Interviewed by Natalie Ponte.

I loved the way desire shaped so much of Cecily’s journey in The Storm We Made, in ways that felt very human and real. How do you navigate desire as a writer, especially for your women characters?

It’s funny, because when I was starting to write this, I really didn’t want to write an epic romance. I wanted to write a World War II novel. But I realized while I was writing it that I would have to write some sort of desire, even if it wasn’t an epic love story, or else the narrative would have a lot of drama with no breaks. I ended up writing the love element of the novel as a piece of very close bodily-felt desire. I am a woman, and I write from the perspective, usually, of women. It was important to me to represent desire that isn’t always pure. Desire can be toxic. Women can be toxic. I have always been quite curious, philosophically, about the concept of charisma. What draws people to other people? Are these things innate, or can they be taught? With this relationship, I was exploring the idea of charisma and what draws her to him. Her desire is tied back to the concepts that he represents and who he is. I felt drawn to write that unapologetically, because I don’t think that all female desire has to be pure of heart with ambitions to end in a wholesome heterosexual marriage. 

You’ve mentioned how your father helped you with research, and how you were inspired by stories you heard from your grandparents growing up. Was there anything you learned in the research process for The Storm We Made that didn’t make it into the book?

A lot of them were things I slipped in, but I didn’t get to tell the full story. I did mention a lady who ran a laundry service, just at the very beginning of the book, and then it kind of goes away. She was inspired by a real woman who ran a laundry service. She spoke Japanese and laundered the Japanese soldiers’ uniforms, and this gave her a tiny amount of privilege and stature. Every time the soldiers came around looking for girls, she would gather all the girls that she could and hide them. The soldiers never suspected her because she was just the laundry lady. She was still an oppressed person, but she took what little privilege she had, and she saved so many people. It’s a beautiful story. But to include it I would have had to make a new character that wouldn’t have fit the book. And that’s what happens when you write books. You have to get rid of beautiful things that you uncover while writing it. There’s a video about her online, and I hope her descendants have seen this video because she deserves a ton of honor. 

Your forthcoming book The Ugliest Babies in the World is a short story collection, and you’ve said in other interviews that The Storm We Made grew from a short story. At what point in your writing process do you discover whether the work wants to be novel-length or a short story?

I’m generally a short story writer. That is where I started; that is my first love. I’m a person born out of the literary magazine tradition. I started The Storm We Made when I was in my MFA program at the time, and my instructor was Marie-Helene Bertino, who wrote Beautyland. For the final assignment of the semester, she asked us to write a short story about someone who does something on repeat. I wrote a story set in the 1940s, about a teenage girl living in occupied Malaysia running through a series of repeated checkpoints to get home. While she’s running through the checkpoints, she’s thinking about all the misfortunes that have befallen her family. I turned that in and forgot about it. When I got her feedback on it, I saw that she wrote, “it is so beautiful, all the air left the room as I read it,” and I thought, “Oh, that’s so nice of her.” And then she wrote, “. . . but I don’t think that this is a short story.” And I thought, “Oh, no, don’t tell me I managed to flunk the first ungraded assignment in grad school.” And she said, actually, I think this is the beginning of what could be a beautiful novel, and maybe your life’s work. A version of that story ended up as Chapter Four in the novel. She saw the beginning of The Storm We Made and told me to keep it close, keep writing it and see what happens. And 352 pages grew out of it. This is just a testament to incredible teachers, who can see things in your work even when it’s raw and you don’t know what it is yet. For my forthcoming story collection, some of the stories were already published, and some of them I wrote while I was writing the novel, because you’ve got to take breaks. And so I consider myself both a short story writer and a novelist. But I definitely started as a short story writer, and that was the form that I would say I got my training in. 

I adored this quote of yours in an interview with The Creative Independent: “I do not believe in feeling guilty about things that bring joy.” How does this philosophy impact your writing? 

In that particular interview, I think I was talking about not writing. I believe in taking free time to do whatever it is you please, and in my case it’s watching garbage television. But in writing, I don’t believe that one should be restricted by any specific standards. If rules give you joy, go ahead and write to that, but I don’t believe in particular restrictions. I believe people should write whatever they want. I also believe that people should write whenever they want. If writing is no longer giving you joy, take a break. If writing is the only thing that gives you joy, you should keep going. I don’t believe we all need to work toward the same very specific end points, like a traditional model of relationship or career success. For some people, those things are joyful. And for other people they’re not. Life being as limited as it is, it should be filled, as much as possible, with things that are joyful. In my case, that was a life full of books and writing. But also other things when I needed to take a break. And that is kind of how I built my life. I really don’t believe in guilt. 

Some of the reviews of my work called the characters unlikeable. And that is because often they are being pulled toward things that they desire, things that they feel joy for that are not necessarily what is traditionally decided that they should want or need, and then therefore are called unlikable. Right? But sometimes joy is unlikeable and so be it. 

What advice do you have for writers who struggle with impostor syndrome?

I think as writers, one of our genetic disorders is blatant insecurity. We are always going to have it, even after traditional acclaim and success. I don’t think impostor syndrome ever goes away, unfortunately. It’s something that you can move through, and understand that, yes, there will always be someone who seems to be better, more successful than you. That’s difficult. There’s a scarcity out there. There’s a lot of comparison, and it’s understandable, and that never goes away. It’s just something you have to learn to live with. But ultimately, you write because you feel compelled to tell a very specific story that only you can tell. And if only you could tell it, by definition, you are not an impostor. 

We love recommending books. What’s the last book you read that you’re excited to tell us about?

Recently I really loved The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. It was absurd and ridiculous and also the author’s hilarious. I’m also a big fan of another book that just came out called Cinema Love, by Jiaming Tang. It’s about gay men in rural China and the women who have to marry them. 

What are your favorite literary journals?

Oh, there are so many. Literary magazines gave me a crash course in how to read and also how to write. During the pandemic, I was a reader and editor for three or four literary magazines at the same time and it helped keep me sane. Online literary magazines like Pigeon Pages really helped to make my career and give me my first distribution, which is how I got my agents. I am a big fan of my friends at Electric Literature, specifically the Commuter section because it’s so short. It’s really great. I love Conjunctions and Ecotone, which publish beautiful print magazines. There is something about print that just feels so tactile and beautiful. If the literary magazine universe went away, I would be devastated. It’s a scary time out there right now.