So when Hannah kept butting into the climactic scene, Ng realized she needed to collapse all of the fragmented narratives into a single story and weave them together with an omniscient narrator. In a novel where the power of the story comes from the subtle shifts in how different characters react to the same events, this made for confusing reading. At one point when the parents fight, we see it from the mom’s perspective but then have to wait many pages to see how the dad reacts. To get each character’s reaction to certain events, she had to rehash it multiple times.

Ng was on the third draft and this structure had been a nagging problem for a while. On Saturday, October 25th at 4:45 p.m., Ng will appear on the 'Fiction: Love and Loss' Panel at the Boston Book Festival. A blank line clearly signaled the switch in viewpoint. The four family members had been taking turns telling the story and revealing their secrets, each section assiduously sticking to the narrator’s point of view until he or she passed the baton to the next. This intrusion went against the point of view rules Ng had established for the novel. When Ng was rewriting the climatic scene of her novel, a confrontation between Nath, the brother of the family, and a neighbor he thinks is hiding something about his sister’s death, the little sister Hannah kept piping up to interject her viewpoint. Upstairs at Café Algiers in Harvard Square, surrounded by books and copies of old drafts, I listened as Ng dissected her struggles with the omniscient voice, a surprisingly tricky narrative voice that she realized she needed near the end of her novel. I was struck by the ability of the novel to etch with crystalline clarity the forces holding a family in place and I asked Ng if she would let me peek behind the scenes of her writing process. The book is a subtle and powerful exploration of grief that also tells the larger story of a biracial family (a Caucasian mother and Asian father) living in small-town Ohio in the 1970s. Celeste Ng This article is more than 8 years old.Ĭeleste Ng’s recent novel “Everything I Never Told You” tells the story of a family unraveling in the wake of the mysterious drowning death of its favorite daughter.

Books written by celeste ng