-Welcome to the show! -Thank you so much
for having me! -I´m so happy to have you.
This book is fantastic.
It takes place in Shaker Heights, Ohio,
which is where you´re from. -Yes.
-It takes place in the ´90s.
Why -- I want to start with why you chose to put it in the ´90s.
-The first reason was that it gave me a really good excuse
to relive my teen years, which is not something
that I ever thought I would actually say.
-Uh-huh. -But the real reason is that
I wanted to look at sort of, how far we´d come
and then how far we hadn´t come
from race, class, all of those issues.
I remember living in Shaker Heights in the ´90s,
and the way that we talked about race was really to say,
"I don´t see race."
And now that´s sort of a punch line, right?
And so I wanted to look at the ways that we haven´t really gone
as far as we think we have.
-Also, just reading it, I realized, oh, this is nice,
that, in the ´90s, like, the fact that anyone has
a cellphone is mind-blowing.
And so teenagers communicate the way it sounds like
you communicated as a teenager. -Exactly.
So, it was before cell phones, before any kind of social media,
before the Internet was even really a thing.
I needed the characters to have a little bit of space
to have secrets, ´cause these characters have a lot of things
they´re keeping from each other and trying to hide
and leave behind parts of their past.
And it´s a lot harder to do that now
and I wanted them to have that space.
-And so you put it in Shaker Heights,
and this is the town you grew up in.
But I´m wondering if in the writing of the book
and the researching in the book, did you find out new things
about where you were from? -I did.
I learned way more about the Shakers, the religious community
that used to own the land that became Shaker Heights,
than any reasonable person needs to know.
-Uh-huh.
-So anything you want to know about the Shakers now,
-I can talk about. -Yeah, all the --
When you went to the library, all the Shaker books
were available, none were checked out?
-They were. The Shaker Heights Public Library actually has
a really great local history room,
and this is where local history librarians do the job
when nobody else can.
She pointed me to old newspapers,
all kinds of books
about the Shakers and everything.
But I also learned that a lot of things that I thought
were normal from growing up in Shaker Heights were actually
not normal at all -- both good and bad.
-One thing you were talking about, there´s a --
which I did not realize either. There´s a Halloween tradition.
And this is sort of -- does this come from the fact
that the Shakers were very regimented and organized?
-I think it does.
Even though the Shakers were never actually living
in Shaker Heights, somehow that kind of rule-following nature
sank into the ground, and has permeated the community now.
So in Shaker Heights on Halloween when it´s time
to trick or treat, the city runs the sirens at the fire station
at 6:00 to let you know that it´s time to start.
And then they run the sirens again at 8:00 to tell you that
it´s time to stop trick or treating.
And I thought that everybody did that.
-Uh-huh.
-And we didn´t realize that wasn´t true until --
A good girlfriend of mine who grew up in Shaker Heights
lived near me and we both have little kids.
And we were talking to our husbands who didn´t grow up
in Shaker Heights, and so we said, "Okay, so when do we --
When does trick or treating start?"
And our husbands looked at us and said, "What do mean,
when does it start? It starts when you
put on the costume and you go outside
and you ring a doorbell."
And we said, "Well, when does it end?
Like, when do you stop?" And they said,
"What do you mean, when does it end?
It ends when you come home and stop ringing doorbells."
And my girlfriend just looked at me and said,
"Well, this is just chaos." -Yeah.
[ Laughter ]
-And now I just have to ask, is there --
For the rest of your life, your adult life,
when you hear a fire engine, do you have a Pavlovian candy?
-A little bit. -Yeah.
I want to go and ring somebody´s doorbell.
-To the other guy, "I hope your house isn´t on fire.
Also, can I have a Kit Kat?"
[ Laughter ]
You were actually -- So you´ve been doing readings --
Doing a book tour. And you were --
You rescheduled, thank you so much for rescheduling
to be here, but you were going to read
in Shaker Heights tonight. -I was.
I was supposed to read in my hometown where the book is set.
So I hope that they forgive me.
I hope this was a good enough reason.
-Yes. I think they will forgive you.
But you also -- You know, you talk about
the people in this town. Do you have any worries
about that versus any other reading across the country
that you do? -A little bit, yeah.
I´m kind of nervous about that, just because it´s --
It´s a little bit writing -- like writing about a relative
or like writing about your grandma.
You know, you love them and you want everybody to see
the good things about them, but you also know all
their weird habits and their weird quirks
and you want to kind of reveal those, too.
-Do you think it´s a good -- If I´m in a Shaker Heights
book club, is this a good book for us?
-I think so. I think that the Shaker Heights
population will have a lot of things to talk about.
I hope they see themselves in the book, and they also
sort of question, like, "Okay well, do we mean to do that
or is that just kind of how we do things?"
-And if there´s a character that they don´t like,
I bet they´ll see someone else in the book club
as that character. -Yeah.
-I don´t think they´ll see it´s them.
-Yeah. -It´s my next door neighbor.
-Yeah. That´s definitely Megan.
[ Laughter ]
Your parents were scientists. Your dad worked at NASA?
-He was a physicist. -And what did they feel when --
That you have two scientists, when say you want to be
a writer? -I think they were
really nervous, but I think they kind of knew
it was coming because I was an early reader
and ever since I was a kid I was the one who was, like,
off in the corner, drawing little books
and making up stories.
And I used to write plays and I would make my cousins
perform them.
And so I think they were nervous, because they just --
This was a world they didn´t know.
They didn´t know how to do anything.
And so when I told my mother that I was going to go
and get a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, she said,
"Okay." And then we got off the phone.
And the next day she sent me an e-mail where she said,
"Okay, I´ve talked to my friend who is the chair of
the English Department here at our university."
She was the chair of the Chemistry Department.
And she said, "He assures me that a Master of Fine Arts
is a real degree.
[ Laughter ]
And that it qualifies you to teach writing..."
which she wrote with a capital "W,"
...and artsy stuff."
And so she was like, "Okay, this is --
you know, I think you´ll be able to, you know, buy food
and pay for your rent."
-Well, they were right. They were right on that account.
And thank you so much for being here.
-Congratulations on the book. -Thank you so much.
Celeste Ng, everybody!
Her new book, "Little Fires Everywhere" is available now.