2022-10-13
19 分钟You're listening to Book Exploder,
where authors break down a passage from their work to show us how they write.
I'm Rishi K. Shirwe.
And I'm Susan Orlean.
Today, I'm speaking with Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere.
Little Fires Everywhere is Celeste Ng's second novel.
It came out in 2017 and was named Amazon's Best Novel of the Year.
It was a New York Times number one bestseller,
and it was turned into a TV show starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington.
The story is set in Shaker Heights, which is a suburb of Cleveland,
and it centers around two families, really the mothers of these families especially.
One family is sort of a quote-unquote typical suburban family, a mom, a dad, and four kids.
And the other is a single mom, Mia, and her daughter, who are newcomers to the town.
And so, Susan, the passage that you and Celeste talk about is kind of outside the main story.
It's really more of a flashback into the backstory of one of the characters.
Yes,
this was really an interesting passage to talk about because it is about how one of the characters,
Mia, who is an artist, how she developed her technique.
And a lot of what I was curious about was how do you develop an idea of how one of your characters develops as an artist.
It's sort of a nesting doll kind of problem.