 Okay, so sorry for the delay. One of our speakers just moved into Columbus, so they were rushing here. That's why there's a delay. Everybody's a little frantic, but it's all good, right? So thank you for your patience. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Janet Rome. I'm the Interim Dean for the University Libraries. It's my pleasure to welcome you all here for our 2020-2024 authors at all these free events. Today, we are hosting a very special conversation with author and 20th century alumna, E.M. Tran, talking about her book, Daughters of the New Year, with Patrick O'Keeffe, Associate Professor of English, and local author and alum, Madeleine Fitch. Madeleine Fitch is the author of the story collection about her eyes around the horn and the novel Stand's Bite, which was a finalist for the Penn Cunningway Award, the Wanda Lesbian Fiction Prize, the Washington State Book Award, and was named the Ohio Great Reads Book for the 2023 National Book Festival. That's all. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, Harper's Magazine, and Grand Theft. She is the recipient of the 2024 Ohio Arts Council Award for Individual Excellence and the 2024 Oak Henry Award. Additionally, I'll just add that she did earn her PhD here in English at Ohio's College of Arts and Sciences. Patrick O'Keeffe is an Associate Professor in the Department of English here at Ohio University. He teaches Fiction in the Creative Writing Program. O'Keeffe has an E.A. in English from the University of Kentucky and an M.F.A. in English Fiction from the University of Michigan. His novel, The Visitors, was published in 2014 and a collection of stories in Hill Road in 2005, both by King England. The Hill Road was awarded the story prize in 2005. And The Visitors were shortlisted for the Cary Group Irish Novel of the Year Award. O'Keeffe has also received the Whiting Writers Award and has been named in the Barnes & Noble to discover great new writers. E.M. Trinon is the author of the debut novel, Daughters of the New Year. Her stories, essays, and reviews can be found in such places as the Georgia Review, Literary Pub, Jotland, Vegas, and the Los Angeles Review of Books and Harvard Review Online. Her essay for Prairie Spooner won a non-fiction prize in a Glen Oaks Lot's Game Award and she was listed as a notable essay in Fast American Essays 2018. She completed the M.F.A. at the University of Mississippi and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at the Imperial High University. I'm gonna also add that you can travel with the Libraries at Mons Center for Archives and Special Collections graduate assistant in rare books and when she was a doctoral candidate. She's a very special to us. E.M. Trinon was, oh, I got that one. She was born, raised, and currently lives in New Orleans with her family. I wanna make a quick thank you to your intro tour for organizing today's presentation and to the many staff, there are too many to name who helped make this presentation possible. I also wanna share that as part of the Visiting Writers Series, Trinon will be reading from her novel at 7 p.m. in the Gallbraith Memorial Chapel on the College Green. Almost lastly, little professor, Brooke Sanctuary-Selene, Daughters of the New Year and E.M. Trinon will be available to sign copies of Please Stop after the presentation. This was published by Hanover Square Press in 2022 and the book was reviewed and praised by publishers weekly with just one word, Powerful. I also wanna add that Evelyn will need to speak out very calmly at 4.10 so we can continue the conversation if we're having one still at that point but just know that she needs to speak. So please help me give a warm welcome to our presenters, thank you. Thank you very much and welcome with Lizzie. I just picked Lizzie. It's wonderful to see you again. Welcome back to all of you and welcome back to the live. And I'll just say thank you to all in your life here and the work you've done. And the first question actually, I want to ask, like there's so much in your novel in terms of like, you know, the personal, the myth, the family, immigration, diaspora, war and then myth, it goes into so many wonderful, wonderfully different places. But I'm just wondering what physical role the library, archives, research played in the novel and was there anything you found there in particular that became embodied in the novel or became, do you know what I mean? That opened up certain doors into knowledge and your imagination that became part of it. Is it okay to answer that? Yeah, yeah. Well, I love, I mean, when I discovered that there was a vault with old books in it on our campus, I was like, how do I get in there? So it was just such a special place because I would just be in there. I would come, Miriam would just let me into the vault and I would just spend hours in there alone with my headphones in and I would just be organizing books and touching materials. And it was just so lovely to think that something from, you know, 1632 or like the one leaf from who knows when has made it, has had this journey and has somehow ended up in the Athens, Ohio Library, right? And when I was writing my book, I was dealing a lot with memory and how memory is so transient. And if you don't have a physical object to report it that memory just disappears, right? Like, I mean, how many of us could say that we know the names of our great, great, great, great grandmothers or greater great grandfathers, right? Like, I mean, even your great, great grandfather, I couldn't say what his name is. Like, that's not that far away from me. And so I just thought it was really remarkable that we have these physical objects that have made it, you know, generation to generation to generation. And maybe I don't know who this person is, but this object exists to say that they did exist, right? And so there's so much physical that was lost in the Vietnam War and in any war, really. Like, I mean, just so much devastation and loss and just the actual, the violence of getting rid of, of evidence of the existence of people. Yeah, and so I was really interested in re-imagining a past of, you know, maybe not exactly my family, but a family that's like mine that maybe their history has been erased. And I can recreate some kind of record of that in this book. So the library really, really inspired that because of just like being surrounded by all of that material and just like looking at things and learning about people who I just otherwise never would have even thought existed. And then also to imagine like that person who wrote that thing or who made that print or whatever, that they could never have imagined that I, like just some random person would be handling this material and looking at it and learning from it. So yeah, there wasn't any like literally getting these texts that I found in the book, but just like, I think generally it infused the novel with that feeling. That's wonderful. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I have a quick follow up about the research method that you used for the book. Like I guess I'm wondering, it's so deeply researched. Did the research follow the story or did the story follow the research? Right? Yeah, I think that so in the beginning in the first half of the book, a lot of it is, I mean, it starts in 2016. So like the present, you know, and then you go backwards in time and as you go backwards, it becomes more and more based in historical research for me. But the first part of it, I think it was the opposite where I was writing from personal experience and then supplementing that with, you know, like, oh, I really wanna write about this thing. So I'm going to research it and add it into the story. And the farther and further I got back, of course, I had less personal material to base the story on. I then went into a historical record to inspire what I wanted to write about. And that was really interesting because so much of it is about the Vietnam War. When you go farther back into the second half of the book and there's so much of that, that was televised, that was recorded. And because I'm not fluent Vietnamese speaker, a lot of the things that I was looking at were in English. And so there was this really strange mediation that I had to do in thinking about perspective and what new sources and primary sources I was looking at and then how to think about that from a Vietnamese perspective, which I mean, I would say that I am not a Vietnamese perspective, I'm a Vietnamese American one. And so I really had to place myself, I was several levels removed from that. And I had to place myself and really emphasize in that moment with how those characters were interacting in space. So you mentioned that the novel means backward in time. Great segue to my question for you. I really wanted to give you a chance to talk to people about the form, the form of the novel. I was reminded when I was reading it, that sometimes we say, and if anybody knows the attribution for this to have about, but a novel teaches us how to read it. Yeah, like each novel teaches us how to read it as we read it. And I kind of had to keep reminding myself of that as I read your book, because I was confronted with my own expectations for narrative. It was humbling because sometimes I think of myself as the terminal, terminal stylist, but then don't we all read it, right? Some people felt, but I thought when I was reading your book, I kept being confronted with my own expectations about what plot should do. Or so I would be, I was talking to you about this last night that I would think, okay, this thing that I'm reading because it happened in the past, it must be context or backstory for the foregrounded story that I'm sure we're gonna circle back to in a minute and it's all gonna add up and I would just have that kind of subconsciously buzzing. And then about halfway through, I felt like the novel taught me how to read it and I just dispensed with those expectations. And then I was incredibly satisfied at the end because there was such a consistency and a deliberateness of form. And a commitment to the form that you've chosen. And I was really eager to ask you how you became upon that form, what you'd have to say about conventional expectations of the narrative or like Western versus other narrative traditions and all that type of thing that led you to this way of writing the novel. Yeah, well, I first came upon that narrative structure when I was reading for my comps actually. And I read How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Actuals and that book is similarly structured as a backwards moving narrative. And I had started writing the novel but I was really struggling with it because there was just, I knew that I wanted the timeline to be so large and I knew that there were so many characters and I didn't know how to present the information. Like there's just so much, right? Like, I mean, I think that's every writer's kind of first issue. Like, what is the perspective, how do I present it? There's so much information, how do I, what do I leave out, things like that? And when I read How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents I immediately was like, this is my novel but I'm stealing this woman's idea. Like, this is an amazing way to structure a novel because for me, the most important part of the book was not necessarily the present action but how the past had led us to that point, right? And so it was an uncovering of like a family history that was more interesting to me than what we normally see in a forward moving and traditional linear narrative, which is that, okay, something happens, it causes something, some event happens, it causes some consequence, the consequence causes something else and then we are kind of propelled into, you know, the future as we go forward. And I wanted to subvert that because I felt like the future wasn't important to me, I wanted to know about the past. And if I was uncovering a history then I had to continuously go back into the past, right? And I also just felt like so annoyed when I would go to create a writing workshop. Oh no. I would just stop your sessions right in there. I would, yeah, you know, like I feel like, I mean, I have such, I'm so grateful to the education that I've received but I do feel that I was constantly pushing against these expectations in the workshop space that a story needs to look a certain way. Yes, yes. And so when I was writing my novel, I was like, you know what, this is not a workshop. I can write this however I want. I love all of them. Yeah, I was like, I'm rising above. And it was very freeing but it was also really, really difficult because as you were kind of up against your own biases as well when you were reading it, I had to, it was a learning process for me as I was writing it to let go of the expectations I had for myself. Like it felt, the book is very episodic because it moves backwards and each story is its kind of own contained thing that should build upon the one before it but it's also could be its own thing. And I felt it was very, very difficult to me because it didn't have that forward momentum that you regularly expect from a book in a linear narrative. And I had to really let myself see the book in a new way as I was writing it. And so going off a little bit on that, Lizzie and probably connected to like workshop culture and what's acceptable or what's deemed. I mean, you win the book. It's such a wonderful and thrilling play, right? The story of, hey, she kills the sister-in-law, right? Well, she kills the pig first, right? Yeah. Because she's told the killer thing that she kills the sister-in-law. She's washed away, she throws it away, right? She's almost mid... Like, I mean, you almost put us in the world of myth, right? The genre is entirely different, right? And she goes to the camp, right? And soldiers are just hanging out. They're not like the men she thought they were, right? And she takes over, right? She's transformed, right? But like, did you feel like moving back into almost a kind of a different genre or a different way of seeing? Like, why did that character have to be like that? Does that make sense? Why did that kind of mythological, almost, you know, comic, wonderful, dramatic? Like, why did that fit that part of the story, that big set? Well, and then moving into the very final section, rather than like we're in the first person. We're in the first person. I mean, supporting what you're saying, but we're in the first person and there's this kind of need, you know, the three, there's three people that are the perspective. And it began very heavily grounded in literary realism. Yeah. It's a beautiful setting. Yeah. And it captures out with the prologue and it does that wonderful first chapter, right? And then you just, right? Yeah. Yeah. So we got you surrounded. I know what we're doing. You just got up in the air with it. I'm from here. Go. Welcome, wow. You guys really love my book. Yeah, no, I was inspired initially in my research by Lady Tru and the Trump sisters. And what did you find them? I mean, were they almost in your life in some way? No, they have not. And then I found them when I was doing research for PhD because I was like, I don't know anything about being Vietnamese really because my parents never talked about that. Like they just, you know, I mean, it's very traumatic for them. They came over in 1975 after the fall of Saigon and they came over, they were not together then they met in the U.S. And so they both had their own separate kind of reading stories from the city. And we never talked about it when I was a kid. Like they didn't talk about it. We didn't ask about it. Like that was not our relationship. I did not bring it up. And then it didn't even occur to me to bring it up because I was like, don't want to get yelled at today, right? Like he does, these guys need therapy. And I, they probably just do it. But they, you know, I just... I like the whole thing is alive. We just never talked about it, right? And so when I got to, and I was also always a very self-conscious about my Vietnamese identity growing up because I never felt that I was Vietnamese enough. There's a very large Vietnamese community in New Orleans. And then I also never felt that I really belonged in mainstream American white culture. So I was always kind of in between and feeling I was very, very self-conscious about it. And so when I, it wasn't until I became, you know, like in late 20s that I got to this PhD program and I was like, felt comfortable enough to really lean into that and look into my own history and doing, and was surprised by what I had actually a very like large and, you know, a very nice Asian studies department. I had a university. It was like, I didn't even know that I could take classes here and do this. So I took a, and actually I did take a Vietnamese history class at LSU, which was my undergraduate. It was terrible. It was like some old Vietnam war veteran who for some reason was hired as a professor there. He was like, we lost the Vietnam war because of the hippies. And I feel, I don't know anything about this, but I feel like this is wrong. So when I came here, I finally took it all. Yeah, he also is unwell. So when I came here, I took a Vietnam history class, actually it was the Southeast Asian history class, which I found in hindsight is very comical because it was like 10 different countries shoved in. It was like literally the title of the course was like Southeast Asian history from the beginning of time to like 1832. I was like, something like told me random. But I mean, it was good because I learned so much about the region and what I learned essentially is that all of these borders are completely arbitrary eventually and you can't really study the history of it in that way. So it was useful, but I, but anyway, so I was doing this research about my own history and I came upon these female figures, maybe two and the true sisters. And they're both, they're both, or all three of them are warrior figures. And they're real women who led these rebellions against the Chinese in Vietnam. And they're at, the true sisters in literature are at different times in history, but they've kind of been lifted up into this mythological almost like God-like, high nationalist figure, right? And I mean, part of that is to political end, the communist civil end. But I mean, I think that they've been used a lot throughout history to a particular political end. And they change, right? They're very romanticized. Very, very romanticized. And they change based on the current moment. People use them for different ends. And I thought that that was so, one, it was very interesting that they were women and that they were not just women, but they kind of pushed against this idea that women had to be submissive or in domestic, you know, in the domestic space that they were warriors. And then I also thought it was really interesting that their histories were so vague because they were from so long ago that there's not that much written record about them. Again, like physical objects are not really recording what they actually did, it's word of mouth. So I thought that was so interesting that they had been morphed in use in these kind of ways. And so my interest in writing about them was to add to that, you know, add my own version of that to a written record to reimagine, you know, they've been mythologized that to imagine them as real people, like actual people who have feelings or, you know, survived something terrible. And that was part, and as I got farther back in the book as I was writing, I don't know if it was intentional, but like the last story with Lady True is kind of, or not, yeah, it was Lady True, that it was like, it did turn into kind of a folklore type story, kind of like a myth. And I put it in her voice because I wanted, the rest of the book is in third person, limited perspective, and I wanted to put it in her voice to kind of make it, you know, to make her flesh and bone, right? And so that was kind of my idea with those last two chapters. And then the very last chapter, there's ghosts throughout the book, but I just was very interested in this lineage of women and that, you know, they don't go away. Like, it's kind of like the ghosts of Lady True and the ghosts of the True Sisters are kind of hovering over my shoulder, right? As I'm writing the book, and maybe I didn't know about them until now, but they've definitely deeply affected the history of my family and the history of our cultural identity. And so I was just really interested in thinking about that ghost-like presence. Yeah, did it almost allow you into the culture, your own culture, in a very positive way, if that makes sense? Yeah, yeah. I was able to engage within a way that I had not before, which was very much before was filled with shame, embarrassment. Yes. I didn't know anything about my own history. And so being able to do my own research about them and write a story from their perspective really gave me an agency over something that I felt like I didn't have any control over before. Yeah, so I hope you like the book. I do. Thank you, Madeline. Yeah, thank you all. Oh, really? I wanted to ask, okay, so now we're gonna go back and talk more about the realism as well. I like the contrast that happens more at the beginning of the book with this image-driven detail. I just wanna make sure we're emphasizing the tech, like the detail that you include and the way that you're working, just the way you said it, it was episodic, is so much more by story than by plot. And I think sometimes in creative writing classes, we get story and plot confused, or we use them interchangeably. And I kind of thought this book made me think, well, you could have story and you don't need plot so much. But if you have plot and you don't have story, you really don't have a book, you know? And so this, for example, I just thought it was built brick by brick every, it was every single section had integrity, like we could have just stopped right there. And I wanted to give you a chance to talk about these indelible images that you're creating with, where you're really pushing things to their limit, like we were using the word, I asked those of you before, if I was allowed to use the word grotesque, because I mean it in a very complimentary way. But like we can't just have true watching her sister knee on the reality TV show while she's working a dead-end job at a gym and like thinking about her life with an annoying manager. There also has to be a drowning kitten. You know, there's like a little timeline of this drowning kitten in a swimming pool and that she has to go safe by the end of the chapter. So yeah, and then there's of course the unforgettable Bonn-Me eating food competition. There's the Squirtest Goldie Hawn hosted Beauty Contest or whatever it is, pageants and there's the unforgettable beauty pageant trophy spray painted and sharpied over. So just the bananas on top of bananas. Like you're not satisfied with just having kind of a unforgettable story or scene. You have to really, really give us the most extreme version of these details. Yeah, it's totally grounded. It's totally emotionally rooted. It's not satirical. It's not a parody. And I think that the decisions to make each story like that so unforgettable and so indelible and so rooted in image is what carries us through the book, right? Like what keeps us reading, what gets very propulsive. Yeah, I love, I love good image. I feel like it's because I know that I'm not a good poet. So like my only way in is to just create an image, right? And to shove it into my work. But I, it's funny story about that kitten one. Actually I will say that that particular chapter was, it was a chapter that I wrote like when I had finished writing the book and I had to write it after my editor was like, you need another chapter. And there was a chapter that I had written earlier. Oh, it was actually a chapter about applying a pet bird at a bird fair. And I brought, so I brought part of this book as my creative dissertation and my, and I brought it to my dissertation defense. And Patrick was on my committee and he said, you know, I don't think we need this chapter. You're like, touch that. It's like, I wrote this chapter about this, you know, the girls going to the bird fair. Yeah, I just didn't see then how it fit. Yeah, they're like, I don't think we need this chapter. You should get rid of it. And I was like, at the time I was like really, I was really defensive about it. I was like, oh, secretly Patrick of course, not to your face, secret that. Secretly, I was like, well, like, because you also were not the only one, my editor was also like, we don't need this chapter. And I remember feeling like, these people don't know what they're talking about. Like this chapter is amazing. There's a bird, like there's an attack, like there's sadness at the end. And then I was like, you know what, what if I just get rid of the chapter and see what happens? So I got rid of it. And of course the book was better for it. Everyone was right, that's wrong. And then my editor was like, we still need another chapter though. So I was like, okay, what do I write about? And at this time I was working at a high school. I was a high school English teacher, which by the way, I was terrible, high school English teacher. Never hired me as a high school English teacher again. I'm terrible. And you're like, why are you so bad at this? Why is nothing great? I was like, I don't know. I'm supposed to grade that on time. Oh, the parents are wondering, okay. But at the time that I was working at the space school, I was in, because I was a new teacher, they put me in this communal classroom. And I didn't have my own like office space. I was in like a communal office space. And the woman behind me, her name is Connie, she was a hoot. Like if you are a writer, you dream of people like this because they're just amazing to write about. But Connie came to school with a duffel bag and it was moving. And I was like, Connie, Connie, what is in your duffel bag? And it was a kitten that she had found and that she was feeding and keeping in the duffel bag. And she was like, I told the administration, I'm taking care of this cat, it's fine. It turns out she told no one that the cat was not supposed to be there. It was probably the insane situation. But I remember thinking like, they have to write about this cat. Like I have to write about Connie's cat. Like this is a gift to me. And so I wrote about it. And I made, you know, I basically structured the chapter around that the image of that cat. And I find that that's like the where I start a lot of times when I'm writing is that like I encounter something really weird in real life. And I think we have to write this down. Like this is reality. Like we're living in reality right now. A reality in which Connie brings a cat in a duffel bag to school and still teaches all of her classes. And I think that that is my favorite thing about writing is that like you can be as weird as you want and you can pile up those weird moments. You can compress those weird moments into one chapter. And sure, like the weird moments happen across the length of our lives. But like, why do I have to make the book like my life? I can just make it into this one chapter. And so I think that that is the way that I really approach the image-based writing. And it is based in reality because it's happening in real life, right? Well, and the image leads you into a story. Yeah. You have faith that if you get the image right, it's gonna lead you. So this is like, so we can have plot, we can have story without plot. We can have, you can't have a good story without a good image. I don't know. I'm trying to get, just build something about it. Well, no, you're right. Because on its own. On its own, Connie with her cat in a double bag is not a story. It's an anecdote, right? Yeah, correct. It's an anecdote. You gotta dig around it. Yeah. Which is what you do. Which is what you ended up doing. Yeah. And I think that it's also, especially when I was a young writer, I felt very obligated to write what I saw. Like I felt like I couldn't deviate from what I saw. But the older I get, I realized like it's fiction. Why do I, why can't I deviate? I can just take this one thing that I was really interested in and build a story around that. And I can grab this bit. Yeah. And if I think it's true. That poor cat. It didn't. I mean, unknown. It was rescued. You have to be seen. But it was rescued. It'll tend for the story. You know, if I had been my younger self and I had met Connie, I had, I would have just probably tried to write that image and I would have really floundered because I would have been like, where does the story go with Connie and the cat at the school teaching her class? And he's so boring, right? And so I had to really think about how to structure that in a way that had a cohesive storyline, right? I wanted to ask the follow up question about image. I think one of the really remarkable, really affecting images that I, and when I was rereading it this week was the self-immolation scene. And of course, I know everybody's seen in the news that the military servicemen who self-immolated this week to protest their genocide happening in Gaza. And the discourse after that app, right, has played out on social media. Was it mental illness? Is it suicide? Is this about mental illness and suicide awareness? Is it a legitimate political act? Does it have a genealogy? Is it rooted in history? So there's tons of plot takes, right? Then I happen to be rereading your novel this week and I get to this, you know, there's just, it's like I said, rooted in image all the way through. And then we get drawing, looking out the window and then the same level of patience where you just make us look at this Buddhist monk self-immolating at that time in history, especially reading that as an American citizen, thinking about this sort of international experience that people are experiencing, you know, right now with culpability and people versus their governments and all that kind of thing. It really made me want to ask you what you think the novel form, I guess I was comparing the patience of reading that in a novel that was published several years ago or a couple of years ago to the experience of reading the discourse around this immediate and incredibly disturbing act that happens this week, right? And how just how powerful I found to read about the genealogy and the understanding of that as an act in the novel form as opposed to in like the social media form or the topical news media form or like the constant speed that's being updated. And of course, as a novelist, it really, yeah, re-rooted me in the form that I've chosen. So I was really interested in hearing you talk about that. Yeah, well, first of all, social media is a trash fire and it's terrible. And I think part of it is, I mean, it's feeding into this addiction that we have to constant stimulation and constant news. And I mean, there's 24 hour news, who needs that? Like, has anyone watched 24 hour news? It's like, there's nothing to report on after a while. So it's like, what are we watching? But it's making up things to fill up the time. And I think that social media is kind of like that. There's constant, there's this need to keep scrolling, right? And I think the consequence of that is that the news cycles out so quickly and we become kind of over saturated with it. We don't care about it after a while. And my full aim with the book was really to think about how historical moments continue to recycle themselves. How they happen over and over and over again. And part of the reason they continue to happen is because as human beings, we fail to learn from our past. And as you experience yourself, it's been silent, right? When you silence something, right? Yeah, it was good. And I think that terrible things continue to happen in the void where people refuse to learn about their history, right? And so part of the project of the book was making it physical, right? The repetition of the history. So throughout each, you know, as you go through the narrative and especially as you go farther back in time, you see kind of the same things happen over and over. And like, I mean, like the book starts with the reality show, fake bachelor version. And then we have like similar things that occur as you go farther back. We have, you know, a beauty pageant. We have a game show. And so it's like just this repetition of the ways that we expect them to perform in the public space. But I think that, you know, writing about that, the Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in protest of the Vietnam War was really, I mean, it's, again, history repeats itself. It happens, it's happening outside of the book, right? Like that repeats itself outside of the book. And it was very, very interesting to research that because again, like that happened in the new, the age of the news, right? So I was able to look it up, to read news reports about it, to look up like a New York Times article, to watch video news reports about it. And it was really interesting to see like the way that people talk about it immediately after and then the way that we look back on it as, as like, you know, society, like it, of course the, like we look back on the Vietnam War with, it's not kind, right? We don't look back on that with, with sugarcoating, right? These days. I think that that signals to us something about our present moment and it signals something to us about our future moment. And, you know, if we continue, the ways that we continue to behave as human beings. And then what do you think the novel, like this storytelling form offers, offers that? You know what I mean? Like it's witnessing and it's also fictionalized. There's something heightened about it. There's something, it's physical. It's going to be here for a while, right? And it's long. I don't know. It really made me think like, why this medium and not another, right? Well, I mean, I hope one day that this book, you know, maybe in a hundred years, if we're not all, you know, we're still here. The five university library is still here. Like maybe this book will exist in a vault somewhere and the random person will pick it up and be like, what is this? I mean, you know, I don't, I don't pretend to like think so highly of myself that it would. I mean, think that is like the purpose of books. And I was just talking to Patrick about this, like people tell me all the time, like, oh, I haven't read your book yet. I'm so sorry. That's totally fine. The, to me, the beautiful thing about a book is that it's an object that can live on your shelf or on your table and then you or someone else or your children or your spouse or your mom pick it up somewhere along the line years later and they're able to enjoy it because it exists, it's frozen in time, right? And it's like an act of interpretation. Yeah. And also, it's not quick. It's not asking for a quick digestible. Yeah. You know, I'm going to ask you one more question and then we're going to open it to the audience just for time's sake. And what I'm going to say and he's really connected is that the person, Carlos Nuskar, he is talking about that wonderful novella by the artist writer Claire Keaton, small things like these, which has the history of the homes where the children die in Ireland and stuff. And he said, but fiction does, which I thought is just very simple and wonderful. He said, fiction gets very, very near to something. You know what I mean? Fiction has a nearness and that's why fiction is still so important, that the novel is still so important that it still gets really close to life. And actually I was thinking about this now that Madeline is talking about it and you're talking about it. What's your own work? I mean, there's places in your books and I love this in reading. I mean, I like to feel uncomfortable as a reader. Does that make sense? I don't mean I like, I don't need blood and guts. I don't need any of that stuff. Although you avoid no emotions that you don't divide anything in life, also including love and humor and all these things. But there is, you get very, very close to people. You're a very sharp observer. Sometimes I can wince a little at people's self-deceptions and think about my own self-deceptions and just wince a little at humiliation and embarrassment and particularly, how do you, like I know you're feeling it yourself because you get very near it. I mean, how do you handle that as a writer? I mean, do you have something resistance to it? Do you worry about offending your community? Do you worry what mothers say? Do you know what I mean? I was thinking, yeah, does that make sense and representation and all this, right? Because you're a very intimate writer. I mean, it's not just the image. I mean, you write out a lie. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think that you should worry about how you're writing affects people because otherwise you're like sociopathic, right? But it doesn't mean you shouldn't write about it. It just means that you should be empathetic, right? And I think that the worst characters are the ones that are so flat and they become flat because it's clear that the writer is dismissive of them, right? Yes. Or it's judgmental. I think if you judge your characters, they're never going to be rounded. No, no. And it's just not interesting, right? It's not. And actually one of the things that I was the most nervous about, not the most nervous, but I was like, I felt a little bit bad for this character, my book. It was the actual character who appears just for like two seconds. But he's so flat because I'm making fun of it, right? And I mean, there is a function for a flat character in a book, but I mean, you never want to have an unintentionally flat character or anything. But I mean, but he's flat because I am judging him. I am dismissive of him. And any character that you are approaching that way, I think that you really have to deeply interrogate why you're presenting that person that way. And if it's, and if you want to do it, then that's fine. And if there is a better way to do it, then maybe you should explore that option. But for me, it was like in my family, a lot of it is semi-autobiographical. But it's also just like so much of it is based in like my experience, but the nugget of that experience and then fictionalizing it. And because otherwise, of course, it would be boring if it was just like my childhood, right? But I was really, really nervous to write it because I thought that my family would care a lot. Yes. They did care that like they were, I think, surprised that I wrote a book. They're like, why did you write a book? So that's what she's up to. That's where you've been for the last five years. It's just a little diary book, okay. But I think that they cared because they cared just about being, like finding themselves in the work, right? And I don't know if it mattered so much to them the exact portrayal that I made of each character. It's interesting. But because I was kind to each character, right? Like even though they were flawed, it was really important to me to be kind to every character with the exception of Ben, the bachelor. Sorry. That's exactly all he is, right? I thought he wrote here a French book, the Frenchman. Oh yeah, it was really needed to. But actually, but I... Show you more. It was so real painful. Not just being in front of him, when he's self-illusional about how he's dying of redemption or whatever. He thinks he can get better. Like I was like, I hate this guy, but I can really feel pain at this person too. I guess Ben was more kind of a prop. But also it was part of the reality TV. It's part of like the whole, the circumstances of the show. But he's gonna be fine. He'll be, yeah, Ben is very successful. He is, you know, he's an influencer. Very funny. But you're saying that your mom actually felt like it helped. She felt like you understood her. Like you actually had been paying attention. Yeah, I think the fact that like, I mean, the book, Swann, the mother in the book is, I mean, very much inspired by my own mother. And not the exact same person, but very much like by experiences with her helped to build this character. And I think that when my mom, my mom actually read the book, which I was kind of shocking cause she's not a reader. And she read the book and she was, I think she was just, I was nervous and I thought that she would be mad that Swann, you know, wasn't the perfect mom. But I think that she actually really appreciated that Swann, that I recognize that Swann had a hard time. Right? Like that I wasn't just a brat. Like I think that she just thought that growing up that I just didn't notice any records or that I didn't know what she went through. And I think that that fundamental misunderstanding caused on strain in our relationship. And I think that actually writing this character and making her, you know, a fully rounded person who has a lot of problems, but isn't a bad person. Like I think my mom was like, oh, you know, like I enjoy finding the version of myself in this that you wrote. So that was really, really wonderful. I think that anytime that you're writing a character even if they're not a good person, I think that it's important to try to imagine what it would be like to be done. Right? Like even Rodier, the Frenchman, like he's a bad person, but I can understand why do you make those decisions? Because they're self-interested and he's ashamed and he feels, you know, he doesn't have anybody. So that's not the solution. There's that beautiful line about Tay and Rodier, right? She was a speck in the grander journey of his life and to meet. That's your hope, you know, your focus on that, right? Which is, you know what I mean? It's something people are interacting and colliding into each other. Suddenly you're in another country. Suddenly you're dead, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think everyone views themself as the, you know, as the protagonist in their own story, but the truth is that, like, no one cares about your birthday, right? Like, oh, just don't think I care about your birthday. Like, when you get older, you just have to start playing your birthday party. And that is, I feel like that is the truth, that is life distilled, right? Yes. Should I hand this out? Should I open up for questions? Yeah. Yes, at that time, right? Thank you. Sorry, if you just repeat the question into the mic. The one I just said? When somebody asks the question, if you repeat it. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay, yeah. Questions, questions, please. Yeah. Go ahead. So at the beginning of the talk, you mentioned that how your parents didn't talk about what had happened in their previous lives and how it was buried. Like, you didn't want to get yelled at that day. And I'm curious if this book, Your Mother Had Read It, did it open up more conversations or dialogue between what happened when she had immigrated here? Yeah, yeah. So the question, I don't know if y'all heard, was that whether or not it improved the relationship between me and my mother and talking about our history. And it actually did because when I was writing the book, I actually did ask my mother about some stories about her life growing up in Saigon. She grew up very, very privileged. She was from a very wealthy family. And I was doing this research about this like recreational club which shows up in the club called the Circus Sportee. And it was this, they had this pool and they had all these beautiful parties around the pool and they had balls and it was a recreational center but it was also kind of like this social club. And I'm so interested in this club. Like I wanted to be transported to the moment in time where people were going to that club. And then it occurred to me. I was like, my mother was a part of that moment in time where she went to that club and she went to balls. And so I was like, wow, okay, I'm gonna ask my mom about this experience. And I asked her about the club and I was like, mom, have you ever heard about the Circus Sportee? But she was like, yes, I've heard of it. You know, your aunt loved going there. And I was like, oh, did you ever go to the annual ball there? And she immediately kind of got, you know, very, she clammed up and she was kind of like, yes, I, you know, I went to hundreds of balls. Like, you know, she was like, what balls? I don't even remember. And she got very, very kind of like, you know, closed up, didn't want to talk about it. And so, you know, I was like, okay, she doesn't want to talk about it, like he's typical. And, you know, I just, I kind of like tried to imagine it on my own, did research on the recreational center, imagine this situation without her help. And when the book came out, my mom read it and she was like, she was so excited, like to see, I think, a part of her history in the book. And she said, why don't you ask me any questions about my life, like in the book? Like, I have so many stories to tell you. Like, you know, your uncle, he slept with, you know, the governmental figure's wife, and then you lost all of him, gambled away all the money, and then they wouldn't get, I was like, whoa, like, wow, these are amazing. Yeah, that's the next one. Right? The degenerate uncle. Yes. Like from the family. Yeah. So she was very excited and dig to learn that, because I think before she was like, oh, you're a writer. And then she came to, you know, we had a publication day and met at a bookstore. And there was, I mean, it was like the hometown events, like all my friends came and she was like, where are all these people here for? My book, mom, my book came out. I was like, oh, your book? Okay. And so I think that she, part of it was that like, she was excited to read herself in the book, but she also like, started to take seriously that I was storytelling. And I think that now she's interested in her story being reported in some way. So it has really improved our relationship in the way that she talks about her memories as a kid. It's hard to talk about your past, but you can come from a different place. Yeah. It's impossible. I think even when they're happy memories, they're sad because it's a past that she can no longer revisit. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for asking. I've never been like a very editing student. But I just wanted to add, any part of your book journey that, you know, it's sure that you'd be surprising about directing with agents or editors that would help them in that whole book. Yeah. I mean, basically the whole thing was like a wild ride because I will hear that question. I know they're, oh yeah. So the question was like anything interesting about the editing or publishing experience and what it was like. And the answer to that is that is that's like, they don't tell you anything. You basically, I mean, I think it's different for every writer and it really just depends on, you know, what they have created in their minds about the marketability of your book in heavy quotes. And depending on how marketable they think it is, they, you know, they invest a certain amount of resources into it and also depending on how much they paid you or if you're a debut writer. And so I was a debut writer and they, you know, they, I was really lucky because they cared about my book to the extent that they could care about it as a debut writer. You know, like I'm not Celestine or, you know, not like Anne Patchett and so it was like really exciting for them to care about it. But what I learned in the process was that like you really, you kind of, I kind of view it as like just getting like thrown around like on a boat or something. Like sometimes you, sometimes surprising they're like, they're like, what is your opinion on this? And then other times they're like, we did this thing and it's already been approved. And like silly, one of the things I was really, really surprised about was the audio book narrator. I actually got to pick the audio book narrator, which I thought was shocking. Like I just thought they were going to pick it. But then when it came to like, you know, the cover, they gave me some options for the cover and they were like, which one do you like? And I told, it was this one actually. And I was like, I like this one. And they were like, okay, we'll tell the marketing team, but no guarantees, you probably won't get it. And I was like, great, why would you ask? And you changed the title. Did you change it or did that happen along the way? I did change the title. It was called Dragon Tiger, cool. It was. And they made me in the contract, they made me agree in my contract that I would change the title. Really? Yes, they did. And I was very, very reticent to agree to it because I loved the title. Yeah. But it turns out that they were like, they were like, oh, we feel like it's hard to market books that have, you know, successive words in them like that. And we need something that has like mothers, daughters. Yes, they're like mothers, daughters, family, or like something in the title like that. And so I was like, okay, like, I doubt that you'll find the title that I'll ever like. And then my editor gave me a list in the first title I liked. That's personal. It turns out I'm not as original as I thought. I was like, you will never find a title that I'd like ever again. But yeah, it's just, I think it really depends. And I mean, like the other thing that was really, really shocking to me was like when my paperback came out, they, you know those like theater guys that are in the back of paperbacks? In my mind, I was like, a group of professionals is writing this. They have hired someone who has the know-how to write this. My editor gets me and she's like, hey, do you want to write a reader's guide in your paperback? And I was like, I was like, well, what if I don't? And she was like, well, then there won't be one. Okay, so this is on me to write. So yeah, like everything is held together by strings. And it's very hard to tell if things are social or professional. Yeah, yeah, it's a dance party. Yeah, yeah, towards dinner or something like that. Somebody. Do you feel like there were places that you, you know, like were you able to figure out where to hold your ground versus where to be totally flexible? Is that the sense? Yeah, there were places. I mean, I think that that always happened on the line level. That they're really big stuff I learned to really chill out about like the titles and the cover because I felt like if it was that important to them then it would just make it, I didn't want to sour our relationship, you know what I mean? But the places where I really held strong were on the line level where they were suggesting edits that I felt would change the stylistic voice of the book. And a lot of it was like, you know, the copy editor was like, this isn't dramatically correct. And I was like, I know. The copy editor. Yeah, they're real sticklers for the rules. But yeah, I think that if you're going to hold your ground anywhere, it should be at that kind of granular level. Or there's nothing. Yeah, please. Yeah, any more questions? Oh, no, sorry. How often was the communication between your editor and the copy editor? In the beginning, it was very frequent. And he would, you know, the, especially during the edit stage, it was almost constant. It was kind of like, you know, she would send me a version of the story and then I would respond to the track changes and then I would send them back and then she'd be like, okay, like I'm going to respond to it again. And we went through that like, you know, I couldn't even tell you how many times we edited the book. But at that point, it wasn't until like final manuscript edits were in that it kind of, you know, tapered off. And I didn't really hear from her. And it was like, you know, I didn't hear from her for a long time. And then she'd be like, hey, don't forget about this thing or, hey, there's a marginable promotion. Maybe you should post it about it. But it was very much like, I really learned, I really understood from interacting with people behind the scenes that there's so many books, right? Like there are so many books and there's not that many editors and they're working on so many books at the same time. And so it was really, you know, interesting to think about like how my book was kind of floating in this weird sphere of influence where it was like, you know, it really, I feel like the editor relationship is so important because they really do go to bat for your book in the giant company, you know, like in Harper Collins is gigantic. Like there's like a million, like so many books happening at the same time. And so because I had a good relationship with my editor, she would take my book to, you know, the big meeting, the company-wide meeting or whatever, and she would push for my book to be marketed better. And I think that that was because we talked a lot and we had a good relationship. And but that's not the case for everyone. I was really lucky. Yeah. I mean, it had a wonderful time review on its day of publication. Yeah. And the date came out. I was sitting around here in the waterfall. Yeah. That was pure luck. Really? That's a big deal. Yeah. It's hard to get in there. They don't review that much anymore. Yeah. I was really surprised that they did that. Yeah. That was good. I like to leave it to you. Yeah. 22% of the time. Yes! Some people get, you know, sometimes they get reviews in the New York Times that are like, this book sucks. And you're like an agent getting a book in the New York Times book review in the New York Times. I like it. I like it. Watch the porn. This is an option. This is an option. More questions please. Yeah. Thank you. Well, question. Researching journey is very fun and is supposed to be a very useful activity. A lot of my research was happening. So what is the question? Oh, I'm so sorry. No, no, not at all. The question was, what was my researching journey like? And a lot of my research happened with like, newspaper archives. And so I'd go back in newspaper archives to read newspaper articles about, you know, what happened on this day in, you know, 1974, whatever. And then a lot of it was also just watching YouTube videos of a historical event, like, you know, just like news coverage of a particular historic event. And then also I was, there's this, this blog called Sidenere that is written by all these kind of like diasporic Vietnamese people around the world. And they write, I mean, it's a very, what I learned is that there's like a whole community of people, of course, who have left Vietnam and live all over the world now. And they are writing about like a time gone past. Like, I think it's common with a lot of diasporic communities. Like, there's places that you could never go back to, but it exists in your memory. And so a lot of the Sidenere is documenting these kind of places in Vietnam that no longer exist. And so weirdly, I found a lot of stuff there. And they had like primary sources on there, like photographs they had gotten from, you know, of particular moments. And I did like research on the types of cars that people were driving in Vietnam at that time. A lot of people were driving through Joe. Like, what's your French, right? What's your French? And so it was really, it was really interesting. Because what I learned when I was writing was like every single little detail, I just don't know, right? Like, and you come upon these kind of roadblocks while you're writing, like, okay, this character is going to be driving to her rubber plantation. What car will she drive? And I just realized I did not know. So I had to kind of think about the research in that way. Like, okay, I'm not necessarily just Googling, like, what would a Vietnamese woman drive in 1952 in Vietnam? But I'm looking at, you know, cars in Vietnam, like there because there's car buffs, right, that are like really interesting stuff. So it was like a lot of like weird, I wasn't necessarily setting out to look for a specific thing. It often was I was writing something and then I would come upon a thing I didn't know. And then I would start to unravel the ball of information in that way. Yeah. I actually was, Say the question. Should I say? Yeah, you should, because I keep forgetting. No, I don't. So let me ask that. So that children of immigrants, what is it like if you want to be a fiction writer and you come from a an immigrant family, whereas the pressure often in immigrant families needs to go in, needs to go into STEM and these kind of more stable professions, right? Yeah. Is that fair enough? Yeah. Yeah, I think that I was really, I again was very lucky because my dad was also, okay. So to start off, I was nervous that my parents did not want me to be a writer because like, I mean, come on, being a writer is like, it's like, how can you do that? There's no money in it. Like, you know, it's just you have to just really love it in order to do it. And my parents came and my dad was an engineer, a biomedical engineer at a hospital. And, you know, my mom was a stay-at-home mom, but she took on odd jobs and she's like a paralegal. They were very practical people. And so growing up, I was very, very nervous to be honest with them about lots of things, right? And when I got to undergraduate, I, they make you declare majors. I declared a business, a business major, which I thought was very practical. I was like, oh, they'll love this. I can be a business major. He knows the betting. And I'll do my own thing on the side. Turns out being a business major is hard. And so I enrolled in all of these classes that were like, you know, I had to do like business calc, which is like calculus for dumb people. And I still failed it. I was still so bad at it. I had to do, you know, accounting. And accounting actually was the class that I was like, I am not doing this anymore. Like, these accountants are geniuses because I don't know how to read this chart. And I, so we did really, really badly that semester because I, you know, missed the drop date. I had all these classes. I did terribly in them. And I was required to go to the counselor. And my parents were like, what's going on? Why are you doing so badly? So I had to go to the school counselor. And the counselor was like, okay, what are you good at? And I was like, the only thing I'm good at is English. And she said, okay, you're going to be an English major. Would you like to do literature or creative writing? And just like in that moment, in the snack decision moment, I was like, creative writing? Now I'm a writer, I don't know. So that, you know, I, we didn't, me and my parents didn't talk in that way. So I think that they were just like, just get your degree, whatever. And, and unbeknownst to them, I embarked on this journey where I had to take these workshops. I, and I was immersed in this world that I didn't even know I, you know, I could do studies in. I was reading poetry and, you know, books, then I was writing, and it was for great. And it was amazing. And I was really excited about that. And when I graduated, of course, I didn't have a job. So I was an English major. And I went home and I, you know, interned a couple of places and I lived at home and I worked, you know, my parents like, you know, you need to figure it out. So I applied for graduate school in MFA, creative writing. And the first time I did it, I got, I applied for four places and they all rejected me. And it was a huge wake up call. Like I was like, of course, I'll get into Brown. It'll be amazing. And then Brown was like, we don't care about you. And so I applied again. And I got into University of Mississippi and they gave me a scholarship to go. And it was really competitive. Like they, you know, like they only accept a couple of people a year. So I was like, Oh, this is exciting. And I told my dad, I was like, dad, this is something my dad will understand more school. So like, dad, I got into a graduate program. And he was like, Oh, what, what is it for? I said, it's for creative writing. And I braced myself for him to be like, this is stupid. Like, why are you going to create a writing program? And to my shock, he was so excited for me. He was like, they're paying you money to go and write stories. And he was like, you know, what I learned from this interaction was that actually my dad was also a writer. And that he was like a really big part of the Vietnamese literary community. And he, you know, he was doing all this research and he was writing on the side. He was obsessed with his book. And all this to say, like, of course, every Asian family doesn't have a dad who's secretly a literature book, right? Like, of course, I lucked out. But I think what I learned from that was that I had created this narrative in my mind about the way that my parents would react. And I made a bunch of decisions based on what would make them happy. And then I ended up getting a bunch of Fs in, you know, business counting accounting. And I think that it was because I had created, I built up in my mind that they would care that they would be really upset with me. And maybe they would have. But also the alternative was that I made these decisions that were horrible for my own, you know, for my own life. And because I embraced it, because I ended up doing this program, regardless of what my dad's reaction would be, I ended up learning about my own father and I learned about my own family in a way that I didn't before. So again, it's not to say that like every family is the same, like some Asian parents might just own you, which was very common. But like, at the same time, it's like, do you want that? Or do you want to own be a business person? I don't even know what my plan was for that, right? But I was like, I'll be a business major, like I didn't have a plan. So I think that that just being really confident in my own choices and thinking about like, what do I actually want? And it's also a very Western way of thinking as well. And I acknowledge that like, to be able to say like, I'm not going to make a choice based on my parents is a very Western way of thinking, but I think that's just like a choice that you have to make. Yeah. So I just want to thank everybody for coming and