Book Exploder: Celeste Ng - Little Fires Everywhere

Song Exploder

Hrishikesh Hirway

Music

4.8 • 6.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2022

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Celeste Ng is an American writer and author of three novels. Her second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, was published in 2017 and became a #1 New York Times bestseller. A television adaptation of the novel, starring Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington, premiered in 2020.

Little Fires Everywhere is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and centers around two families—the mothers of these families especially. One family is upper-middle class with a “typical” suburban structure: a mom, a dad, and four kids; the other is a single mom, Mia, and her daughter, who are newcomers to the town.

In her conversation with Susan, Celeste discusses a flashback to how a young Mia first became interested in photography as a medium.

For more, visit bookexploder.com/episodes/celeste-ng.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Book Exploder, where authors break down a passage from their work
0:06.2	to show us how they write.
0:07.6	I'm Rishi Keishirui.
0:09.2	And I'm Susan Orleen.
0:12.7	Today, I'm speaking with Celeste Eng, author of Little Fire's Everywhere.
0:21.3	Little Fire's Everywhere is Celeste Eng's second novel.
0:24.0	It came out in 2017 and was named Amazon's Best Novel of the Year.
0:28.0	It was a New York Times number one bestseller, and it was turned into a TV show starring
0:32.3	Reese Witherspoon and Carrie Washington.
0:34.9	The story is set in Shaker Heights, which is a suburb of Cleveland, and it centers around
0:39.2	two families, really the mothers of these families, especially.
0:43.0	One family is sort of a quote unquote typical suburban family, a mom, a dad, and four kids,
0:49.2	and the other is a single mom, Mia, and her daughter, who were newcomers to the town.
0:54.0	And so, Susan, the passage that you and Celeste talk about is kind of outside the main story.
0:58.7	It's really more of a flashback into the backstory of one of the characters.
1:02.8	Yeah, so this was really an interesting passage to talk about, because it is about how one
1:09.5	of the characters, Mia, who is an artist, how she developed her technique.
1:17.2	And a lot of what I was curious about was how do you develop an idea of how one of your
1:24.8	characters develops as an artist.
1:27.6	It's sort of a nesting doll kind of problem.
1:31.8	And it was really interesting to talk to Celeste about how she did that.
1:36.3	Here's Celeste Ang in conversation with Susan.
	...

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