4 takeaways from Celeste Ng and Jennifer De Leon’s author talk

Book Club

The authors joined our Book Club and the Globe Summit for a conversation about their new novels, “Our Missing Hearts” and “Borderless.”

For award-winning writers Celeste Ng and Jennifer De Leon, innovation is at the heart of storytelling. Ng and De Leon’s new novels, “Our Missing Hearts” and “Borderless,” tackle big themes like racism, migration, and class and invite the next generation to broaden their understanding of the world through fiction. 

Both authors were our guests for this month’s Book Club discussion and Globe Summit panel. This year’s theme, Today’s Innovators. Tomorrow’s Leaders, invites leading voices in our culture to have important conversations about technology, art, business, health, and more. Globe Summit runs through Thursday and can be streamed live via the Globe Summit website. Tune in for conversations with Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, Red Sox manager Alex Cora, and gun control activist David Hogg, and other leaders. 

Ng is certainly a leader in the literary world. Her previous novels, “Everything I Never Told You,” and “Little Fires Everywhere,” were loved by critics and readers alike. The latter was adapted into a Hulu miniseries starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington and was the genesis of her most recent work, “Our Missing Hearts.”

Both books center on a relationship between a creative mother and her child, but while “Little Fires Everywhere” depicts this as a loving, supportive bond, Ng’s newest novel takes the opposite approach. In it, 12-year-old Bird is estranged from his Chinese-American mother because her poetry has made her a target of the United States government.

“As I was finishing up [Little Fires Everywhere], I started thinking, what if that relationship wasn’t so harmonious? What if there was a creative mother and her child just didn’t understand why she needed to do these things and maybe even saw it as a threat?” Ng shared at the Summit. “And then the rest of the story came from there.”

As artists, both writers look at familiar stories through different lenses. De Leon’s newest novel, “Borderless,” is a story about a young girl crossing the U.S. border to seek asylum, but the author said she was careful to offer a different perspective. Seventeen-year-old Maya takes the harrowing journey not because she’s eager to reach the U.S., but because she’s left with few other choices. 

“I felt really pushed to write a story that is about a young girl in Guatemala who actually loves her life, who isn’t dreaming of coming north because that narrative is very valuable, but it’s been told,” De Leon said. 

Ng and De Leon are members of the same writing group and saw each other’s novels come together before the pages reached readers. They joined us for a conversation about their writing process, how current events inspire their work, and the importance of literature for all generations.

Read on for takeaways from their discussion and watch their full discussion.

Ng and De Leon find themselves returning to familiar wells in their writing.

Neither Ng nor De Leon are first-time novelists, but both writers said they explore similar themes across their creative projects. For Ng her stories often center on families, struggles with identity, and how art can shape lives. 

“As writers, we come back to certain themes and certain ideas. And it’s not that we write the same book, I think they’re all very different from each other, but that we’re constantly turning that idea,” Ng said. “It’s almost like one of those 20-sided dice. You turn it and you see another face and then in the next book, you turn it a different way. And you’re getting a fuller picture of what it is.”

As a child of immigrants, much of De Leon’s writing is tied to Guatemala. “Borderless” is set there and after completing the novel, she still feels drawn to writing about her family’s homeland in future projects. 

“I’m inspired to write more books set in Guatemala and the one that I am working on now is set in Guatemala. But then [I want] to dip into the history and…use history as my palette,” De Leon said. “There’s so much hidden history that I want to bring to light, but through story.”

Both novels took a lot of research to complete. 

De Leon first started to think about writing “Borderless” in 2018 as protests against the treatment of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border spread across the country. She was pregnant at the time and unable to participate in the protests, so she turned to writing as a way to process the moment. Later, as her novel became more fully fleshed out, she went to the border to get a first-hand look at the story she was depicting. 

“Our writing group encouraged me and it felt like yeah, go do it and collect the the clay. Then come back and mold it and see what comes of it,” De Leon shared. 

Ng’s book is also about children being separated from their families, but in a world slightly different from ours. In the dystopian world she created, economic chaos blamed on China causes the U.S. government to enact laws to preserve “American culture” that are ultimately used to keep families apart. Ng turned to the Cambridge Public Library to do research on authoritarian regimes past and present.

“It felt really important to look to history, to look to the real world because that’s not just an imagined scenario. We’ve seen that happen many times, in many places, all over the world,” Ng said. “And we might be watching it happen again if we don’t learn from the past.”

Books are invaluable resources for young people.

“Our Missing Hearts” is an adult novel with a child protagonist, a move Ng hopes makes the book accessible to both adult and adolescent readers. The decision to have Bird, the novel’s narrator, be 12 years old was a deliberate one. 

“I realized that, in some ways, this story was going to be about a person waking up to the world they’re in and it felt like the right perspective to start off with a child who is gradually, as we say, coming of age,” she said, adding, “In a lot of ways books are a safe way for young people to encounter some things in the world for the first time. And it’s also a safe space in which they can grapple with this and figure out what they’re thinking about.” 

De Leon takes her engagement with young readers off the page as well by making classroom visits to talk with young people about her journey as a writer and encourage them to read lots of different stories. She often asks herself, “What will they have to pass on to the next generation, and the next?”

“These are going to be the politicians, the doctors, the teachers,” she said. “In that way, it’s actually scary. I don’t have time for writer’s block, right? I’ve got to get a cup of coffee and get to it because it feels urgent in that way.”

Fiction is an important tool for “bearing witness” and building understanding. 

Both writers say fiction has a unique way of connecting with the public and inspiring empathy. In their novels, De Leon and Ng draw from real-life events to create fictional scenarios, but the work is no less impactful.

“My hope is that through story, people are able to hold it more, they empathize with people more,” De Leon said. “The way our brains are wired, we remember story more than a set of facts. Both are important, but this is one way that I feel like I can contribute.”

Ng shared that novels have often allowed her to gain a deeper understanding of the issues she cares most about.

“I think that there are lots of people out there who would consider themselves well-read and intellectual but who might be reached through a novel and through the empathy that it asks them to display where they might ignore a headline,” she said. 

Ahead of our Book Club event, Ng and De Leon joined Globe Today to discuss “Our Missing Hearts” and “Borderless.” Watch their interview and sign up for future Book Club updates below.