I was lucky enough to read several drafts of her first novel, Everything I Never Told You (Penguin Press), and to see it evolve from an ambitious first draft to the gorgeous, brilliant book that just published with starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal. Over the years, our friendship has deepened as we’ve read and edited each other’s work, and helped build Fiction Writers Review. I would read anything this person writes, I thought, and told her as much. Her prose was delicious her stories, dark and moving. We were in the same fiction workshop every semester, and I remember devouring her stories with a hunger that felt both familiar and new. This conversation originally appeared on June 30, 2014.Ĭeleste Ng and I met almost exactly a decade ago in the University of Michigan’s Creative Writing MFA program (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program). The two discuss Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You. Our first feature is a conversation between founding editor Anne Stameshkin and Celeste Ng, who was one of FWR’s original contributors, as well as the former editor of our blog. Who may be the only one who knows the truth about what happened.Editor’s Note: For the first several months of 2022, we’ll be celebrating some of our favorite work from the last fourteen years in a series of “ From the Archives” posts. Youngest of the family, Hannah, who observes far more than anyone realizes-and

Lydia's older brother, Nathan, isĬertain the neighborhood bad boy Jack is somehow involved. Responsible party, no matter what the cost. Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to find a James, consumed by guilt, sets out on a reckless path that mayĭestroy his marriage. When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. Homemaker, in James' case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with aīusy social life and the center of every party.

Pursue-in Marilyn's case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a Parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to

Inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Lydia is theįavorite child of Marilyn and James Lee their middle daughter, a girl who So begins the story in this exquisite debut novel about aĬhinese American family living in a small town in 1970s Ohio. Novel about a mixed-race family living in 1970s Ohio and the tragedy that willĮither be their undoing or their salvation

Everything i told you