I knew what to expect. Both of my parents had experienced retinal detachments, so I was terrified but prepared. The warning signs sounded vague: “Be wary of sudden bright flashes or arcs of light,” doctors told me. In reality, it was more like hot white blaster fire ricocheting off the hull of an Imperial light cruiser. “Be wary of any new ‘floaters,’ ” they said. When the floaters came, they were like black, stringy Dementors descending unexpectedly over my field of vision.
I’ve always seen the world through this perspective—everything filtered through what I watched, heard, read, and loved. But consuming pop culture like the world was ending when it actually was wasn’t so much fun. By December 2020, we had binged, read, spun enough. My wife and I decided to focus on our health, going on nightly mile-long walks around our Forest Hills neighbourhood, in Queens. One evening, the symptoms started in my left eye. We rushed to a retina specialist for outpatient laser eye surgery. Pew-pew-pew, and the hole was patched. Phew. More lasers in subsequent visits (both eyes, to be safe). My own up-close-and-personal Pink Floyd light-show experience, with encore performances.
Our newfound fixation on health was timely. A staph infection puckered my left calf like Freddy Krueger’s. Meanwhile, gummy bears were apparently killing me—prediabetes had matured into full-blown Wilford Brimley–style “diabeetus.” I was hitting middle age hard. I was no Wolverine; my healing ability was vastly inferior. While my body was failing, my mind was racing. The realisation that “life moves pretty fast” made me channel my inner John Hughes, as I attacked my decades-gestating manuscript like I was frantically writing a Ferris Bueller sequel.
And so, at 48 years old, I was finally able to see my pandemic project, my debut novel, published to great acclaim. No one was happier than my mother. Her da xinganbao (“big precious”) was finally a published author. I have always taken after her family: thick black hair, broad nose, the love of the written word. I was inspired by my grandfather, a famous Chinese reporter who sacrificed everything to immigrate to the US for journalistic integrity. He then spent much of his life caring for his fragile wife, my grandmother, who suffered from anxiety and a weak heart. So much of them was yi chuan, inherited by us. The noble talents, but also the poor eyesight, diabetes, and mental-health issues.
My mother had spent much of her time looking after the men in her life: shuttling my grandfather to appointments, working 12-hour days while her husband pursued his doctorate, raising her sons to do good. But now, like mine, her priorities were shifting: The pandemic presented an opportunity. My mother informed me that she had started writing, too. Or rather, she had resumed writing, tapping back into the collegiate aspirations she abandoned when she began her life here in the States.
And so, at 73 years old, Grace I-Yin Jeng was finally able to see her pandemic project, her first essays, accepted for publication in a Chinese journal.
Both of us were always inspired by my grandfather’s professional legacy, even more so after he passed. His final message years prior was one simple eternal character, ai (“love”), writ large in marker across the unfolded panels of a Chinese newspaper, left on the table of his hospital bed. As I wrote about such big ideas expressed through small moments, I wondered what my mother was writing about. Her childhood in Taiwan and the Philippines? Her early struggles in New York City as an entrepreneur? (She owned three shoe stores.) Having two teenagers and then a third miracle baby in her 40s, or helping thousands as a Social Security caseworker? Her response: “Thoughts on the season changing to autumn—and about you becoming a writer.” She still can’t help but focus on the men in her life.
What no one saw coming: my vision growing exponentially worse. In August 2023, as I was starting the final edits on my book, the lasers stopped working on my left eye. I would have to go under the knife. The vitrectomy would replace my eyeball juice with fresh-squeezed artificial replacement fluid, and a self-dissolving gas bubble would be injected to push my retina into place. A painless procedure (thanks, propofol and Valium!), but the following seven days of constant facedown positioning would be absolute torture. I was inverted and sore, and sleeping with my CPAP machine (like Hannibal Lecter in his face mask) was inhumane. Worse yet, in December 2023, I learned that my right eye required the same process. I immediately burst into tears.
Most people will get cataracts (the slow, natural decay of the lenses in their eyes) as they enter their 70s and 80s. But as a result of these surgeries, my eyes are undergoing vast changes until they stabilise. I am fast developing cataracts and losing my sight. (And no, my other senses aren’t heightened. Turns out I’m not Daredevil, either.) Each check-up fills me with dread. If the vitrectomy surgeries don’t hold, I may need further procedures to save my vision. If it’s only the cataracts I have to contend with, then hopefully within the year, my eyeballs will be “ripe” enough for this next round of routine surgery to replace my zombified lenses. Nothing makes you feel so old as looking forward to receiving the same treatment as octogenarians.
On the other hand, my mom is in great health, hopping on airplanes and cruise ships. On her last visit to Taipei, she got a blue whale tattoo. In honour of my dad, the marine biologist? “No deeper meaning,” she insists. “It’s cute and I like the ocean.” My mother, pleading with her sons to take her to see Bon Jovi. My mother, smoking weed for the first time. She’s been in her renaissance. But plans don’t always work out; her Cabo trip was curtailed when my father grew uncharacteristically pale and refused the buffet. He’s been dealing with his own health crisis ever since: leukemia. While we are slowly being attacked by our own bodies, she keeps us afloat, as per usual—sorting the pills for my dad, sending frozen dumplings to me. All done with grace, by Grace.
Nothing makes you feel so old as looking forward to receiving the same treatment as octogenarians.
Her “big baby,” tall and strong. But now I can no longer lift anything heavier than a half-full banker’s box for fear of putting pressure on these fragile eyes. What I fear, what I am most wary of now, is time—our mortal flesh fades fast, in spite of all we have left to do, say, and see.
Recently, my mother started letting her bob go grey. My temples, too, grow more into the same signature silver of that pliant genius Reed Richards. But I feel further from fantastic, as my limbs become increasingly stiff and achy every day. My eyes, too, miss out on so much wonder before them.
My mother has read my novel and is my biggest champion. Soon I will get to read her new work—in translation, sized up to a 24-point font. But there are still so many stories she hasn’t yet written. I am afraid to ask about them, to hear them spoken in this life or the next. But isn’t everything that’s inherited and passed down simply about ai—love—in the end? At my book events, I can make out her shape, beaming proudly from the front row, that familiar magnetic red phone case flapping wildly as she tries to record a video. What I experience now, however, is all blurry, hazy like a dream. I’m hoping once my vision is renewed, I’ll get to see this all again with her, for the first time and not the last.
Originally published on Esquire US
My process of composition is a long and sinuous one: first an idea comes to me, usually by serendipity. I can now allow the idea to incubate and grow into a fully formed piece—a novel or a short story. That period of incubation is often long, but when the story spills onto the page I am often satisfied because it has been a long time forming. But in 2011 when I completed the novel I had been writing since 2009, I felt that the narrative perspective was not right. It wasn’t a third-person narration; I had already tried that. It wasn’t a simple first-person narration; I had already tried that too. So what then? I left the book in frustration and began writing other things until I flew to Nigeria that summer. It had rained on my way to our house in Makurdi, but on arriving, the sun was shining and it had turned hot. I took a quick shower and lay in my old bed, now occupied by my younger brother Benjamin, who was nine at the time.
Benjamin had been waiting for me to come to the room so he could talk to me alone. He was taller than I had thought he would be—I hadn’t seen him in three years. He had a small scar on the side of his head, and even in the heat, he’d put the new cheap shirt I had bought him over the soap-worn one he was wearing. He was happy. He was talking, wanting to fill me in on the happenings since I was gone. Did I know that there have been changes in the neighbourhood? A new supermarket had been built just two blocks from our house—did I see it? I nodded, yawning. The family next door, who lived in the shack that formed this big contrast with our concrete, gated house, lost their dad last year—did I hear about it? I perhaps didn’t answer. I was tired from the 16 or so hours travel, falling asleep.
“Eh, brother, you know last week there was this boy, he was big. He was beating every-body, like a superman... but I fought him and beat him!”
These were words said in between some longer narrative, to which I was murmuring only mhmm, oh, while thinking of Cyprus from which I had just arrived, the friends left there, my apartment, and the new position the university was offering me. But now I was shaken awake. “There was even that new house with that blue roof. They have these two boys, twins. Ah, they can run really fast! That one, Ignatus—he can run. They are rabbits! And, they even go to that public school with many children... they are ants... they are all doves!”
A boy was a superman. Two boys are rabbits. Some schoolchildren are ants. Some adults are doves. These are not comparisons in the way I was used to, but associations. Benjamin, at only nine, did not have the ability to understand complex phenomena like violence, the absence of his older brother, marriage or things beyond his comprehension. So, he attempted to make sense of them through associations with thing she understood better—comics or animals (he owned an encyclopedia of animals that he treasured). This was why, when a boy bigger than him beat him, he could only explain this defeat as having fought with a “superman”. If kids can run so fast in the case of the twins, they must be “rabbits”. I knew at once that my younger brother’s childish babbling had opened a door that I had been banging at for many months. That night, I rewrote the entire novel, recasting the story of this fractured family through the lens of the youngest of four brothers, Benjamin, nine, who narrates the story by comparing everything to animals: “Father was an Eagle”; “Ikenna was a Python”; “Mother was a Falconer”; “Boja was Fungus”.
It was easier to make the choice on how to tell the story in the second novel. But later that year, I wrote a short story in which I faced a similar struggle. I had written it this time in the form it should be, but “The Strange Story of the World” lacked a narrative core. My father was visiting the US, and we were driving from Nebraska to Michigan. We had been in a debate about Christianity in Nigeria—my father defending the modern form, me arguing that it was corrupted and doing much harm. We stopped at a rest place and when we got back in the car, he wanted to change the subject. So, he began singing a song I hadn’t heard him sing in years, perhaps, in two decades. It was a song about hope being something that must be preserved. For some reason, this song—even though I hadn’t heard it in a long time—felt like the background music of my childhood, of my family story if it were to be made into a film. And as the cars stirred back to life, it occurred to me that the story of the family I was telling in the piece must revolve around a song.
We took a turn once this epiphany happened and I looked at my father, concluding his singing, and said to him, “Daddy, thank you for that!”
“What?” he said.
Years later, I began work on a new novel about the Biafran War of Independence. My mother was born in 1961, and only nine when the war ended. She knew that an uncle went to fight and never returned, and that one of her older brothers fought and survived. She knew about the hunger, the drills, the death she witnessed and heard about. At first, she wondered why that war, why was it a thing to be written about? She did not get it, I argued, plus it was too late. I had already finished what I believed was a complete draft.
We were sitting on the porch of her house in a town near Umuahia, and she was gazing at the sun shining through the palm trees, picking her teeth with a chewing stick. She sighed, looked at me and said, “OK, but there is something you should know about telling stories of wars.”
“What?” I said.
“Wars are meant to produce large-scale deaths,” she said in Igbo. “So, its primary subjects are often dead people, I fu go?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But, when stories of wars are told, they are told only by who? The living! Ha, but that is never complete. If the story of a war must be truly and fully told, it has to be told by both the living and the dead.”
My mother went quiet as my unwitting collaborators—my brother, father, and now mother—often did after unknowingly changing the shape of a project.
In the silence I could hear only bird cries. Two of them were floating just overhead on a thermal, the sun on their wings. I knew, watching them and with my mother’s words in my head, that the novel I had just finished would have to completely change.
Originally published on Esquire UK
A fountain pen is like a tie these days. It is not a necessity but an expression of taste—and a chance to snatch a little extra joy from the grip of everyday existence. Given the choice, would you rather scratch out a note with a cheap plastic ballpoint or glide a finely tuned 18k-gold nib over a sheet of paper? No contest.
This brings us to Montblanc. Founded in 1906 with the catchy name Simplizissiumus-Füllhalter, the company pioneered modern, easy-to-use fountain pens. And the Meisterstück—German for “masterpiece”—has been the pinnacle of its lineup since it was introduced in 1924. It’s the fountain pen elevated to an art form. Combining superior engineering and materials, the century-old Meisterstück takes the writing experience to another level by ensuring that the ink flows in an unbroken stream from reservoir to nib to paper without the slightest pressure from the user. It’s a simple pleasure but a profound one. And sometimes—more often than you might expect—that is precisely what you need.
Originally published on Esquire US
Pooja Nansi was appointed festival director for the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) in 2019. During her tenure, Nansi bolstered the outreach to a diverse demographic, which included young people and individuals with special needs. She has enriched the multilingual aspect of the SWF with literary groups dedicated to various mother tongues. When the pandemic hit, Nansi brought the festival to the digital space.
With 2023 being the final year for Nansi as festival director, we conducted an exit interview of sorts about her time at SWF, guilty pleasures and the challenges of parenthood.
(Note: This interview took place last year. Nansi was recently awarded the Knights of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture to celebrate their "significant impact on cultural cooperation" between Singapore and France.)
ESQUIRE SINGAPORE: Was five years always on the plan for you?
POOJA NANSI: I think the typical tenure is four years but with the pandemic and because the festival moved from being housed within National Arts Council to the Art House Limited, I was asked to stay on, just to help stabilise things. That’s why five years. It’s much longer than I expected.
ESQ: What do you feel you have accomplished during your tenure?
PN: I mean, we can only do what we can do with the time that we have. There’s always more to do, right? I had two big goals I needed to see fulfilled because I knew this tenure was always limited. I wanted to increase the space to include a variety of participants and audiences. And to draw in young people who never came to the festival before. So I definitely think we have achieved that to the best of our capacity. If you ask me, there’s always more that can be done. But I am proud of what we’ve achieved in five years.
ESQ: What was the pandemic like for you?
PN: Can we not talk about the pandemic years? [laughs]
ESQ: Was anyone even in the mood for a lit fest?
PN: It was weird because there was very little time to be reflective, right? In the early days of the pandemic, we all thought that this was happening somewhere else. No one imagined that the whole world would shut down. Sometime in April, the decision was made to go digital. And I remembered the team and I going like, we have no idea what that means. A festival is a gathering of people, right? It’s a physical gathering of bodies. So, at the time, we were thrown in the deep end and there was a steep learning curve to overcome.
Whether everyone was in the mood is a good question. But I think it was sorely needed. Props to the Arts Council for realising that because people needed to hold on to something right and writers and thinkers of our time are what people would return to when things get difficult. People needed to connect with other people and the festival provided a space for that. It turned out to be quite a necessary space.
ESQ: Esquire used to work with Yong Shu Hoong and he’s the next director for SWF. Were you involved in the selection process?
PN: I’m not actually involved in the appointment so I can’t speak to that. That’s all done by Arts House Limited and the National Arts Council.
ESQ: Any advice for him?
PN: I’ve known Shu Hoong for a long time because we are both poets in the scene. And, of course, I’ve been to many of his SUBtext sessions as a young poet, he’s always been very generous to me. I don’t believe in giving advice. I think Shu Hoong is more than equipped to take this on and he’s going to give it his own stamp. So it’s not so much advice but I hope he enjoys his time as much as I did.
ESQ: So what will you do now?
PN: I’ve been working on my PhD, which had been on hold for a long time owing to the pandemic. And I had a baby two weeks before the festival during the pandemic. So that was an... interesting year... working everything out. I’m taking a bit of a break from that. So my immediate goal is to focus on the PhD and complete it.
And I would like to return to my writing. I really missed that and then going back to some level of teaching creative writing. I wanna spend time with my daughter and learn to perfect making my mother’s dal. Y’know, things that I haven’t had time to do before.
ESQ: Does having a kid change you as a person; as a writer? I have a child and now, at the movies, I can't bear to watch scenes of children getting hurt.
PN: Yeah, it's a biological thing.
ESQ: Yeah. Because we're hotwired now to protect our young, right?
PN: How old is your child?
ESQ: Four in two months.
PN: My daughter just turned three. So, how has she impacted me? Thanks for asking that. People always ask how being your mother made it more difficult, which carries a lot of presumptions. I'll be really honest, I had a lot of anxiety when I found out that I was pregnant. I was really concerned about how having a child would affect my ability and my freedom to work as a writer and a thinker. But I can honestly say it's just expanded me as a human being beyond my wildest imagining. The clichés are true. Being a parent is the hardest and best job in the world. Your capacity to love expands, your empathy swells. You've become invested in a world that your kid is gonna grow up in.
ESQ: Do you think that has something to do with your openness to provide a space for a younger crowd?
PN: I conceptualised the youth fringe in 2019 before I had my daughter. I think that comes from just being a teacher at heart. I used to teach full-time for 10 years in MOE. I've worked with teenagers for my whole working life; I love working with young people because they're going to take over the world.
ESQ: Do you feel that the younger crowd aren't given the credit they deserve?
PN: The "younger generation"... that's a huge demographic. Some people have far more resources than others. It's not a monolith of young people that we're talking about. Some young people go to certain kinds of schools or come from certain kinds of families and backgrounds and have a lot of access and exposure to the arts. And then there's an entire demographic that, people seem to think, does not need exposure to the arts. That has always rubbed me the wrong way.
Literature teaches you how to know things. It teaches you how to learn. And I feel that we all deserve to have those tools regardless of where we come from. The art scene is potentially, one of the most democratic spaces we can offer a young person, if we come at it correctly and with the right intentionality.
ESQ: Like the Youth Fringe segment for the Singapore Writer's Fest.
PN: It wasn’t about, oh, let’s have a programme for young people. Very early on, I was very clear with my programming team that we cannot presume what young people want. That happens a lot in schools, where we prescribe to young people what they should be reading, what they should want. But what I wanted to know from young people is, what do you want to see in a literary space? Why aren’t you coming and what would make you attend?
We did a bunch of focus groups where we went into schools and asked young people about what they are reading, what is exciting to you? We collected all those data points and gathered youth curators who suggested programmes for us. The trick with that was to trust them, even though the programmes seemed outlandish.
ESQ: What seemed outlandish at the time?
PN: Wattpad. A lot of us were like, what on earth is Wattpad? But that’s what young people are writing and reading on. Even though we didn’t have any idea what it was, we had to trust that this was what young people were excited about. It was kind of magical because they came in droves. Yesterday, I was at an event and we had to turn people away. I was really upset but the book signing was packed. A stampede of young kids ran down with their little origami hearts to give to the author. I see things like this so it’s absolutely untrue that young people are not excited or that they’re apathetic. It’s just that half of the time, we don’t listen and we don’t meet them at where they are. And by that, I mean the average 14-year-old today won’t pick up Great Expectations. They’re engaging in the digital book space, like Booktalk, BookTube... it’s changing the literary landscape for the better.
ESQ: I heard there was a complaint about the inclusion of AI.
PN: Oh yes. For the Opening Debate. [Editor’s note: The festival kickstarts with an Opening Debate with topics that are tongue-in-cheek. This year’s topic was, “This House Believes AI is the Better Writer”.]
ESQ: I understand that the debate is meant to be facetious but people took it the wrong way.
PN: I dunno if it’s taken the “wrong way”. I think those views are valid. But if I’m understanding you correctly, it was a kind of outrage about the fact that a literary festival would feature ChatGPT, right? Someone wrote that AI is unethical because it mines other people’s labour without compensation. That it’s exploitative and unethical. How can a literary scene for writers give space to ChatGPT?
So we responded that the entire premise of the debate and the concern of the debate is precisely that. And we always believe in letting writers have the last word. So we wanted to let writers speak on it. And the plot twist of the debate was that ChatGPT was operated by a writer. If people had come to the debate, they would have realised that the debate was really funny, really clever and actually really poignant.
To me, AI is inevitable. It’s going to be a part of our future. There is anxiety but I think it was a beautiful thing for us as a community of writers and readers to sit with that anxiety and it was comforting to hear writers say, how can we learn to coexist and still use this technology to make our lives better rather than be controlled by it? That was the entire ensuing conversation.
ESQ: I always look at it as a good jumping point for discussion. Instead of just-
PN: Shutting it down.
ESQ: Precisely. We can talk about it. Maybe set up parameters for the use of AI.
PN: How are we going to collectively as a species navigate issues if we don't allow ourselves to talk about it? Maybe I'm growing old. I think social media is important but I do find a lot of the conversations very oversimplified and binary. Like there's only one right thing to say and a few buzzwords that you need to use and if you don't see it exactly like that, then you're wrong. I think that's damaging. That's why a space like a lit fest is precious because it's one of the few spaces where we can listen to each other talk. I mean, how many spaces do we have that allow that?
ESQ: Speaker's Corner?
PN: Yeah suuure. I'm a fan of talking about it no matter how difficult it is. There's no point in shutting it down.
ESQ: What is your guilty pleasure?
PN: I have none any more because I’ve embraced all my trashy loves. They turned me into who I am today. But... when I was a kid, I used to read Sweet Valley High. Now when I look at it, it’s terrible. Francine Pascal created the series but now it’s produced by a team of ghostwriters. It was so formulaic and bad but I was hooked on it. In retrospect, it taught me so much.
I’ve also watched so much trash reality TV. I just finished the latest season of Selling Sunset. I’m very fascinated by the dynamics of that show and its weird feminism. I could write an entire essay for you about that.
ESQ: Is it your PhD?
PN: PhD is not about Selling Sunset, unfortunately. Yeah.
ESQ: What about music? What’s your guilty pleasure?
PN: Oh, this is a hard one to admit but I still listen to Kanye.
ESQ: Old Kanye?
PN: I listen to a lot of old Kanye because I miss the old Kanye. It troubles me. I didn’t get off the Kanye train for a long time. Even when a lot of people dropped off, I was still kinda hoping that Kanye would say something that would redeem himself, but yeah. It’s really hard to justify it but I believe in listening, reading and watching things in the context. So, I listen to old Kanye and I don’t feel guilty. I feel conflicted about who he’s become and what he’s saying, but old Kanye’s music came from such a pure place actually, like some of those songs are so pure, that sometimes I’d cry listening to “Hey Momma”... they pull at my heartstrings because you can hear his hope, naivety and his emotions.
I can’t listen to Justin Timberlake the same way any more either. Like after all of the things that have come out, you know. It’s really hard to listen to him in the same way as before.
ESQ: Does your daughter know what you do?
PN: She’s very recently figured it out. I told her that, oh, mama runs a festival and she came to the festival this weekend and really enjoyed it. I left her with Denise from Closet Full of Books for about 40 minutes. She reads every book that she comes across. Sometimes when I tell people that my daughter loves books, they’re like, oh, of course she’s your kid but I’ve never met a kid who doesn’t like books. Because children are born curious, right? If you present them with something and you let them explore, that love for it will grow.
ESQ: Can she read?
PN: My daughter loves being read to. Every night is a battle about how many books we're going to read before she sleeps. It's a bit of a negotiation because I have energy for two and then she'll come into the room with four books. If we go to a bookstore and she picks something, I will let her buy it. Even if it has too many words. Maybe she won't understand it but I'll let her buy it because she'll get into it.
ESQ: Do you control what she consumes?
PN: I think, there’s a difference between gently nudging her towards new things and saying no. It’s different for every child and every parent but for me—and I know this is going to be a controversial statement—I’d rather she engages with difficult things with my knowledge. So that we can have that conversation.
I’m not saying it’s easy; it’s really difficult, especially when explaining big concepts to kids. But I’d rather we try and grapple with the issue together. A good example is when she was missing her grandparents one weekend and—she has big feelings—burst into tears. I tried to compromise with her, it’s ok. You know, you are going to see your grandfather and grandma tomorrow. And then she asked me, do you miss your grandmother? It took me aback. I said, yeah, I missed her a lot. And she said, oh, but it’s ok mama because you can see her tomorrow.
That was the moment when I had to make a choice, right? Because the easy answer is to dismiss her and think she won’t know any better. But I said, I can’t see my grandmother tomorrow because she is gone. She’s gone up to the sky to be with God, you know? And my daughter looked terrified but I assured her that it’s not scary. I may miss my grandmother but she’s always in my heart.
ESQ: I had several deaths in the family this year and my kid was asking questions about it. Like you, I came to a crossroads about talking to him about death and dying. I told him that Grandma died and now she's in a better place and I thought that he understood. Then, a few months later, he started saying that he hoped I'd die.
PN: But he's hoping that you'll get to a better place.
ESQ: Yeah. It sounds flippant but, weirdly, it came from a good place. You'd want to protect them from all that.
PN: I did not come to this interview thinking that I was gonna cry with you, but yeah.
ESQ: I'm still not sure if talking about death is too early for him. I do want him to be emotionally secure if either of his parents dies.
PN: There is no correct way to parent. We do the best that we can. And it's not the exact quote but I go back to Philip Larkin-
ESQ: "This Be The Verse".
PN: Yeah, we're gonna do it. But we try our best not to.
ESQ: Speaking about death, can we talk about Adrian Tan? He sadly passed and this is the first year you’re doing the debate without him.
PN: For the festival’s Opening Debate, yes. It’s really one of those things that hit me harder than I thought. The reason for that is that I’ve never seen Adrian without a smile on his face. He has always been so kind, so supportive, so generous with his time and his energy.
Ever since I took over the festival and when I doubt myself for a decision that I’ve made, Adrian would be like, if people are a bit pissed off, you’re doing it right. And, this is kind of morbid but, he added, don’t worry, Pooja. No one’s gonna die. That’s Adrian. He never takes anything too seriously.
ESQ: Did you know about his illness?
PN: I knew he had been ill for a while but in true Adrian fashion, he never called attention to it. He never made anything about himself. I might get the timeline wrong but I think as early as February or March, when we had an online meeting, I saw him and I didn’t think he looked too well. But I wasn’t expecting that he would go so soon. That was hard.
We talked about how we wanted to celebrate him at the festival... and I intentionally used the word “celebrate” and not “memorialise him” or “eulogise him”; that’s just not in the spirit of who Adrian was. He always enlivened the party. We didn’t want to do a moment of silence because Adrian would have hated that. So, we decided to dedicate the debate to his memory.
ESQ: Given what you know, if you were asked to return to lead the Singapore Writers Fest’s programme, would you?
PN: Not immediately, I would like a little time away from it. I haven’t had time to reflect on what we’ve achieved and where it’s moved to. Some distance is important for reflection, right? But if I have the chance to work with these people again, I’d do it in a heartbeat. It’s been a privilege of a lifetime to work with these people.
ESQ: Are we good? Is there anything else you want to talk about?
PN: No man. We already talked about kids and death and Kanye. I think we’re good.
Photography: Shawn Paul Tan
Styling: Asri Jasman
Photography Assistant: Xie Feng Mao
Hair and Makeup: Nicole Ang at THE SUBURBS STUDIO using DUNGÜD and DIOR BEAUTY
I’d seen the word on social media. Mid. The show was mid. The song was mid. The rapper was mid. So many shows, songs, rappers and more are unknown to me, trees in the now-bewildering wilderness of pop culture that the young navigate effortlessly.
But I rapidly deduced that mid is not good. Mid is mediocre. Middle of the road. Meh.
And then I realised—I am mid.
The pandemic made my midness unavoidable. Until then, I could convince myself that I looked 10 years younger than I was, and looking good is halfway to feeling good. But in the Age of the Mask, my face of denial was shrouded. Suddenly all I saw were eyes. Nothing I did to my visage or hair could perform a trompe l’oeil and camouflage how my age was now inscribed in the lines and wrinkles around my eyes, underlined emphatically by a duo of bags that got heavier every year. The young, in contrast, showed off their youth effortlessly with the smooth and unblemished canvas framing their eyes. Every moment of fleeting eye contact with both young and old reminded me of the threat of mortal illness as well as the inevitable slow motion of ageing.
Funny how I trembled when I turned 40, more than a decade ago. How youthful 40 now seems. But I remind myself that at that middling age, when I wanted nothing more than to be a novelist, there was no published novel. I also had not wanted to be a father, that death sentence, yet that is what I became. When my son was born, my life, as I knew it, was over.
I was 42.
I had just finished the first draft of my novel, and my most important job was to watch over my son at night to make sure he lived. From late in the evening until 3am, I rewrote the novel while watching little Oedipus sleep in the same room, swaddled on the futon. Anytime he stirred, I stuck a bottle of formula in his mouth. From 3am until his mother took over childcare duty at 5am, I sipped my own formula—single malt Scotch—and wondered: Was I a failure? Was I ever going to publish this novel? Was I middle-aged? How does one know for sure?
Statistically, the average middle age for American men begins just past the mid-30s, since the average American male’s life span is 73.5 years of age. As a country, America can be considered rather mid, with the United States ranking below Albania and above Croatia. Hong Kong tops the charts at 83.2 years. Our average must be brought down by a daily drip of government-subsidised corn fructose and the lack of universal health care, as well as a toxic mix of economic inequality and depression, gun violence and opioids.
If I am statistically average, then I have been middle-aged for 15 years. I tell myself I am not afraid of Death. Easy to say until one sees the Great Funeral Director’s hand on the switch, ready to turn off one’s light. I will admit that with the shadow of mortality falling on my toes, I bought a sports car at the age of 43. A used grey Infiniti coupe with automatic transmission, the nicest car I had yet owned but far cheaper than a brand-new Honda Accord. Not a sports car by the definition of connoisseurs. Not a Corvette; not red. The car even had a back seat that could fit a car seat and my son.
Even my midlife crisis was mid.
I examined my son, destined to kill me and usurp me, at least symbolically. Cute little guy. Could he escape his destiny? Could I escape mine? Perhaps if I read him more books? Spent more time with him? Took him to more Little League baseball games? Thankfully, he quit baseball after a year, but then took up soccer with great enthusiasm. I bought him shin guards and cleats, watched him and his Neon Knights practise while I sat on a tattered beach chair, angling my umbrella to ward the sun off my pale legs. Was this happiness? Was this what a writer does?
The long middle of a story is the hardest part for me as a writer. The beginning, far in the past. The ending, I don’t know. But what I do know is that it is good for a writer to be unaware of the conclusion. If the end startles the writer, it likely will surprise the reader, too.
Pssst—the hero dies.
I didn’t hear that.
I used to think that writing was a ticket to immortality. Who needed children when one’s progeny was one’s books? In my teens and early 20s, I longed for fame and glory. I didn’t think much about how the names of the immortals were relatively few, while libraries were filled with thousands of books by writers I had never heard of before, some of them quite famous in their time. And some authors whose names dominated only a decade or two ago are rarely mentioned today, now that their life force no longer animates the literary scene.
When it comes to literary fame—which is not really that famous—I have more than some authors and less than others. But whenever I am tempted to believe my own hype, I read my one-star reviews — Bafflingly overpraised! Absurdist and repulsive! Pure garbage!—and recall that I live not far from Hollywood. When I tell people in Los Angeles that I’m a writer—no one cares.
And if no one cares, why should I?
That seems to be the greatest freedom in being mid, at least for me. To be middle-aged is not necessarily to be mid, particularly if one feels that one is at the peak of one’s powers. But to acknowledge that one’s accomplishments, great or small, hardly matter to most people and may one day fade into the dust, rendering one mid or even forgotten—might that actually be liberating rather than depressing?
When I was younger, I cared very much what people thought of me and my work. Part of me, because I am human, still does. But an even greater part of me does not. I had an inkling of what it meant not to care when I wrote my first novel; I was already old for an aspiring novelist.
I had written a short-story collection while yearning for the attention of editors, publishers and agents. When I realised that the power brokers did not care about my book or middle-aged me, I was free. Not to care. To do exactly as I pleased. Because I was mid.
It’s hard not to care in your teens and 20s. But as I looked at my son, turning two, three, four, I saw how he was almost literally carefree, except for wondering if he would get all the toys and treats he wanted. But he also simply did not pay attention to rules, expectations, conventions. You’ll find out, I thought grimly. That’s the way life is.
And maybe he will submit to the borders of adulthood. But at five years of age, he wrote and drew his own comic book, Chicken of the Sea, about restless chickens who run off from the farm to become pirates under the command of a rat captain. I was amazed. I could never have come up with that story. Because I cared about things like reality. How realistic. And how limiting.
So in my mid years, I try not to give a damn about unimportant things and unimportant people. The important people—friends and family, children and partner—still concern me. Writing, too, because it remains my passion. After I publish a book, I do keep an eye on how it fares in the world, vulnerable as I am to desire and vanity. But in the midst of writing a book—the art is all that matters.
The result is that the stack of books I have authored grows little by little, outnumbering my children in quantity. But never in height. Or weight. Or even, perhaps, in quality. If you had told me, in my youth, that I would be a father and love fatherhood and adore a daughter and a son I did not want or even dream of at the time, I would not have believed you. Down that road of family and stability, love and care, lay mediocrity. And perhaps that is true. But what is also true is that if my story concluded here, midway, I could live, and perhaps die, with being mid. Not the happiest of endings, but happy enough. And no one would be more surprised than me.
Originally published on Esquire US
Twenty years ago, I stumbled across a copy of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods at a Barnes & Noble in Chattanooga, Tennessee. At first, I was only drawn to the cover, where lightning illuminated a distinctly Midwestern highway. But as I devoured the book over the next three nights, I knew I was reading an instant classic that people would be talking about for decades. I say all of this because since then, I've only felt this way about a handful of books—and Kelly Link’s first novel, The Book of Love, is one of them. I honestly think it’s a masterpiece.
Set in the fictional town of Lovesend, Massachusetts, where “toffee Victorians” and “single-family Capes” line the leafy streets alongside “chicken coops and soccer nets in the backyard, ”The Book of Love tells the story of four high school students investigating why three of them died, only to be resurrected nearly a year later by their music teacher, who may be more god than human. Over a few days, Lovesend becomes the battleground for a cold war between otherworldly deities, ghosts, witches, and creatures. Meanwhile, the human characters search for a way to avoid returning to the realm of the dead, where they only remember “a lot of trees,” the smell of roses, “and under the roses, something burning.” Along the way, Link interrogates the nature of love between friends, lovers, siblings, parents, grandparents, teenagers, and even animals.
The small-town world Link conjures in The Book of Love—one full of nuanced relationships between a large cast of characters, local history and cosmic mythology, and magic hiding in plain sight—is among the most detailed and immersive ever put to paper. It also makes for an extraordinary comfort read, and an emotional reminder of what we lose and gain as we age.
After establishing herself as a singular voice in science fiction and fantasy with five short story collections—including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble—Link’s 600-page novel is one of 2024’s biggest literary events. From Link's home in the hilltowns of Massachusetts where she and her husband run an independent bookstore, Book Moon Books, Link spoke with me over Zoom about whether she believes in ghosts or afterlives, nighttime logic in literature, adolescence as a liminal space, and what she’s writing next. This interview was edited for length and clarity.
ESQUIRE: When and where did this book begin for you?
KELLY LINK: I’m a writer who finds it very useful to have a deadline, so when I sold Get in Trouble to Random House, I sold them a novel as well, on the grounds that it would make me actually write one. My plan was to write a very short haunted house novel, but I just could not come up with the thing that gave that book a heart. So I fell back on [The Book of Love] because I had a sense of the characters, and unlike the haunted house project, I could see why it would be different from a short story. And then of course it took eight years from that point to turn it in.
Why did The Book of Love need to be a novel instead of a short story?
Honestly, it seemed like it could be a trilogy. But I like compression. Believe it or not, this is a very compressed story as a single novel as opposed to if it were a series of books. There is space to imagine what might happen to these characters at the end, but the only thing I removed when I cut it down to one book was a loving pastiche of Regency romance novels. I was going to move the characters into that space for a whole book, and it would have been fun, but I don't think it was necessary.
How important was it for you to capture a sense of place? How much of Lovesend was inspired by Northampton or real towns on the Massachusetts coast?
The setting is a combination of lived experience and wish fulfilment. Easthampton and Northampton and all of the hilltowns up here have a really distinct vibe and a strong commitment to supporting quirky local businesses. When you live in a town that isn’t too big, that place begins to feel as if it’s a distinct living organism. If you live somewhere long enough, you mourn the ways in which a community changes. But when you write a book, you get to make things last in a way that they don't in the real world. Lovesend is an idealised version of that. There are people who have lived there for a long time who can still afford to live there. Climate change is not yet impressing upon this place in the way that it will very soon.
Why set this story at Christmastime in 2014?
The question of where in the contemporary moment to set it was a real issue, both in terms of music—because these are all characters with strong feelings about music—but also in terms of how the real world impinges on the characters. 2014 is the period when I began thinking about this project. So part of the tonal quality of the novel comes directly from a particular historical moment which is receding swiftly from us. I did think about what setting it at Christmastime would do to the tone. It was fun to take a holiday that wasn't Halloween—my favourite—and try to Halloween-ify it a bit. I also hope it provides a certain amount of solace and comfort.
"When you write a book, you get to make things last in a way that they don't in the real world."
Why did you set the main characters in The Book of Love in high school? Why not a college or adulthood?
I did think about making them much older, but adolescence is a liminal space. It’s a period in which you’re experiencing enormous change. You’re figuring things out about yourself, but you’re also more likely to make leaps into the wild. For me, these characters needed to be people whose impulsivity or decision-making felt more unpredictable, with fewer guard rails.
The first half of the book is written in a maximalist style that zooms in on small moments, memories, and details. Why did you take that approach?
Since this is a book about people coming back from the dead, the granular aspects of life—both the things that are irritating but also the things that give us delight—seem important. Because those are the things that keep us alive, right? If you lose joy or interest in those things, it gets hard to keep on going.
These characters have to make a decision about how badly they want to stay alive. It seemed important to me that they have a hypersensitivity to pieces of their lives that feel very minor. Like the noise that somebody makes when they're vacuuming. Also, to quote a meme, like a “bitch eating crackers.” When you’re so irritated by every single thing that they do. That kind of intensity seemed true to the characters within this narrative space.
How do you get inside so many different fictional people's heads with that level of intimacy?
If I'm going to care about the things that happen to somebody, I need to care about how they see the world in granular detail. The job of the writer is to make those details as interesting as possible. Or as propulsive and connected to the events in the book as possible. I'm not going to succeed at doing that for every reader. But I have to feel I’ve at least made them connective and interesting to me. The readers are willing to go along with it.
You’ve spoken about “nighttime logic” in fantasy fiction before. What does that term mean to you and how did you use it in The Book of Love?
Nighttime logic versus daytime logic is a way of thinking that Howard Waldrop came up with to talk about how narrative logic holds together for the reader as much as for the writer. With daytime logic, there is an explanation for things that happen. Clocks tell time in the way you would expect. Even if strange or fantastical things happen, there's a rule book by which they work that will be explained to you. A lot of realistic fiction, science fiction and fantasy, rely on daytime logic. Here's something startling, but I'm going to explain how it functions in the world. Often rooted in the inexplicable, even ghost stories have a kind of daytime logic to them. Somebody did something wrong and the consequence is that they are haunted.
Nighttime logic is more like carnival logic. Normal roles are upended. In James Theraper's book, The 13 Clocks, things are happening which will not be explained. It signals that the world has become a very strange place. It's not quite the same as dream logic, where first you're in one setting and then you're in another. Or you’re holding a cup of tea and then suddenly it becomes something else. We know dream logic. But nighttime logic is when you have a sense that there is an organising principle behind the world that belongs to the writer. The writer may not explain it, but there is a kind of coherence to it, even if it feels unnerving.
David Lynch is a great example of nighttime logic—there's an estranging quality to his work. A lot of horror operates in nighttime logic. Frankly, a lot of realistic fiction does, too—Joy Williams is great at that, and Barbara Comyns.
Do you often write at night to help you get in the right mindset?
I do my best work between 3:00 pm and 1:00 am. My writing brain gets sharper the farther we get into the afternoon. If I could organize my life so that I push that window further, I would be quite happy! If I'm on a retreat, I can work until three or four o'clock in the morning. I can write pretty much anywhere. I have an office. But I like being closer to other people when I work, so mostly I write down in our dining room. Ideally, I work in a room with other writers. I’ve gotten more writing done if I can see other people engaged in the same work, either having a great time or floundering.
Death plays a large role in this novel, as it does in many of your short stories. Has writing about it so often changed your perspective on mortality?
I saw somebody—maybe Nick Harkaway?—say that writers are generally catastrophists. You get on a plane and if you're a writer, you immediately start thinking about what happens if the plane crashes. You think about the most dramatic possibilities.
I was always somebody who was drawn to ghost stories. And death is always going to be part of a ghost story. I was the child of a pastor who then became a psychologist. Those are the professions where you're dealing with heavy, confusing things. I don't know why writers end up with the material that they draw from over and over again. You end up with a range of interests that you have an emotional connection to as a writer that you’re going to explore. For me, it's the fantastic—and monsters, and loss, and death. It's also about how people see the world and what they celebrate.
I don't think writing about death has changed how I see the world, but I do think it gives me a framework for thinking about the way I want to live. The pandemic has been a hard thing to go through. We had to close the press that my husband and I have run for over 20 years because my husband has long COVID. We have to be very careful about going out into the world because of the chance of exposing him to something that could make his health even worse. When you write fiction, you’re in charge of the things that happen. But you also get to work through the emotional costs and realities of dealing with very heavy stuff.
"I collect other people's ghost stories."
Do you believe in ghosts?
A few years ago, a good friend of mine—Holly Black, the author of The Spiderwick Chronicles—got a letter from a kid that said, “Dear Miss Black, I need you to tell me if fairies are real, and don't lie to me like the other adults.” She wrote back, “I've never seen a fairy, but I know people who say that they have.” That's how I feel about ghosts. I collect other people's ghost stories. There are many that I find either persuasive or troubling. I've never seen one, but I fully believe that some people just don't have the antenna or the radar. I am bad at telling if somebody was drunk. So maybe I do see ghosts. We could be seeing ghosts all the time but we just don't know it.
Do you believe in an afterlife of some kind?
I think I do. A childhood spent in a lot of churches with a father who was a Presbyterian minister, maybe some of that is a holdover But I'm agnostic. I would very much like to believe that there is something after death. But I find the fact that I don't know kind of exhilarating—that there is a mystery to which we all either do or don't find out the answer. That seems kind of cool, that maybe there's something interesting aside from the process of dying. That maybe you get to find out.
I have a hard time at the moment with a lot of things that are happening in the world. Not knowing becomes troubling when you see so much suffering and so much needless cruelty and death. It seems wrong to think there's life after death. And maybe it will be better there because that's just a reason not to fix things. But at the same time, the idea that there's nothing past death makes watching suffering that you can't do anything about feel even harder.
If The Book of Love is a standalone novel, what are you writing next?
[Another] novel, which is a haunted house story. I want it to be economical. Small. More experimental. If a novel is a large boulder the size of a large boulder, the next thing I want to work on is a small boulder. The size of a large boulder—a classic 50,000-word ghost story novel that feels like a short story.
