they'd say, oh great, you know now we're we're kind of setting a good example. So I think they were very aware of it, not by choice but just sort of advertecessity. They knew that we would be judged no matter what we were doing, and you couldn't own doing
something good. I think it was both. I mean, if we did something good, then in a way it was like showing people that, you know, Chinese people could do this too. Write Like if I got an a writing my English essay. You know, it was like, see, we can also do this, you know, but there was always this sense of being judged from the outside, and I, you know, I just think about how they had to live their lives that way. I cannot even begin to say that I can um, I can understand or I
can empathize. Though when I went to university it was as if in order for me to do well, I had to absolutely jump through hoops and do every extra credit, every extra thing, because teachers did not want it to appear that they were giving me special treatment. Yeah, I think that is a similar experience. There is a kinship in those experiences because it's what people think of you because of things on your outside, right, because they know your name, or because they see your face or whatever.
It is, versus how you know yourself to be right. And I think, you know, it is that same kind of gap of people assuming something about you from the outside and then you trying to bridge that gap from where you are on the inside. And I think there's that shapes a person, right, But you add to a culturally and historically I mean that you that is I again, I'm not putting myself in that same type of an experience.
But I can appreciate that. Now you said your parents taught you you have a son, correct, yes, right, do you have similar conversations with him? I try to talk about it with him a little bit more openly, and that not to criticize my parents and all, but just because I think that we're living in an era where it's more okay to talk about these things, and I live in a place where there's more diversity in these
conversations come up more naturally. But I try to both let him know that who he is is great, and that he has multiple parts of his identity that are okay for him to hold on to. He can be both Chinese American and American American whatever that means, right, He can hold on to different aspects of his heritage.
And yet at the same time to let him know, you know, the world isn't always kind to people that they see as other, and that's something to be aware of, but that's also something to take to heart and think about when he's interacting with other people. You know, how how can we make the world be just more welcoming to everybody? What were some of the experiences you had when you were his age. That allows you to to sort of see the differences, are see the similarities. I mean,
everything to me is is a now what moment? You know, and I'm picturing you as a little girl, and yes, you have your parents teaching you, but by the same token, you're still a little girl that's dealing with something and you have to ask yourself, now, what what what do I What am I going to take from this? I mean, I can think of a few there, you know, There's there's one that we'd say is sort of more positive
and one that's negative. So the more negative one is I certainly remember times that I would just be walking on the street or something and people would shout slurs
at me. There was a particular time that I was with my aunt and uncle, who were visiting from Hong Kong at the time, and my older sister and we were waiting for a bus and this man, who I think was somewhat intoxicated, started yelling at us about, you know, we should go back where we came from, and swearing in us and things like that, and that was really jarring because I was I think I was maybe ten or eleven at the time, and I just remember thinking, what do I do, as you say, now, what what
do I do about this? Right? What am I going to take out of this? And what I took from that was there was a woman, a white woman, who was nearby and she kind of intervened and she started talking to the guy and kind of got in between him and us, and then after the bus arrived she talked to us about it, and it just made me remember that, Okay, somebody out there is also with you. You're not just by yourself, right, and it's it made me realize what a power there is in someone stepping
in and not just being a bystander. And so that made me try to do that for the rest of my life when I've seen that happening in other context, to try and step in. So that was one. There was also, I think more positive ones where times when I would see myself reflected in other people's experiences. Mostly books. My mom made a real point of trying to get books that were written by other Asian, in particular East Asians. This is in like the early eighties and so there
wasn't as much out there as there is now. There's a little bit more now, but she would get books that were, you know, about living in a Japanese internment camp, where she would get books that were about, you know, being a new immigrant from China to the US. And even though those weren't my experience, it was kind of powerful to get the sense, oh, that's a book about someone who vaguely resembles me. She's also Asian, and that means maybe maybe my stories are also going to be
worth telling. When I get to read books by other people, I get to witness their experience, but in a way I also kind of get to be seen. I get to be seen as like, okay, they're Asian stories broadly speaking, are worth telling. And with the woman at the bus stop, I think she was there to witness that. She was there to kind of say by her also reacting the situation, I see this and it's not okay, and I see what's happening to you, And there's something very powerful about that.
Even though she couldn't stop it, that wasn't her position, you know, she wasn't responsible for what was happening, but the fact that she was there to witness it with us, I think was really powerful and it's important that you do point that out. That she may or may not have been able to affect change, but in that moment, for these young individual girls, she was able to at least say I see you, and I'd like to understand
it more absolutely, and that was really powerful. I think about that moment quite a lot, and I think about her in particular, and even now as an adult, when I'm faced with a situation where I don't know what to do, I try to look for ways that I can help because I think about how powerful it was that she stepped in, and I think about how awful it would have held had she not stepped in. Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? I
always did want to be a writer. I didn't know that it was really a job than anybody could do. I didn't know anybody who had a creative job like that, and so for a long time I thought that I was going to have to have, you know, like a real job, and then writing would be the thing that I did on the side. And I thought that, really until I graduated from college and I got a real job from Harvard by the way from and I got a job in publishing, and I think I started in September,
and I realized in October. This just wasn't the right fit for me. And I was really lucky that I had a teacher who said to me, you know you always talk about writing on the side, why don't you try putting it in the front. And it was really because of her that I started to think, well, maybe I should try. Maybe I should try writing and see where it takes me. Did you quit that job or I did. I stayed at it for a year because I needed to pay rent, and you know, I had
loans and things I had to pay off. But I stayed at the job and I started working on my writing and I got together a portfolio so that I could apply to grad school. And really what I was doing was I was just starting to learn how to be a writer. I was reading and I was writing, and I was to sing. Talk about a now what moment? I mean, you quit your job and then you all
of a sudden, how did that feel? It was definitely a now what moment because I got to the point where I was like, I have to quit this job because I need to focus on this other thing. And it was very scary. I did some math and I was like, here's how much money I have saved. Here's how long I can give it to try and make this writing thing work. And it was the first of several now what moments like that. I think for most writers, your life is a series of those now what moments
until hopefully you managed to get a break. But it was a moment of I think, really asking myself, if I stay here in this secure place, I'm going to be unhappy. But if I leave, maybe I will be happier. Can I make it work? Can I? You know? And that was a position privilege. I was lucky, I had a partner. I was lucky that I had been able to save money. But it was a moment of trying to reaffirm for myself it's worth it. Did you have a structure to writing? It was easier when I was
in grad school. I was lucky enough to get a fellows hip and so I had a little bit of a stipend. And you know, your job when you were in this program was to sit and right and so I would try and write. I would go and sit with friends and we were all on the writing program, and we'd sit there and we'd we'd work for a while and then we'd talk and then we'd get back to work, but it was easier when someone was looking
over my shoulder. When I left grad school, I definitely had another now what moment where I was like, Okay, how do I do this without an assignment? How do I do this with that? You know, I don't need to turn anything in. If I don't write anything, no one will care. And then I realized, actually, no one will care but me, And so that was really I had to find the motivation in myself to get myself to the desk and sit there and look at the page.
I tried to make it into a routine, basically, and it got easier when my son was born, because when he was napping it was my time to write, or when I dropped him off at daycare, I knew exactly when I had to pick him up, and I would go, okay, I have four hours. I'm paying for those four hours. I've got to make them count. I can only imagine. But the idea of structure and doing it on your
own is it's a huge lesson. I mean that is a huge lesson because a lot of it is really how you you know, how you approach your vocation and calling it that and not feeling guilty for it. So you're writing when you can. Mostly people sleep when their kids sleep, but now you're writing when you're kids sleeping. Um, what was your first project? Like, I had been writing short stories in grad school. So I published a few
short stories. You know, you send them to a magazine and you hope that an editor likes them, and I've been lucky enough to find a few homes for them, and I got an agent on the strength of that. It was an agent who had read some of my work, liked it, got in touch, and she seemed to get what I was doing, and she was extremely patient because
she signed with me. And then I think it was about five years before I had actually finished a book, and it was a story that I had started working on in grad school, and it just took me a long time to figure out how to write a book, how to tell the story, and then how to kind of polish it so that it it said what I wanted in the ways that I wanted. There are so many times that I think people don't really focus on the rejections, but there are usually more rejections than there
are acceptance. In that five year period, were their rejections that stood out to you where you questioned, oh, there were, I mean, there were many, and it is, you know, I don't think it's even something that people should be ashamed of. But I say that even though I used to call the spreadsheet where I marked down my rejections, I used to call it my spreadsheet of shame, because
we feel like we should succeed right away. Um. But you know, I would list all the places i'd sent a story, and then I would list down when they sent it back, you know, And then I would send it out to the next one, and I'd list when it got rejected from that. But that's I think part of the process. I was learning how to write a story. I was learning which magazines were fit for just what I write. Not every magazine is right for every story. And so I did have a bunch of rejections in there.
And in particular, I remember there was one story that I kept sending out and sending out and it kept coming back and I really believed in it. And in the middle of it, I had my son, I dealt with some postpartum depression, and I was like, maybe this is just never going to work out. Maybe I should
just give up. And then a magazine took that story and then they submitted it for an award, and then it won that award, and it was this sort of amazing boost at a moment where I had really been questioning myself to get that kind of affirmation from, you know, from this magazine and then the award. Yes, it's worth doing. God, I hope you framed that list. I hope you have that list, and I hope you frame it showed everybody. I have it saved in my computer. Well it is.
It's a long bar. I color coded it so that I could see some rejections are red, right, and then ones that are out or yellow, so you can just kind of see visually without having to look at the no no no column. You can just see it. And then there's this one green line at the bottom and sometimes, I mean it only takes one it's always going to be read until it gets to that green. You mentioned postpartum.
I too had postpartum rather severely. Um I wrote a book about it, Celesting, and you well, I remember that, and I was so grateful for that. Actually, I was so grateful that you talked about it, because I felt like it was this thing that no one talked about that everyone was somehow embarrassed about having, ashamed of having, and that no one had really you know, they mentioned just like, oh, this might happen, but it kind of doesn't.
And I was sort of shocked to find that it was happening to me and that it actually happened to lots of people. And so I was really, honestly so grateful to you for talking about that with your platform, because it would be so easy to just pretend like it hadn't happened. Well, I appreciate you saying that. Really. I had a person say to me, an agent at the time, and he said, you have to tell this story.
And my first reaction was, who wants another celebrity on some soapbox complaining about how terrible it is, you know, to have this baby, and you know, and I could afford IVF and you know, so there was just just a sort of self indulgence that I was afraid of. And then once I started asking around and realizing that I wasn't the only one that had experienced that, it became a journey to tell other people's stories or give other people the context to feel their stories exactly. You
do that beautifully well. And I love that way of looking at it too, because I've been in a position is you know, Chinese American writer and Asian American writer that's had some success. I don't want to speak for other people, but I want to give more context and more space and sort of like you know, elbow out a little bit more room for other stories to be heard, because they can only be told by the people that
experience them. But it is so affirming to to see someone else, and especially somebody who you know is incredibly well known, talk about something that they experienced that you also as. There's this sense of shared humanity that I think that we don't often get a lot of times, and certainly around topics that are difficult, like issues around pregnancy or postpartment depression. So it yeah, it sincerely mean.
It did mean a lot to me to see that you were talking about it, and I didn't remember anybody else really doing that. I think it really was one of the first and people were shocked, you know that I that I was, And it was interesting because they talked about how brave and what's so interesting. I couldn't quite get my mind wrapped around the concept of that
being a brave move. It felt necessary. That's similar to the way that I look at it, where I hope that what I write resonates with other people, but I do write it first and foremost because it matters to me. You know. I hope that it's going to speak to other people, but I couldn't write it if it didn't also feel important. I don't think people really understand the sort of trajectory between when a book is written and then if and when it gets adapted to a screen.
I would love to hear a little bit more about what that is like and what you grapple with when it's presented to you. It was such an interesting experience to have Little Fires Everywhere made into a mini series and I had a really wonderful experience with it, actually, and I think there were two reasons. One was that I went into it kind of thinking, I want this project to have space to be something different, the freedom to evolve into something else, because it should be different.
It's an adaptation, it's on TV that's a different language than writing on the page, and thinking about it that way kind of made it easier for me to let go and be like, let it grow into what it's going to be. But the second reason that I think I had a great experience is that I got to work with the great people. I was really lucky um Reese, Witherspoon,
and Carry Washington and their production teams. I think started the project because they love the book, and so they were always kind of holding the respect for the book in their hearts. Even when they were changing things. They were doing it in ways to explore the same issues, but just in a different angle. And I think that's really made it successful. And I feel very fortunate you've gotten to work with them. But it was it was fun, and it was I'm not lying when I say that.
When I watched it, I watched it, you know, in early like everyone else did. UM. I sat on the couch with my husband and there were parts where I kind of gassed and I like leaned in and I was like, what's going to happen? And he looked at me and said, do you not know? Like you wrote this book? But I was so caught up in what was going on the screen that I was like, yeah, but I but it feels new. And that for me
was such a pleasurable experience to encounter the story differently. Well, that is a very arrived way of looking at something, and I'm in awe of that, and I'm going to take that to heart, just because you know, when you all of a sudden you have this book, you call it your book, and now people have opinions on it. Yeah, did they feel personal? They always feel personal, But I
try to remind myself that they're not. And I think it's a good thing when people read your book and they have reactions to it, and that's how it should work. And Patrick, who's a writer that I just adore, she has a saying that the meaning of a book is not made between the writer and the reader. It's made
between the book and the reader. And I really like that idea because in a way, it means that the reader is going to bring their own experiences to whatever they read or you know, whatever they view, you know, whatever the art form is. They're going to interpret it the way that they see it because they've had certain experiences and it might not be exactly what I had in mind, but it doesn't mean that it's invalid. And if they take meeting from it, to me, that's great, right.
In a sense, I have to get out of the way as the author and let them make a relationship with the work whatever it is. They're going to feel that they know me. They might make judgments about me, but that's okay. They're allowed to do that. I have to kind of remove myself from that equation and let them engage with the work. So that's how I try to look at it. Anyway, That's very how it's hard. I think that's what real art is. I mean, art
allows interpretation and allows individual experience. Um, this show, Now, what is about pivotal moments? And I think we women humans have had multiples in their lives, and I just want to wrap up with just talking to you just about some of those. Now, what pivotal moments where you you were stopped in your tracks and you had to make a decision. Can you talk about any of those in your life? Sure? Well, one that comes to mind
first and foremost is becoming a parent. I thought before I became a parent that I understood who my parents were and what it would be like. Probably many parents think that, And then once I actually was holding my baby, I had this sudden, terrifying realization that I did not know what I was doing. You know, I had this moment of going, oh God, I'm responsible for this tiny
little creature. How do I do right by him? And it made me see both sort of my life going forward and then my whole relationship with my parents in very a very different light. I was realizing how much they had done for me and for my sister and
kind of appreciating that. And I was at the same time sort of looking forward towards, you know, the future I was going to have with my son and thinking, Okay, what do I want to try to give you right if in the time that I've got with you, because it seems like it goes so fast it does, what do I What do I want to try and pass on to you? Right like? What are the most important things that you need to have before you go out into the world? And that, I mean, that's a transformation
that's still ongoing. It's it's sort of a very long, extended now what moment where I'm constantly trying to figure out, you know, what are the most important things? I think that's the frame that I'm living my life in now. And you know it starts when their babies. It's it's
ongoing and it's exhausting. Because it ever, let's up, and then this unbelievable moment happens when they start to teach you yes, And that's That's been one of the joys of parenthood, I have to say, is seeing like you say these things and you don't know if it's really sinking in. You're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm listening. And then when you actually see them do something that kind of shows that they've taken in the values that you're trying to teach. It's a really great moment. You know.
I hope I'm giving that moment to my mom now as I get older. But it's nice to see it in my son where I'm like, oh, that was a kind thing you did, and he's like, oh yeah, it just seemed like the right thing to do. I'm like, yes, did it. That's it for us today. If you enjoyed my conversation with Celesting, be sure to pick up a copy of our new book, How Our Missing Hearts. You'll be happy you did. Now. What is produced by the wonderful Julia Weaver with help from Darby Masters. Our executive
producer is Christina Everett. The show is mixed by Bahed Fraser and Christian Bowman. A special thanks to nicky Etre and Will Pearson. If you liked this episode, please subscribe to the show on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your shows.