Poured Over: Jessamine Chan on The School for Good Mothers
“One thing that I was interested in doing is making literal the surveillance that parents feel every day, because there is the sense that you’re being watched and judged and shamed all the time.” Jessamine Chan joins us on the show to talk about her debut novel, The School for Good Mothers (think The Handmaid’s Tale meets Klara and the Sun), writing a Chinese American main character that she wanted to read, making sure her satire is laced with humor, how a self-proclaimed Luddite came to write a book like this one, and more. Featured Books: The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan, Plain Water by Anne Carson, Karate Chop by Dorothe Nors, Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, Orange World and Other Stories by Karen Russell, The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee. Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus eps on Saturdays) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher and wherever else you get your podcasts.
Full transcript of this episode:
B&N
Jessamine Chan thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over your debut novel The School for Good Mothers is just out. We are going spoiler free in this conversation by the way.
Jessamine Chan
Thanks so much for having me here. It’s great to see you.
B&N
So can we introduce listeners to Frida?
JC
Yes we can. So my novel The School for Good Mothers is about a Chinese American single mom named Frida Liu who loses custody of her toddler daughter, Harriet, after having one very bad day. So to regain custody, she has to spend a year and at a newly created government institution where she’s re-educated with mothers from across the county whose transgressions ranged from benign to horrific. So if I were to describe Frida, I would say she is in a lot of ways the Chinese American heroine I always wanted to read and who I longed for and look for in books all my life. And by that I mean she is highly flawed, she’s vulnerable, she’s self destructive. She is selfish and desirous and loving. My agent Meredith Kaffel Simonoff said it best she said “Frida is a character driven by love.” So I think that she represents a lot of what I wanted to see from a heroine of color in a story like this.
B&N
She’s really really human. I liked her quite a lot. Your publisher is comping The School for Good Mothers to The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. And I want to add another comp to that I want to add Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, and we’re going to explain why in a second. How did School for Good Mothers start for you?
JC
Well, the origin story of this book is unlike any other project in my writing life, because it really came to me fully formed, which has never ever happened before. And I’ve been writing since I was 18. And I’m now 43. So obviously, this took a while I was working at Publishers Weekly as a nonfiction reviews editor and after my 13th or 14th, try trying to get into MacDowell and Yaddo I didn’t get in. So I took my vacation days and made a little writing residency for myself at a friend’s house in upstate New York, it is very handy to have a friend with a country house, and who will generously let you go live there for two weeks. Snowed in, not speaking to the world. At the time, I was trying to write a short story collection. So I was coming up with one terrible short story idea after another and I happened to have a really good writing day. So Frida’s very bad day emerged from my very good day where I wrote for six hours like in a trance. And what emerged became the blueprint for the whole novel, it of course, took years of work and suffering to turn that promising first draft into a novel manuscript. But from that day’s writing, I had the voice of the book. Most importantly, I also had Frida and all the supporting characters, the idea for the school and pretty much her whole arc from start to finish. So I thought I was writing a very complicated, dense short story, because I’m not the kind of person who will probably ever sit down and say, today I am starting a novel or this is totally going to be my first book. I was just really finding my way into it. I tend not to be a planner with my work, or much of an outliner. And I’m sure my editors can tell you that that makes the editing conversations a little complicated in terms of defending my decisions. But really, it was the result of a couple of different things in my life that were going on. I was in my mid to late 30s. And my partner and I were trying to decide whether or not we try for a baby. And it was basically the biological clock decision was bearing down on us. And some people come to motherhood very naturally. Like the “I’ve always wanted to be a mother” kind of decision making process. But for me, it was a very tortured, ambivalent thing and felt very heavy. And it felt like the biggest decision in my life. And so the anxiety of that was part of my daily life for a really long time. And a few months before my really good writing day, I had read a story in The New Yorker by Rachel Aviv called Where Is Your Mother?, and it was about a single mom who’d left her toddler at home. And then in the course of the story, never got him back again. I didn’t have it next to me when I was working. And I didn’t even necessarily think, Oh, this is a spark. But something just planted itself in my brain because I just felt so haunted and enraged by that story. So I think there were a couple of different kernels of inspiration
B&N
When you talk about finding the voice for this novel in that one very good writing day, which is such a great story. Does that mean you started with character? Or did you start with the story because the plotting and the pacing is really spectacular.
JC
Thank you so much. I can tell you that a lot of trial and error and toil went into the plotting and pacing. I really start honestly with the rhythm of the sentences more than character or plot. And I tend not to think about theme at all when I’m working, which again is strange to hear because it’s a very big theme, big question project, but I was really just following the rhythm of the sentences and trying to follow the language into the story. I started writing fiction at Brown in the late 90s, which is a very sentence-craft oriented kind of program. And so that was my entry into writing fiction at all. So I think like that really formed how I look at the craft of storytelling, like I tend to focus much more on sentence level movement, then even big story elements, but the pacing, and the plotting really was shaped in the editing process, because I can’t even tell you how much got cut from this book. Like I could fill many other novels with the material that got cut.
B&N
So can we talk about some of your influences then when you were at Brown? Like who are the people that you learned to write sentences from?
JC
I was really lucky to get to study with a lot of amazing teachers at Brown. And it was really just happening to be lotteried into a beginning fiction workshop that got me started writing it all, because I initially was planning to be a book editor. So in another life, I could be 20 years into a publishing career. That was what I was intending to do. Because I think like a lot of first generation immigrant kids becoming an author or becoming an artist is this thing that other people do. When I was growing up there was Amy Tan, and Maxine Hong Kingston. And I think there is some truth in not thinking that that path can be for you if you don’t see anyone who looks like you’re doing it. And I was planning to take this beginning fiction workshop just so I could be a better editor one day and my teacher Jane Unrue changed my life. I wrote very bad stories in her class, but she somehow saw a spark of talent. One teacher can completely change the course of your life and I ended up studying with Robert Ariano and Robert Coover and Ben Marcus, those teachers really shaped how I saw literature and I was introduced to Anne Carson’s work very early in her publishing career, and I was reading Carole Maso and it was a really heady time. And this was also pre-internet. So I was just consuming more books than I do now. And I feel very lucky to have had those formative experiences before we all had phones. And before we could look up anything, I spent an awful lot of time at the Brown and RISD libraries. And those were very cherished experiences.
B&N
Frida finds herself at the School for Good Mothers and it’s run by women in pink lab coats. And it’s a mix of Black and Brown, and I’m including Asian in that Brown designation, and white mothers, and there are all different ages and different socio-economic backgrounds. They’re all there because they have lost custody of their children for whatever bad behavior they’ve done. And they’re each given a doll, a life size, animatronic doll, and they have a year to learn how to parent the doll. Frida names her doll Emmanuelle, and this brings me back to Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun because you make this entire concept and your current editor I think she referred to this as a “high concept barnburner” of a novel and she is not wrong. I love that line. But you make all of this very human and humane. It doesn’t read like a stunt. I was really invested in Frida and her success. I was really consumed by the story. So how do you balance this big picture, big ideas novel with your characters humanity?
JC
That is a really good, hard question. And I think what I saw as the heart of the book was that it’s about a mother fighting to win back her child and all the big ideas are surrounding that. But the central quest I think kept me focused. And I think after I did decide to have a baby and was in the trenches of motherhood, I think Frida became a lot more relatable and vulnerable and more loving. And so I think her love for Harriet became a lot more tangible on the page after I had something to draw from because honestly, I know that the book is described as harrowing by some people, but it was actually much darker in the earlier versions, which I know is a little hard to swallow, because it’s a pretty dark book. But I think Frida became a much more competent parent as I became a parent, because before I had my daughter, I could really only envision what would be hard and restrictive about it. It’s very hard to imagine what the fun parts will be like, or the strangeness of the person you grew in your body starting to talk. And like it’s just very strange. I was very awake to the surreality of it, we probably cut 40 pages from the school section. But in the course of the writing over many years, I cut hundreds of scenes because in the earlier drafts, I don’t think I understood what kind of lessons would be most compelling because I had the mothers doing much more complicated stuff, because I didn’t know that just getting a toddler out the door is this 45 minute gauntlet of feelings that we just had this morning before I got on the Zoom with you.
B&N
The dolls are programmed to collect data from the mothers and whenever I come across tech in novels, my first thought is— but tech is programmed by people and people bring their own inherent biases to programming any kind of tech. And my sort of immediate response was, oh, no, the deck is stacked against all the mothers and they are learning things like “I’m a bad mother, but I’m learning how to be good.” They are literally being taught to say that. There’s another line that they’re taught to about “I’m a narcissist”, and I’m like, yeah, but a narcissist would never say that because they don’t know they’re a narcissist. And so these instructors, we don’t even know if these instructors are mothers.
JC
We don’t know much about the instructors. And I did deliberately try to limit some of the backstory. I’m completely thrilled out of my mind to have any comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale, which is one of the greatest books ever written, so it’s beyond an honor to be mentioned in adjacent phrases in anything. But one way it’s really different is that that is much more extensive world building than I’m doing in this book. And so yes, the deck is stacked against the mothers and yes, there’s inherent bias. One thing that I was interested in doing is making literal the surveillance that parents feel every day, because there is the sense that you’re being watched and judged and shamed all the time. So the women in pink lab coats and the data that’s being collected is a way of embodying and making that literal. One very kind reader told me that she felt like the women pink lab coats represented how she feels taking her baby to the playground in Brooklyn every day, just the sense that any mistake is, is going to be noted.
B&N
But it seems like that is a lot of the dialogue online, whether it’s Instagram or Twitter, you’re not just being judged as mothers in the real world, you’ve got people who’ve never met you or your kid weighing in on whether or not you’re a good parent. And the consequences are really significant for Black and Brown mothers in a way that they aren’t for white parents. And that’s something that you’re talking about in this book, too. And that’s where it gets a little harrowing. Because this is really true to life in more ways than one.
JC
Well, I wanted to gesture toward some of the phenomenon in the real world. That kind of surveillance and punishment that I’m referencing primarily happens to poor Black and Brown women in communities of color. So it wouldn’t necessarily even happen to someone like Frida. But I wanted to tell this story through an Asian American lens because she is an outsider in every way. She’s an outsider because her race, but she’s also an outsider because of her class. I wanted to work with those dynamics, but also reference the larger tragedy of courts taking children from their parents, I probably shouldn’t have been this surprised because this has been happening for decades. But I was genuinely surprised to learn how pervasive it is, and how much that depends on circumstance. Like in the reading that I did, it was surprising to find out how often it happens because of poverty.
B&N
Yeah, the termination of parental rights is something that happens far too quickly. And it feels like the criteria really capricious. And it really depends on who the people who were in the system are. But Frida is the only Asian American in the school. So she doesn’t quite fit anywhere. She doesn’t really have a peer group. She’s trying to make friends, but she’s really kind of at a loss. And she’s also not the most sociable person and it’s not just because she’s anxiety prone or that her marriage is over. She’s just Frida, she doesn’t have the best people skills. She really doesn’t. She’s not great at asking for help. She’s not great at being part of a larger world. She is very good at loving her daughter. And we learn a lot about Frida’s parents in the course of the book. Frida and her mom have a really interesting relationship and they approach parenting in not entirely dissimilar ways. But you can see that Frida has a little more skill than her mom, and how much of that is the first-gen, second-gen and how much of that is Frida as mom.
JC
it’s hard to divorce culture from personality. For me, as a first generation American kid who has always felt much more Chinese than American, it’s very strange to reconcile a culture where love is demonstrated through touch and saying, I love you and I miss you and all the very Western ways of expressing affection and devotion and loyalty. In my Asian family, it was not a very huggy family growing up, and like we all hug a lot now, but growing up, my parents just didn’t express themselves that way, because that just wasn’t a thing. And so I definitely wanted to talk about that in the book, because in the world of the book, it is a Western set of standards. And in the original Rachel Aviv article that provided some of the creative spark, what particularly enraged me about the article was the judging the mother by an American set of standards, which if you’re from another culture, there’s no way that you would instinctively know how to do any of those things. And I wanted the mothers to be judged by how much they express affection how much attention they pay, like whether they hold their dolls at the maximum level of tenderness. And it was I think in a lot of ways, I was probably processing some things that confused me as a child growing up in between cultures. And now that I’m firmly an American mom and trying to raise my daughter as best I can like, what elements from my childhood do I want to pass on? And then what do I want to do differently.
B&N
And the injustice runs really deep in School for Good Mothers, there is a sibling school, let’s call it the Bad Dads down the river. They don’t have to wear uniforms, they do have dolls that they have to parent as well. But they’re not subject to the same sort of capriciousness as the women are, and at a couple of different points everyone’s brought together and it’s just made really clear that the standards for the men are radically different and much more relaxed, and even a little more elastic than they are for the women.
JC
That’s where I think there is room for humor, because obviously, no reader wants me to tell them “standards are different for dads, see.” I wanted to be able to play with those different expectations. One thing that struck me among all the parents that I’ve met now that I’m entrenched in the intense American parenting culture that I’m satirizing in the book is that the moms I know spend a lot of time thinking about their parenting, and whether they’re doing a good enough job, feeling guilty about not paying enough attention to their kids, feeling guilty about raising their voice, feeling guilty, really about everything. Whereas most of the dads I know think they’re doing just fine. And they’re dealing with the same set of circumstances. But there isn’t the same internal monitoring and judging the self and feeling ashamed. And so I wanted to build that into the school.
B&N
This goes back to a line that you have in the novel, where one of the instructors is repeating in different ways, mothers must sacrifice everything for their children in order to be quote unquote, good.
JC
I wanted to take some ideas from our culture and make them insane for the purposes of satire, for the purpose of entertainment to draw attention, hopefully in a subtle, subversive way. Our society and culture really oppresses women and oppresses mothers and subjects them to a completely impossible set of standards. So in my book, the standards are literally impossible. So a lot of times what feels impossible in life is just made bananas in the book.
B&N
Satire demands a level of structure and focus that not every style of writing demands, right? Like, you’ve got to put everything on 11 at all times in order to make this work. So for you as the writer, as you’re going through, how much of this are you turning up? And how much of this are you saying, Oh, wait, did I just go too far?
JC
Like a lot of my answers to the questions of like how things turned out this way, it was solved in the editing and the revising, because my initial draft had much crazier lessons and much crazier ordeals— like I had the moms actually running through fire. But that was before I understood that just getting your child to do any simple thing feels like you’re running through fire, and I didn’t need to make them actually endure that much pain. When I attempt to describe what the humor and the satire in the book is like, it’s hard to find a book comp that exactly represents what I was trying to do. But after I’ve been working on the project, for a few years, I saw the movie, The Lobster, and that represents the really dry deadpan humor that I was going for. And I think it’s hard to do humor like that, because you have to take it very seriously and hope that your reader will follow you there. I really was just following my crazy ideas to their furthest conclusion and hoping to bring readers along.
B&N
Okay, so you’ve made it clear that your agent is a huge part of that process, obviously your editor is a huge part of that process. You were, at least when you were still in Philadelphia, part of a writing group. And I don’t know if you’re still, you’ve moved, so I don’t know if you’re still working with them. But how much of your work with your writing group influences your work on the page?
JC
Well, I was very lucky in Philadelphia to be part of a women writers group that it was kind of a collective really in a social group called The Claw and some of the writers and include Emma Eisenberg and Carmen Machado and Liz Moore and Kiley Reid and Asali Solomon. And I joined the group in I think, 2018, when my daughter was still, before she turned two. And so at the time, I was joining a group that was full of these very successful authors. And so it was hugely intimidating because I was at the point of saying, Will I ever get my book done, and we don’t actually exchange drafts, but it was more like a friendly Social Club, in a sense, where we met once a month and talked about our projects and exchanged industry advice and ate a lot of snacks. So it was it was very uncompetitive, and there was a lot of eating and drinking and just cheering each other on and so it made a huge difference in the sense that there were these wonderful women invested in my success. and cheering on each stage of things. One of them, Stephanie Feldman, helped me edit my query letters, another writer named Annie Lyon read the whole draft, Emma has been instrumental in so many things in my writing life. And it was just wonderful to be part of a community and those friendships have carried on and they’re letting me be a satellite Claw member on email. It was a really special experience. Because coming from the New York writing world, it was just so refreshing to have everyone be rooting for each other in like a completely unjealous way. And not to say that New York writing communities are not also supportive, but I think because the Philly writing world is just so much smaller, we all just really banded together.
B&N
You have an MFA from Columbia, you’ve taught undergrads, what have you learned from teaching?
JC
One thing that I did after leaving PW that actually informs my answer here, too, is that I also did some writing coaching on the internet. And in a way that was really illuminating in the sense that it’s very humbling to see how many people want to write books and the lengths that they’re willing to go to, to get their stories on the page and the way they’re willing to rearrange their lives. And so I’m just really grateful to be part of that I think coming to teaching was a really special experience, because teachers have been so important in my life, like I wouldn’t be writing fiction at all, if besides that classroom experience because I, I don’t think I would have even dared to and this project in a lot of ways grew out of a conversation with Percival Everett at Bread Loaf in 2014. I brought the short story draft thinking here workshop, here’s a short story draft and he said, I don’t want to make your life bad, but I think you have a novel. And that was also like a life changing conversation. And then we had a conference where he said, “Oh, you could do 50 pages on the blue goo, you could do an interrogation scene, you could develop the hippie couple, Gus and Susanna”, and he really pointed me toward a path to turning the story into a novel. And I think there was a quiet voice in the back of my head with my draft that thought, hmm, maybe this could be a novel. But sometimes that push from a person that you really respect and who has great authority in the field can be very helpful. And teaching is a really special experience because when else in life, are you going to have the time and attention to sit around with a group of budding artists to focus on your creative development, it’s just so different from the way we conduct ourselves in daily life.
B&N
Let’s talk about literary influences for a second. We’ve talked about who some of your teachers have been, and certainly I think Percival Everett tells you you have a novel, you have a novel. But who are some of the writers that you turn to?
JC
Well, I have a little stack of books by my desk that I tend to think of as my secret books, but I will share them with your listeners here. So I always keep on hand the poetry collection, Plainwater by Anne Carson. I love Karate Chop by Dorthe Nors, the Scandinavian writer. I love Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls and I’ve been trying to mention that in any Q and As or interviews because it was a book that was out of print for decades, but now it’s out from New Directions and it is just a total joy of a book. And I love the collection Orange World by Karen Russell. And I think one influence that probably would be a little less obvious would be The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. I love the Ripley novels, and I read The Price of Salt when I was working on revisions with my original editor Don Davis, and I really needed to work on developing Frida’s interiority and her decision making and deepening her character and also the deepening the secondary characters. And for anyone who’s interested in that craft question, The Price of Salt is the perfect book as she renders the character psychology on the page in the most beautiful, compelling way. And I really love Patricia Highsmith just in general, I also always refer to the collection, Her Body and Other Parties by my friend Carmen Machado, which is another perfect book. I tend to read a lot of short stories and poetry and prose poetry, probably more than novels, even though I know I wrote this really plotty book, I tend not necessarily to read super plot driven work in my in my writing life.
B&N
So you’re really looking for the language first. I mean, some people read for character some people read for story, but you absolutely want language first, right?
JC
Well, I came out of a school of writing as an undergrad that didn’t talk about plot at all. So I’m much more plot focused in my life at this age than I then I was in my 20s. But I certainly still love the work of writers like Michael Ondaatje and Joan Didion, who put really beautiful prose in your brain. I was writing a column for The Millions recently about my year in reading and I wrote about how I was reading Alexander Chee’s, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, his essay collection. And I was just reading that over many months as I was learning to write essays because I was telling him on Twitter, I just wanted to put myself in proximity to essay excellence. And so I think I’m trying to do that in my reading life, I have to feed my brain good things in order to get to that level of concentration, where you can make something out of nothing.
B&N
What’s the one thing you wish you’d known before you started writing The School for Good Mothers?
JC
Honestly, I wish I had known that it would be okay. I wish I had known that I would finish the book and that I would sign with an agent and that we’d sell it, and then now it will be published. I wish it could go back in time and tell me in 2014, that there would be a happy ending to this project that felt like it might actually be impossible. And I think that aspect of novel writing is part of what’s so hard, you have to sink years of your life into this project that you don’t know if it will be good or not. And also, if anyone will want to read it, and you just start going towards the unknown for years and years. I spent the end of my 30s and the beginning of my 40s and like a lot of changes in my life were folded into the writing of this book. And I wish I could go back and tell myself that it’s going to be okay, because there’s so much uncertainty and anxiety in harnessing your life to this project and so I’m happy to be on the other side of it. But there is just so much not knowing what the result would be.
B&N
And you spent a lot of time with Frida, do you have a favorite moment with her from the book?
JC
I’m very fond of the ending which I realize that we we can’t give away but I’m I’m really proud of the ending because my friend Diane Cook, whose short story from her collection, Man v. Nature is part of what inspired the school, she gave me some directions along the way of like, oh, you could try an ending like this because I was having a really hard time landing the ending because this could have gone in many different directions. But another favorite part is when Frida and Emmanuelle are just resting in the sun and sharing a really loving moment and Frida is thinking have I ever done this with Harriet, and that is definitely taken from my own life of feeling like I’m just rushing through every day. And clearly, children grow up very fast as everyone tells you that they do and then all of a sudden, like my daughter’s turning five right before my book comes out, the same week. And I so rarely stop and think, Oh, I’m really happy right now and it’s really nice to be together with her right now. Because I’m just so task oriented and trying to take care of household stuff and life stuff and I really am trying to be more alert for those moments of beauty in daily life. It was nice to write one because I rarely pay attention on that level to what I’m doing with my daughter day to day.
B&N
And I will totally vouch for the ending. It is fantastic. It’s organic, it is the only way this novel could have ended. But that’s all we’re gonna say because y’all should just read it for yourself. What do you want readers to know about Frida in The School for Good Mothers or any of the other characters,
JC
There are a lot of different ways into the book and that hopefully, it is a book for everyone, not just for parents. I would also want them to know that there is a fair amount of humor, even though the subject is quite serious. I’ve been telling people there, there are some funny ha ha moments in there too, despite the sorrow. I hope that the book will allow people to feel seen in whatever way that they find their way into the book, there is a Chinese American immigrant story threaded throughout the book, Frida is not just a mother, she’s a daughter, she’s a wife and an ex-wife and a friend and a lover. And her being a mother is the role that I explore in the book, but I think that there’s a lot of other stories woven in. And I hope that it’s a book that is about many things, not just about parenthood.
B&N
Okay, as a person who’s not a parent who devoured your book, really there are multiple points of entry.
JC
Well, I think it’s also about an individual fighting against the system and fighting against government oppression. And so I think that has made the book timely in a way that I didn’t intend, because I began it in 2014, in a very different political landscape. And so the book I think, has different resonance, because we’re just living in a very different country and so my dystopian novel, I think, felt several degrees more dystopian than it does now. And whereas now it reads is realistic and plausible, which I couldn’t have it envisioned that when I started.
B&N
You’ve written a satire, and it is very funny in places you’re writing about motherhood, you’re writing about what it means to be a person of color in America right now, in a way because after all, fiction is a mirror of our lives. But this isn’t probably quite the book that people were expecting from you. Can we talk about that for a second?
JC
I definitely don’t think people expected this from me because anyone who knows me in real life knows that I am a complete Luddite, my husband likes to say that I don’t know how the internet works. And I seem to have written a book that is classified by the Library of Congress as Science Fiction, which is hilarious, because I barely know how to use Google Docs. So I think the element of technology in the book is probably the most surprising. But along the way, I was just telling myself that it’s okay for a book to be many different things. And the book that I was always citing as an example of that is Severance by Ling Ma, which is many different things that don’t necessarily belong in the same book together. So I don’t think I sat down and had a whole conversation myself that like, these are the high concept elements, these are the Sci Fi elements, this is the coming of age story, this is the immigrant story— it just came out that way and I had to just trust that I would be allowed to do that. And what’s been exciting with the editors I’ve worked with working with Meredith too, is that I was given the freedom to not rein any of those elements and to really build a world in the book that would hold, that would be a net for all of these disparate elements that don’t necessarily all appear in one novel, usually.
B&N
But all came out of that one draft, that one good writing day at your friend’s house up in the country.
JC
I now just have to hope that that will happen again. That was a very lucky day. And it’s the kind of moment of inspiration where you feel like you’re flying and you don’t have any sense of time and then you look up and realize that you haven’t eaten in five hours, and you’ve just been scribbling. I also write longhand, so that is part of what we were talking about earlier with following the sentences. I wrote the whole first draft longhand, which is, I can tell you the absolute most inefficient way to work. But I think that just going forward with the first draft is what allowed me to get quite as crazy as I did with the ideas because I just decided not to edit myself until I got to the very last scene. So I had a completely unwieldy sized draft that I then cut by two thirds. And then I started rewriting again, I really think it’s important for writers and artists not to censor themselves in advance because of what the market wants necessarily, because I think a lot of the exciting ideas come from experimenting and playing. And just the the sense of having fun and a lot of cases with the book as I was working on it for years and years, was just wanting to entertain myself and and truly following that idea that I was writing the novel that I wanted to read.
B&N
What’s next for you?
JC
I wish I had a project to tell you about. But I will definitely caution other debut novelists who have not started a second project before they launch their book, that it is probably much easier to say what your new project is than to explain why you haven’t started one yet. But I really am a slow writer, so it might be a while before I figure out what the next project is. So what’s next for me is continuing to work on essay writing, launching this book in the US and the UK, hopefully touring it in some capacity, but also just to weathering the ups and downs with pandemic parenting, which has been pretty time consuming and like this is with full time preschool. I’m trying to learn the art of talking about my book, but also trying to see my small child and reading a lot and just hoping that the well fills back up. But I know that it’s become very common, I think on social media to for people to talk about their new projects and say like, this is how my writing day went and I’m this many chapters in but I’m actually super secretive about that kind of stuff. And I didn’t have any public social media until after we sold the book. So I just want to say that that is possible, that is one possible path because I know that there’s this expectation to share everything about your life along the way, but I think I probably will be much further along before I say like, by the way, there is another project underway and I might just go off and work secretly offline for a while and see how it goes. I wish I was the kind of person who would say okay, this is book two. I’m going to start now but that tends not to be my personality.
B&N
Jessamine Chan, thank you so much for joining us in Poured Over. The School for Good Mothers is out now.
JC
Thank you so much Miwa, and thank you to anyone who is reading I really appreciate it