Jean Chen Ho, FIONA AND JANE

Totally Booked with Zibby

Zibby Owens

Connection, Inspiration, Moms, Entertainment, Arts, Reading, Books, Parenting, Literary

4.4 • 602 Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2022

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Zibby is joined by Jean Chen Ho to talk about her debut novel, Fiona and Jane, which started when Jean began weaving together short stories about the same pair of Asian American friends. The two discuss Jean's daily writing process, as well as why she's now less daunted to complete her upcoming standalone novel and the research she's currently conducting for it. Jean also shares what inspired her to create this book's piano instructor storyline and casually mentions that she's completing her PhD in literature and creative writing at USC.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Vivi Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast. Moms don't have time to read books.
0:07.5	And speaking of books, I have two of my own books coming out this spring and summer.
0:12.7	Princess Charming is a picture book, which debuts on April 19th. And Bookends, a memoir of love, loss, and literature.
0:20.5	Comes out on July 1st, and it is truly a labor of love.
0:24.0	I hope you'll pre-order, order, and join me on tour as I go across the country.
0:28.5	You can find out more at Zibiowens.com or bookendsmemoir.com.
0:34.1	And you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens because I always post about everything. Enjoy the show.
0:41.3	Jean Chen Ho is the author of Fiona and Jane. She is a doctoral candidate in creative writing and
0:47.0	literature at the University of Southern California where she is a Dorn's Life fellow in fiction.
0:52.3	Jean has an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and her writing has been published in the Georgia Review, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, Guernica, the Rumpus, Apache, McSweeney's, Internet Tendency, and others. She was born in Taiwan, grew up in Southern California, and lives in Los Angeles. Welcome, Gene. Thank you so so much for coming on moms don't have time to read
1:11.4	books to discuss Fiona and Jane. Hi, Zibby. It's so nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
1:17.1	And thanks for giving me the world news update. I will be checking in with you for my
1:21.6	updates from now on. Oh my gosh. Just imagine. Oh, the world is so crazy. Okay. Anyway, Fiona and Jane, let's talk about this. Fiona, we go into this setting. We have a secret come out right away. There's something with her dad. It has ripples on the rest of the story. Things aren't what they seem necessarily. And as a
1:45.6	young woman, she has to figure out sort of how to deal with everything. And then, of course,
1:49.5	we have her friend and her story and how everything intersects. How did you come up with this?
1:54.7	Why these characters, why you, give me the whole story. Just like tell me the whole story.
1:59.8	Yeah. I mean, I, before I started
2:02.1	working on this book, or I knew that I was working on a book, I was just writing short stories,
2:06.8	trying stuff out. And I had always been interested in writing stories about friendship between
2:13.0	women and girls. And, you know, I think before I started working on this project, I was sort of
2:20.6	playing around with just thinking about how Asian American women relate to one another.
2:25.9	And because I am, you know, from Southern California, I also found that most of my stories
	...

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