I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still

watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,

soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,

Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago, join me as I share how the genre

began, their social impact, and why these stories endure. Listen, wherever you get your podcast.

From WB.B.E.Z Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is The Nerdat Book Club.

It's just like a regular book club, except sometimes the author stops by.

Our October selection is Celeste Inge's third novel, Our Missing Hearts.

It's about Noah, also known as Bird, who's in grade school when the novel starts.

He lives in a sort of post-democratic America where access to

information is scarce and anti-Asian racism is everywhere. His mom, who is a Chinese American poet,

disappeared a couple years ago. So now it's just him and his white dad. This is a book about the

power of myth and motherhood and the slippery slope towards fascism. That's all I'm going to say for now since this is a spoiler-free interview. But I am super excited to introduce you to Celeste in Celeste. Welcome to Annette. Thank you so much for having me on. So I sort of hinted at this in the introduction, but the America that you paint in this book is one that is in crisis. Kids are

being taken from parents. Books are being turned into toilet paper. Authorities are inspecting the

mail. Civil liberties really don't exist anymore. I wish I could say this was difficult to picture,

but here we are. You know, I feel like in the past I've talked to a number of authors who, especially as they write books reflecting on racism, say this isn't surprising to me at all that this is timely because this is a reality that I'm constantly living with. Are you surprised at how timely this book feels at this moment? I'm not. I wish it weren't the case, but I went into this book sort of thinking,

you know, I wanted everything in it to have roots in reality. So nothing in here is totally made

up out of whole cloth. The idea of, you know, family separations you said, or of books being banned

or of civil liberties being challenged is not anything new

as I think we're all sort of becoming aware. It's just sort of got the volume turned up in this

particular world. So structurally, this book, especially the beginning of it, felt a lot to me

like The Handmaid's Tale, which you actually mentioned in your author's note as

...