Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the ALA’s Alex Award, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Ohioana Award, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Massachusetts Book Award.

Celeste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize. Celeste and I first connected on Twitter after I read her book, and she graciously agreed to chat with me about the novel, her writing routine, being part of and writing about interracial families, how to address issues of race and representation without being pigeonholed, writing outside one’s own culture, what she’s working on now, and much more!

Nicole Chung: Celeste, I have told you this so many times it must be getting old by now, but I absolutely loved your novel. My husband bought it for me, and then I bought it for half a dozen of my friends and relatives, and every single one of them sang its praises. My sister particularly enjoyed it; her exact words were: “Thank you. And damn you, too. By the end I was crying and slightly traumatized, but I loved it.”

How did the idea for this novel come to you? Was it difficult working on such a tragic story, and why did you decide to focus on such tough issues — misunderstanding and racism and unfulfilled dreams and the grief of losing a child?

Celeste Ng: Thank you! Both for the kind words and for sharing. The novel emerged, as most of my work does, when several seemingly unrelated things collided in my mind and I had to try and figure out why my mind was connecting them. My husband happened to tell me a story about his school days: when he was about 8, he was at a friend’s house when the friend pushed his own little sister into a pond in the backyard. She was pulled out immediately by her parents, but I kept thinking, what if they hadn’t been there? What was the relationship between this brother and sister like before he pushed her — and what was it like after?

I’m sitting alone in Girvan, Scotland, on one of the longest days of the year, looking at the late sun and thinking about the women who all of a sudden caught fire.

There were a good number of them. Enough, in the 1700s, to constitute a chapter in the medical literature. The most-quoted British case is Grace Pitt, a 60ish female whose charred corpse was discovered one morning in 1744—like “a log of wood, consumed by a fire.” But there was no fire in the grate. And nothing else in the room had been singed. Pitt was caught, it seemed, in a strange flame that came from within.

Until recently, I knew of spontaneous combustion only from Krook in Bleak House, whose demise seemed ridiculous to me before I picked up the novel and unblinkingly terrifying when I got to the passage in question. But the eerie little tradition that Dickens extends makes a man like Krook exceptional as well as late. (Bleak House began publication in 1852.) In the eighteenth century, those who burn are often as mysterious as Krook; many are poor; many are single or widowed; almost all are old. As Dickens himself wrote in a letter, however, the real-life cases were “all of women.”

How did combustion happen? Of course it didn’t. But one cause was reasonable enough: gin. A dissembling liquid— sometimes clear as water, sometimes cloudy with dubious flavors. The newest, most dangerous of the hard liquors. Those who drank too much soaked their very flesh and blood in its treachery. Fire was the just consequence.

“Keep your hands to yourself,” I say to Alma, one of the pre-K students at my school. Alma narrows her eyes and gives me a look that says Go to hell. She is holding a sharpened pencil, readying it to poke another student. “I’m watching you. Put it away.”

I see my former student, Claudia, running from the sidewalk into the street. Why aren’t the teachers stopping her? I look around for the music teacher who usually monitors the buses and notice that everyone else is looking the same way. There are other students behind Claudia, also running, toward something behind a bus that I could not see. I realize that while I was talking to Alma I had heard several loud bangs, BAM BAM BAM, like a bus had crashed, and the noise is still echoing in my head as I watch the children run. I am still registering the noise, the running, when I see Ms. Viola gesture wildly in the street and yell something incomprehensible into the walkie-talkie.

I immediately look at Jorge. The youngest pre-kindergartner, I am convinced his parents lied about his age so he could attend school. He is barely big enough to carry the backpack hugging his bony shoulders. He punches someone on the leg and the student cries out; I reach for Jorge’s hand and am moving him to sit on a patch of grass next to me when I hear screaming.

“It’s a mother,” I hear someone say on the walkie-talkie, the voice echoing. “Dear God,” I think I hear them say; I can’t tell. I have been highly sensitive since I was fired from my fourth-grade class. Am I imagining a catastrophe?

I look back at the students sitting along the low-slung school wall, waiting for their parents, making sure to watch them and not get distracted again. Probably it’s just some accident.

Later I will find out that, fifteen feet away from where I stood, a group of children — including Claudia — surrounded a woman’s body on the sidewalk. Her head was in a pool of blood, her palms facing the sky, fingers curled, as if she had simply dropped a note on the way to pick up her daughter from school. It was 3:10 when she was shot, walking to pick up her daughter from school, walking past the apartments where many of our students live.

I always wonder if Kareem was one of the students who saw her.

When it comes to literary daydreaming, I’m not one for those imaginary dinner parties, with artisanally curated assemblages of Great Authors of All Time swapping deft bon mots between courses. Mostly, I’m sure, I’d end up worrying about Emily Dickinson’s food allergies and regretting having brought Nathanael West and Jacqueline Susann into the same room (hey, you choose your Great Authors, I’ll choose mine). Also, I don’t have a lot of chairs.

I’m a copy editor by trade—a tinkerer with commas, a corrector of faulty grammar, a watchdog against tics and clichés—and my notion of an ideal tête-a-tête with, say, Edith Wharton would run less toward swapping aperçus over canapés and more toward seeing if I could persuade her to stop loading the dreaded “the fact that” into every third paragraph, as she was wont to do. Or perhaps instead of keeping an anxious eye on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wineglass I might more valuably let him know that he needn’t hang an adverb on every goddamn speech tag in The Great Gatsby.

Well, we all have our particular ideas of fun.

But what happens when the copyeditorial fantasy comes to corporeal life and the presumptuous red pencil wielder is faced with a stack of very real pages written by a very real—and very dead—Great Author of All Time, a Great Author of All Time who happens to be his Favorite Author of All Time?

Let me tell you.

I don’t recall when I was first well and truly bewitched by Shirley Jackson. Sure, like just about everybody else in America, I read “The Lottery” in junior high, no doubt in that same short-story anthology with “Leiningen Versus the Ants,” “The Most Dangerous Game,” and Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden Party,” and no doubt I liked it, but a steady diet of ABC Movies of the Week—Olivia de Havilland in The Screaming Woman!—had acclimated me to menacing story arcs and macabre twist endings, and I can’t say that reading Jackson’s exquisitely slow-boiling account of the day poor Tessie Hutchinson is not crowned Queen for a Day made a life-changing impression on me.

I can be pretty sure that I found my way to Jackson by way of a late-night telecast—back in the days when to catch a late-night telecast one actually had to stay up late—of The Haunting, director Robert Wise’s 1963 filming of Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House. The movie features a scene, which I can still barely stand to watch by myself, in which Julie Harris and Claire Bloom are beset by a spectral something-or-other whaling away cacophonously at their hopefully locked bedroom door. But as nerve-racking as the movie is, I soon learned that the novel, which I first owned in a movie tie-in paperback that eventually fell apart from overreading, is even more effectively chain-rattling.