Celeste Ng: Why You Feel Stuck

October 6, 2022

Glennon Doyle:

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. We are here with the incredible Celeste Ng. I’ve been really, really psyched to have this conversation. Celeste, welcome.

Celeste Ng:

Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.

Glennon Doyle:

I have read all of your books, Little Fires Everywhere, and your new book, Our Missing Hearts, which my son and I read together. And I will tell you, Celeste, it just feels like all of the things that I’m working out in my life or on this podcast or wherever in my little heart, all the things I’m wrestling with, whether it’s in my family or in my personal life, or in my public self, or in activism or in motherhood, you’re just always working it out in your latest book, which makes me know you’re always wrestling with something like five years before I am, which makes me so grateful to you. And each of your books just feels like this … It isn’t answers, but just beautiful explorations of these questions in the form of a character’s life and love and struggles and decisions. I saw this teacher say on Twitter the other day that she was so sick of students saying that nonfiction was real and that fiction is fake, that she now says that nonfiction is learning through information and fiction is learning through imagination.

Celeste Ng:

Oh, I love that.

Glennon Doyle:

Isn’t that great? So your imagination has taught me so much, Celeste, so thank you for your work in the world.

Celeste Ng:

Oh, thank you. That is maybe the nicest thing that a writer could hear. I write my books always because, not because I have answers at all, but because I’m working through those same questions like you said. And so to hear that the books reached you and resonated with things that you are also wrestling with, that is really the nicest thing that a writer could hear.

Glennon Doyle:

Well, let me just introduce you formally for maybe the three people who are listening who don’t know who you are. Celeste Ng is the number one New York Times bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, and Little Fires Everywhere. Her third novel, Our Missing Hearts, is available now. Ng is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and her work has been published in over 30 languages. Celeste, what I really want to talk to you is about some of the themes that are throughout all of your books, because many of the themes that we’re wrestling with on We Can Do Hard Things all the time. So I thought we could start with a just easy peasy, non-flammable simple topic, which is whiteness and white women.

Celeste Ng:

That’s it. Easy, small, little, we’ll be done in five minutes.

Glennon Doyle:

We’ll just start with the softball. So maybe we could start by talking about Elena from Little Fires Everywhere, because in that book and then in the series that was on Hulu, Elena is a character that just sparked, so to speak, lots of conversation. Can you talk to us about how you would describe Elena as a character?

Celeste Ng:

I would say that Elena really has good intentions. I feel like that’s sort of first and foremost her thing that she does. She means well and she wants to do right, and the problem that she runs into is that it’s really difficult to know what your own unseen spots are, what your own biases are. And that’s true for everyone. But I think it becomes a real difficulty if you are in a position where you have a lot of power and authority and you don’t know what those sort of unseen spots are.

Celeste Ng:

And I should say upfront that I really, I love Elena as I love Mia, sort of her counterpart in Little Fires Everywhere. They’re both really parts of me. And I feel that struggle as well, even though I’m not a white woman, I’m a Chinese American woman. But that idea of, I want to do right, and I know what’s right, and it’s the moment when I say that where I go, “Wait, do I? I need to think carefully.”

Celeste Ng:

And I think that’s such a hard thing for anybody to do. And in Little Fires Everywhere, I think Elena doesn’t, she doesn’t quite get all the way there. She doesn’t stop to go, “Wait, do I know what somebody else’s life is like? Do I know what’s actually best for them?” And therein sort of lies part of the struggle for her. And that’s part of what I think gets her into trouble.

Glennon Doyle:

And I see myself in Elena. So when I talk about white women, I’m talking about myself. I once described myself as a dormant volcano with lipstick on. And I feel like Elena has this mask and you’re waiting for her to explode. And there’s just like this lava running inside. And it feels like it’s this bind of white womanhood, which is what you said, is that anger is dangerous when you have power. But where the anger comes from is the place where you don’t really have power. You’re pissed off at the people, the man who lives in your house, like Elena’s husband who gets to go out and do all the things. Is that bind something that you are exploring in that character?

Celeste Ng:

It absolutely is. And I think that’s so right. I mean, one of the things that I think fiction can do if it’s working well, is it can make us aware of both of those things that feel like they’re contradictions, but they’re both true. And both of those things exist. There are super valid reasons for many people, including white women, to be angry. There are a lot of things that they have to deal with.

Celeste Ng:

But then there are also other things that I think that often many white women are not aware of. Just as many other groups are not aware of them. And those two things don’t cancel each other out. It’s not like because you have one, you get a pass for the other, or because you are dealing with this thing, you should be absolved from another. They’re just both there. And I guess really what we’re talking about is just recognizing the intersections of all of our different identities and the ways that sometimes you have power, like you said. Sometimes you have things that you’re angry about and then in other places you don’t. And sorting that out I feel like is part of the experience of being human.

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah. And who you take that anger out on.

Celeste Ng:

Exactly.

Glennon Doyle:

Because what’s so interesting about Elena and the white woman thing is, we’re pissed off. We’re not exactly sure why. We’re pissed off at white men, I think. And we know our lack of power that way. So instead of directing our anger in the right direction, we direct our anger at who? At Mia. Is this what was going on between Mia and Elena?

Celeste Ng:

I think that’s part of it, is that she recognized that Mia in some ways had certain freedoms that she, Elena, didn’t have and wanted to have, but had chosen not to have or that weren’t available to her because of the kind of person that she was. But at the same time, I think it’s really easy to conflate those other feelings of jealousy or of longing or wishing that you had that or of regret of, with choices that you made that you might now make differently with what you know. It’s easy to conflate that I think with other aspects of people. Like you said, I’m mad about these things. I’m mad about, Elena is I think mad about a system in which because she chose to have children, her career was forced to be put on hold, or because she is a woman, she is not taken as seriously as her male colleague, or she’s not afforded these different rights.

Celeste Ng:

She’s angry about a lot of things that are completely valid. But if she directs it towards those systems, there’s that sense of almost futility. There’s that sense of, I’m just going to run into that wall and stop. And it starts to leak out into other places, at Mia, at her children, at other people’s problems that maybe aren’t about hers, but that suddenly become representative. And I do think that happens in life. That happens to a lot of people.

Celeste Ng:

It’s funny because I think anger, at least for me in my own experience, when I get mad about things, it is sort of like this opaque fog that comes in. I don’t know what I’m mad about. Am I mad at my husband? Am I not mad at my husband? Am I mad at my sibling? What am I mad at? And then I’m like, “Oh, sometimes I am mad at them.” But sometimes I’m mad at something larger that is not necessarily their doing or their fault. And it’s hard to know what to do with that. 

Amanda Doyle:

That theme runs through all of your work, I feel. Like in Everything I Never Told You, something that was fascinating to me was the Betty Crocker cookbook that was handed down from mother to daughter. And it was actually based on your mother’s Betty Crocker cookbook that she came-

Celeste Ng:

Yes.

Amanda Doyle:

She came over when she was 22 from Hong Kong. But in addition to the recipes that it had, it also had these quotes throughout that told women what to want, these ideas of, this is how you reach your peak fulfillment as a woman. So one of them was, is there any satisfaction more intense than looking at a set of jellies and preserves you made yourself?

Glennon Doyle:

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Amanda Doyle:

So these cookbooks are telling women what they should want. And of course women’s inability to find their fulfillment in those things is what Friedan called the problem with no name. And just as you’re saying, Celeste, with this moment that we’re in right now, it does feel like so many women in this country have this anger that they don’t know exactly what it’s about. And still in this moment, the question, what do you want, to a woman might be the most terrifying question that can be posed. And so we don’t want Betty Crocker to tell us, but we’re not real sure we can answer it. And so in this moment where we have the ability to fulfill our potential, ostensibly, there is still this problem with no name, that is different. Do you know what it is? Or for our generation-

Glennon Doyle:

Celeste, help us.

Amanda Doyle:

What is the problem with no name of right now?

Celeste Ng:

Yeah, I think you’re really on to something there. I don’t, absolutely can’t claim to have the answers, although I wish I did. But I think you’re right on in saying that part of it is that we know what we don’t want. We don’t want that. We don’t want things the way they are. We know there’s a problem, but because we haven’t yet made it through to whatever is beyond that, we don’t know what’s there. It’s hard to know what we do want because we don’t exactly know what’s possible.

Celeste Ng:

I have a lot of sympathy for the women of Marilyn’s generation. That’s the mother in my first novel who’s got the Betty Cracker Cookbook. Because in a way, they knew enough to know that they didn’t want what they had. They didn’t want just the jars of jams and jellies. They didn’t want the, here’s six ways to make an egg behave so you can make your husband happy, because obviously you need to have a husband to be happy. And then obviously you need to make him happy by making him eggs the right way. There’s so many layers in there.

Celeste Ng:

Marilyn, in my mind, she had experienced enough to know, that’s not fulfilling me, but at the time there wasn’t another possibility. And so in a way, what she was running up against was sort of this gap where what she wanted, as you said, there wasn’t a space for it yet. She hadn’t even imagined that. It’s hard to imagine something that doesn’t exist. And maybe one of the things that we’re talking about here is this sense that, I guess we want to put a name to it.

Celeste Ng:

We can call it patriarchy and particularly white patriarchy. We’re starting to realize that system doesn’t serve many of us. It doesn’t serve white women, it doesn’t serve women, it doesn’t serve queer people, it doesn’t serve anybody who’s not white. It basically only serves white men. But we don’t really know what system could replace that because we haven’t done that.

Celeste Ng:

And so I think we’re in this hard period of trying to imagine a new space. And that’s hard. Coming up with new things is hard, and especially when we’ve never seen that before. We’ve got ideas of what it might look like. But that’s one of the reasons that I love fiction, both writing it but also reading it, is that I feel like fiction has almost like a door stop that kind of wedges the door open. It doesn’t necessarily give you an answer. It might. It might give you ideas, but it’s just kind of holding open a space where new stuff could come in, and it’s kind of saying to you, “Yes, things can be different.” We don’t know exactly what it is yet, but it could be different. Maybe it would look like this, maybe it would look like that, but there’s a possibility that the way things are now is not the way that things have to be.

Celeste Ng:

Because I think that, Glennon, and what I hear you saying is that’s, in a way, that’s a position of powerlessness, of saying, “We’re in the system, we don’t know what to do about it. And it feels like then there’s nothing to do.” And I certainly have felt that way myself. And one of the reasons that I keep turning to fiction, but also just art generally, music and poetry, is that I feel like it kind of reminds me like, okay, people have gone through something like this. I’m not alone. Which is also such a powerless feeling. And then also it’s reminding me like, oh, maybe there could be something else. It’s just holding, it’s like putting a little placeholder in for what we can imagine later.

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah. It feels so important to enter that space of maybe what could be through art. And then I think there’s also a space of just at least knowing, not this. Figuring out what is the sandbox that you’re being put in. Because when my kids were little and they were bugging me, I would just put them in this space. We have this little space, have some plastic things, and build a thing. And to me, it feels like as women or any marginalized group has to figure out, what’s the sandbox you’re being put in?

Glennon Doyle:

Because that Betty Crocker was just a sandbox. And that sounds ridiculous. Make a perfect egg, to some of us that will bring fulfillment. But what’s that version of ourselves now? Because all of the freaking house obsession, decorating every corner of our house perfectly and obsessing with that, or body as project, beauty, as project, it’s all just another Betty Crocker cookbook. It’s just putting us in the sandbox so we’re not concentrating on the real stuff. It’s fake power.

Celeste Ng:

I think that’s a really interesting way of looking at it. And that’s right, it’s sort of this sense that, in a sense it’s almost like saying, “Here are the rules of being a woman or being a person of color.” Whatever your situation is, here’s the rules. So if you just do all these things, work within these parameters or as you said, sort of be in that little sandbox and you do all those things right, you follow the recipe, you will find fulfillment. And in a sense, I feel like maybe what we are questioning is the whole idea that there is a series of rules that can universally be applied and provide everybody fulfillment. Whether it’s make your eggs right or decorate your house perfectly or get the perfect skin, whatever it is that you’re doing. Right. That sense-

Amanda Doyle:

Have it all.

Celeste Ng:

Exactly. Have it all. I was like, we didn’t even talk about the whole things about parenting and the ways that you’re supposed to be. Everything should be perfect all the time for your child. And we want that, but we’re also human. And I feel like that’s not possible. All those ideas in a way is sort of saying, this might not be possible. It’s not that there can be one set of rules that is going to make everyone happy. And I think that could be kind of a scary thing because in a sense, if there’s no formula that you can follow to do it, what do you do? Right? There’s no guideline for you in a way. And you have to figure out what it’s going to be for yourself, and that’s scary, I think.

Glennon Doyle:

Religion does that, too.

Amanda Doyle:

What do you want?

Celeste Ng:

Yes, exactly.

Amanda Doyle:

The terrifying question.

Glennon Doyle:

But that’s why Elena’s so pissed to me. Celeste, let me tell you why Elena’s so pissed, okay? She’s so because she did the sandbox. She went in there, she followed all the rules that they told her. She won. She has the perfect kids, she has the huge house, she has the husband, and her rage comes from the discovery that it was all a lie and that none of that was going to make her happy. But her reluctance to give it up is because that’s the bind of white womanhood. It’s like, “I’m pissed because it’s not what they promised me, but I don’t want to give up my safety and protection.”

Celeste Ng:

I think that’s dead on. And I think that’s real too because in a sense you’re like, “I’m realizing that all of the stuff that I was told I was supposed to be doing, actually not a lie, not bringing me fulfillment, but then what?” Right? It’s almost the feeling of, is that all there is, right? You’re just like, “Well, then what?” And then you’re like, “Do I just go off into the unknown?”

Celeste Ng:

I think that’s part of why Mia is so threatening to Elena, because in a way Mia has thrown all these conventions out. She’s like, “Fine, I’m not going to play by any of your rules. I’m going to live out of my car. I’m going to go off and I’m going to be a single mother. I’m going to do these things. I’m going to embrace art and weirdness,” and all these things that Elena has held at a distance because she thought that was the way. And in a sense to Elena to say, “Well I can’t do that. So then what am I left with? I’m stuck here.” Right? “I’m stuck in the sandbox.” And that’s a huge bind. And that’s real.

Glennon Doyle:

And it’s a question that so many women are asking themselves right now.

Celeste Ng:

Absolutely.

Glennon Doyle:

Maybe some people are smarter or work faster than I do, but it feels like a question of the late ’40s and ’50s because you already tried whatever your sandbox was and it didn’t work. And so you’re what nexting? You’re on the abyss of time.

Celeste Ng:

And it’s also because we all deserve more grace than we give ourselves, probably. To a certain extent, it wasn’t wrong to try the sandbox. You don’t know what doesn’t work for you in a sense, until you’ve tried that and you’re like, “Oh, and then maybe there’s some parts of the sandbox that I really like. There are some parts of it that are great. Other parts not so much.” But it takes time, I think, to figure that out. And it is that question of, well what do we do next? And especially if you are reaching a stage where your children are older or your career has been somewhat established, to think about letting go of that is a real, it’s a real risk. And I think this is your stereotypical midlife crisis kind of time, which in the movies it’s like, man quits his job, decides to become a surfer and buys a sports car.

Celeste Ng:

It’s that sense of, it wasn’t that. So I’m going to scrap it and start again. And I think again, for many people, and especially maybe for women and women who are raising children, you don’t feel like you can let go of that. And because we’re not men, we don’t have in some ways the power to do that. They can kind of get away with doing that. Not to say there’s not fallout, but that we don’t have all the same ability to chuck it all out the window and pull a Don Draper and get in the car and drive to California kind of situation.

Amanda Doyle:

For whatever reason it is, there’d be a hell of a lot more sports cars, because it isn’t because everyone isn’t feeling it. Because there are barriers to entry to the sports car surfer life.

Celeste Ng:

That’s exactly right. And part of that I think is that as women, we’re often told, “Your job is to take care of people.” And so again, that idea of “Well, what you want isn’t important. It’s all about what other people want, what other people need.” And then you get to a point in your life, where as you were saying, what do you want is a really terrifying question to be asked because you don’t always know how to answer it. And if you do know how to answer it, sometimes you can’t have that.

Glennon Doyle:

That’s why it’s terrifying. Why would you even want to entertain it if you know it’s never going to happen? That would make it worse.

Celeste Ng:

Exactly. And I think to go back to Elena, I think that’s part of her way of coping with this, is to say, “Oh, that is not an option,” or, “That’s bad. I don’t want that. Because if I admitted that I wanted that, it would in a way be admitting that I can’t have it.” And that’s, it’s just easier to be like the old Aesop’s fable of the sour grapes. Like, “Oh, well I can’t reach those grapes. But I didn’t want them anyway. They were going to be sour.” It is a self protection thing. And so I do feel a lot of sympathy for Elena and for all the characters who feel stuck in that bind. It’s a hard place to be in. And it’s a place that I think many of us find ourselves in, in one way or another.

Amanda Doyle:

I think something that is so powerful about those sour grapes and about, what do I want? I feel like a lot of this generation of women with any amount of privilege that have grown up, the myth has been, you can have all the things that you want. And so that no one will say out loud that that is a lie. And I think Celeste, one of the beautiful things I heard you say is, you’re talking about your son. You love your son, you would never trade that for anything. And yet there are things that you cannot have. There are things that you cannot do. There are choices. And I think that’s even part of it. We have to in our heads kind of vilify the alternative. We’re more comfortable with that, as like the Mia situation. We’re more comfortable vilifying or shaving that other thing instead of just admitting to ourselves, “Yeah, I would actually like to have that too, but I can’t have that because I have this.”

Celeste Ng:

Yeah. I think that’s so true. I have, a good friend of mine from grade school on, his father used to irritate him throughout our entire adolescence and it went to adulthood, and still now, by saying, “Life is choices.” Anytime he ran up to something his father would say to him, “Life is choices.” And it became a joke. And now I say that to my kid, because of your Uncle So and So, and he says, “Life is choices.” But it’s true. I mean, in a way it’s sort of what you’re talking about, which is not just saying like, “Oh, well that’s bad. You can’t have it or you didn’t.” But just to say, you can’t have it all.

Celeste Ng:

And that is so counter to what I was hearing when I was a teenager. For the best of reasons, I grew up in the age of girl power where they’re like, “Yes, you can be sexy, but you can also be super tough and you could be in a rock band, but also you could be,” like all of the things. You can have a career and also have as many children as you want. And I get why that was the message. And I don’t think it was a bad thing in and of itself because you do want people to feel that these are options to them. But it is also that idea of, you might just have to choose some of them. You can’t always have them. And it doesn’t mean that one is better than the other or wrong, but just that taking one path will mean that you cannot walk down the other path.

Glennon Doyle:

And important to acknowledge that, because you have a theme also that I love so much, which is this whole idea of the road not taken. And when we haven’t examined that and embraced the “and both” of that, we can totally put it on our kids. Again with Elena, she gave up her career, she gave up her ambition, and then she drove Lexie crazy by pushing her towards perfectionism. So that road not taken in motherhood feels like an important theme with your work.

Celeste Ng:

I feel like what it comes down to for me is almost just sort of acknowledging that we are humans and we’re finite and we’re flawed and limited and those aren’t bad things. That that is just part of, again, what being human is. It means you cannot do everything and you cannot do everything perfectly and you’re not even going to want to do everything. And then that has to be okay. In a sense, it’s like saying that you are not this abstract superhero who can do all of the things, but that you’re going to make choices and that is natural and normal and okay, and you might have some regrets, but you’ll also get some good things. In a way it’s like you said, it’s making it instead of either, or, it’s sort of making it a yes and or a but and. I don’t know if that’s a thing. 

Amanda Doyle:

It is now.

Glennon Doyle:

If Celeste says it is, it is.

Celeste Ng:

It’s sort of like normalizing the idea that you … again, I just keep coming back to, you’re a human being. You can’t do all those things. And I feel like there’s been a very long time in which we’ve asked people and particularly women to be superhuman. And we’ve held that up as the goal. And if you are not packing a perfect bento lunch for your kid and also chairing all of the school committees and also making partner at your law firm and also caring for your aging parents and have a beautiful house, then you’ve somehow failed. And I feel like normalizing that is sort of part of the work we’re doing of just saying, let’s give ourselves some grace because would you actually want to be that superhuman person? I don’t know. Not only does it sound tiring, but it sounds like you’re not a person anymore. You’re just this kind of entity who’s …

Glennon Doyle:

Robot. Yes. You’re a robot.

Amanda Doyle:

Your humanity is stripped from you. And I feel like that’s what happens when women are asked to take on myriad roles, is because you are role-ing, role-ing, role-ing, role-ing, and you’re not human-ing at all. So when you say, “You’re a human being, you can’t have everything,” that can feel terribly depressing, or it can feel incredibly liberating.

Glennon Doyle:

Yes. You don’t have to.

Amanda Doyle:

You are a human being. You can’t do everything. So stop. It’s not possible.

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah.

Amanda Doyle:

Congratulations. Sit down.

Celeste Ng:

Right. Yeah. And I like that idea of thinking about it as empowering. And I should say that even as I say this, I struggle to think about it that way myself because I am still like, “I need to do this and I need to do that.” And then, “Oops, I forgot to put this form in my kid’s backpack when he went off to school this morning. And I also didn’t do this. And my husband had to cook dinner last night because I was too tired and I could not get it done. And I felt like a failure.” All these things that we feel like we need to live up to. In a way, like you say, if you just accept, “Okay, I cannot do all those things. I should stop trying to do all those things because it is physically not possible.” The next step for me is also saying, “And that’s okay because I’m not alone in this.”

Celeste Ng:

And I feel like that’s running under a lot of what we were talking about. When I think about Elena in Little Fires Everywhere, I think about Marilyn in Everything I Never Told You. I think both of them feel very isolated. They feel like they are the lone safety net that’s there to catch everybody. And I think that’s really destructive. And it’s also really hard. And if instead you say, “Okay, but I am part of a team. I have a partner who can pitch in when I am stretched thin.” Hopefully that’s true. Or I have friends who can do this or it’s okay because the teacher at school will make sure my kid does not go hungry even though I forgot to put his lunch in his backpack, or whatever it is. It’s this sense in a way of being like, “I’m not alone. I am in a community.”

Celeste Ng:

And that there is a we, first of all, and that we are in it together, I feel like then can become incredibly bolstering and can be a way of being stronger and of recognizing the strength does not have to come on an individual basis. It can come as a collective. I think as a society, we Americans are bad at thinking about collectives. We are good at thinking about individuals. We are bad at thinking about a team and a group.

Celeste Ng:

But I think maybe shifting from that kind of thinking can be one way of lifting some of that burden off of each individual person’s shoulders, of recognizing the world will not end because I cannot do all these things, because as you said, Amanda, I’m a human and I can only do so much. Other people are also there and we will help each other. For me, that’s what I’m trying to change my mindset to, because I think it’s ultimately a more sustainable way of being.

Glennon Doyle:

And it’s better parenting. It’s better parenting because that’s exactly what we want our kids to know and believe and live as. We want them to not have to feel like they have to be perfect. We want them to live without shame and burden and martyrdom. So then why are we doing it and calling that good mothering?

Celeste Ng:

Yeah. That’s so right. Because I feel like, what are the things we’re trying to teach our kids in school and in life? Trying to teach them, get along with other people, work as a team, ask for help when you need it. If you’re going to win a game, great, win graciously. If you’re going to lose a game, be a good sport. Lose graciously. In a sense, what you’re trying to teach them to do is to be with other people and to be part of a society, whether it’s the society of their team or their school or just the larger society. And so one of the things that I’m, I’m trying to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. And it’s hard, but I’m trying to normalize for my kid that I am fallible and that I make mistakes. And so he’s delighted when he catches me in a mistake.

Celeste Ng:

He’s also, he’s kind of a tween, so we’re getting into some tween things. He’s like, “Why’d you do that thing? How come you didn’t?” And I’m like, “Oh, you’re totally right.” You’re like, “Because I forgot.” And he is like, he gives me this look like, “I didn’t know you could forget.” I’m like, “Yep. Because my brain is tired.” Because I got a lot of stuff going on, but thank you for reminding me.”

Celeste Ng:

In a way, I am trying to think of it as also empowering him to be part of this group and not just to be like, you got to hold it all together. And if anyone ever sees any sign of weakness, you failed. Because that is, that’s a really hard way to be. You can’t hide your weaknesses forever. And feeling like you have to in a way is what gives us the kind of strong man figure that pretends that he’s infallible and knows everything and without him, everything will crash. I’m the only one, right. It’s not always a man.

Amanda Doyle:

It’s often a man. 

Celeste Ng:

That’s not always … but yeah.

Amanda Doyle:

Just usually.

Amanda Doyle:

When you said that about your son pointing out your mistakes, I had this really powerful moment the other night, because you’re saying we’re teaching them to be in a society. Part of that is calling those societies and groups to a higher standard and seeing what is wrong and not just conforming to that society, but saying, “But why, and why not this?” I was laying in bed with my son the other night and he asked a very pointed question about how our family was doing something and said basically, “Why are we doing it this way? That doesn’t seem right.” And I almost started crying because I was like, A, he’s exactly right. That is not the best our family can do. And B, he is deciding that he is safe enough in this family to call it out and that he cares enough about this family to want us to do better and to call us to that higher standard. And I was just like, thank you.

Glennon Doyle:

It’s like, isn’t it a James Baldwin quote? “I love my country and because I love my country, I will criticize it relentlessly.” That’s love. That’s bringing your care and your trust to make it better.

Celeste Ng:

I think that’s exactly right. It’s sort of like you’ve internalized those principles so much that you can then say, “Hey, we’re not doing what we’re supposed to be doing.” And that’s one of those parenting moments where you feel like the clouds open up and says, oh, you feel like, you’re like, “Oh, this is the moment that I’ve been trying to get to.” Right?

Amanda Doyle:

Right. But to be clear, my first reaction was fragility. “How dare you criticize me? I’ve been working my ass off all day. I get one thing wrong. Oh my God, go to sleep.” And then it was the next moment.

Glennon Doyle:

That’s all of our first reaction. That’s like white fragility. That’s all of it. That’s the knee jerk control, control, control. If we could get past that, we get to the fact that the criticism was a gift of trust and of the belief that what is most important to us is not control, but doing our best.

Amanda Doyle:

And not looking a certain thing, but actually being it.

Glennon Doyle:

Yes.

Celeste Ng:

Yeah. That’s such a good point. I mean, and it is, that’s your natural first reaction. You’re like, “Stop telling me that I made a mistake. I know I made a mistake.” And you’re like, “Okay. But I did.” My husband and I have this joke that I’m like, we should have a course in high school or college or maybe just every year where you just practice apologizing. You practice just owning your mistakes and you just practice going, “Oh, sorry, I did not mean to do that. I won’t do it again.” And then you move on. Because I feel like that is a thing again that we don’t really know how to do. There’s a sense that if you make a mistake or if you apologize or you admit that in any way you were wrong, that you’ve ceded some kind of important territory. And I feel like that that prevents everything that could come after that. It prevents all of the learning that we could do.

Celeste Ng:

Prevents you from actually addressing the problem that this person pointed out. And then it also prevents you from not doing this again in the future. And it’s hard. I really hate being wrong, really hate it. I don’t think anybody is like, “I would love being wrong.” But in a way, sort of like when my son was younger, he wouldn’t want to ever admit that he was wrong. And I’m like, “Just say sorry and move on. Just say sorry, just move on.” That works when they’re five, and when you get older, you have to do a little bit more than that. But in a sense it’s like, this is not a huge injury to yourself. Not saying you’re a bad person, it just means you didn’t mean to do that and that you’re sorry. Just move on. And I feel like if we had to do that for one semester every month for our, every year we went to school, maybe it would feel feel less hard. But it is. It’s hard to stop people from doing that.

Glennon Doyle:

I taught apologies in my third grade class, Celeste. I taught apologies.

Celeste Ng:

You did?

Glennon Doyle:

Sure did.

Celeste Ng:

I wish that were taught everywhere, and every year too, because I feel like you just need to know how to do that. I mean, half the arguments that I have with my husband, they are not important arguments, but they’re one or the other of us just needs to apologize and move on. But no, “But I was right to do that because you didn’t turn over the laundry at the … ” You know. All we really need to do is, “You’re right. I totally should have done that. I’m sorry. Ill try not to do it again.” And then we could move on, but we get stuck on the little bump of the apology. I love that you taught that to your class. Did they get it? Did they understand?

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah. So I was using this beautiful way of teaching, I think it was called Responsive Classroom or something, but they taught us that we should teach the kids how to do apologies of action, which I think about all the time. So it’s not enough to apologize. You have to do something or make it right, because if something’s broken you have to fix it. So there was a bunch of different ways we would do it. But yeah, I mean it’s amazing what we don’t teach kids. I’ve had to spend a million years teaching my kids about hieroglyphics, which are great. But they also might want to learn how to deal with their emotions or have relationships.

Celeste Ng:

One of the things that I’m really happy that my son is learning in his school is, they have a health class and a large part of that is sort of socio emotional learning basically. They literally sit down and talk about self-esteem and how to deal with what happens if someone says something to you that hurts your feelings. On the one hand, I’m kind of tickled by the fact that there is a curriculum about this, but then on the other hand I’m like, “No, that’s really important.”

Celeste Ng:

You need to know what to do if somebody hurts your feelings. You need to talk about things like consent. You need to, in all kinds of ways, like if someone wants to play with you and you don’t want to play with them, you don’t have to do it. You can be nice about it, but, right. I mean even that level of consent, it does, it feels like these are the sorts of things that in a way they allow us to do all those other larger conversations. If we don’t have those it’s really hard to, you get caught up in the feelings of it and you can’t get to the part where you can actually sort of learn and grow from it.

Glennon Doyle:

I’m dying to talk, to ask you about Our Missing Hearts. I freaking love this book, Celeste. I love it so much. I cannot believe that you’re releasing it at this moment. It’s just like you always know exactly what we’re going to need two years from now. I could summarize it and tell you exactly what it’s about, Celeste, but maybe I should let you, in case you have differing opinions, in case I’m possibly wrong. Can you just, for the listener, tell us what it’s about and why it’s so important right now? Because it is so important right now.

Celeste Ng:

So Our Missing Hearts is the story of a 12-year-old boy named Bird. It’s his nickname in the family. And he’s living in an America that’s really governed by fear. And in particular there’s a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment. There’s been a lot of social and economic turmoil and the Chinese are the scapegoat of this. And as a result of this, there are new laws in place that say that anyone who’s seen to be acting unAmerican can have their children taken away from them. And in particular, this is often applied to East Asian families or anybody who’s sort of speaking out on their behalf.

Celeste Ng:

And when the novel opens Bird’s mother, Margaret, who is a Chinese American woman, his father is white. She’s left the family some years before kind of in the wake of all of these laws. And he doesn’t know a lot about her, but he gets a letter from her and it leads him to want to try and find her again. And he goes on this quest to find her and to understand what happened to her and why she left the family. And then also of how he can keep going in this world that is really kind of frightening and dark, how he can hold onto hope.

Celeste Ng:

So for me it’s really a story about parents and children and how you can still give hope to the next generation and whether or not the actions of one person can actually make a difference, even when it feels like the world is a very dark place.

Glennon Doyle:

And it just asks such beautiful questions about what is a mother’s responsibility. In a crumbling democracy, in a hurting world, what is a mother’s responsibility? Is it just to stay home and make things as perfect as possible as the world crumbles? Is it just to prepare the child for the world? Is it to go out in the world and change the world for the child? Is it just the responsibility of the child in your home, or is a mother someone who nurtures and heals all children? I mean, it’s big.

Celeste Ng:

And these are the questions that I’ve been asking myself over the past few years. And particularly during the pandemic, I’m thinking about these questions. What should I be doing? I mean as a writer, especially when the pandemic first hit and everything was closed down, I was thinking, “I feel really useless. I’m here in my office, I’m really lucky, really privileged. I get to make up stories about people that don’t exist and tinker with words. And if I were a doctor, had I gone to med school, I could be out there trying to save people’s lives. And instead here I am in my little office with my computer.” And I felt very helpless and also useless. And I started asking myself these questions. Is there any role that art can play in trying to make the world into a better place? Especially in the face of these really huge abstract global problems like a pandemic or global warming or bigotry.

Celeste Ng:

They feel so massive that as one person it feels very difficult to do anything about it. And I was thinking about this of course as a parent too, like you’re saying Glennon, how do I prepare him for this? What is my job? Should I just make a safe space for him here? Which feels important. And I don’t think that’s wrong to say this is a place where you will be safe. Is it important for me to try and make you aware of what is probably going to be out there for you in the world? Maybe also yes. Right. Is it important for me to try to change that? Yeah, maybe also yes, maybe all of these things. And how do you reconcile all that? And so that’s very much one of the questions that Margaret, Bird’s mother in the book, is trying to figure out, is what is her job? What does she need to be doing and what can she do?

Glennon Doyle:

It’s a dramatic response, or it’s in conversation with, or it’s to the other women in your books, she’s so far out of the sandbox. Maybe we can’t do all the things because we’re doing the wrong things. But maybe if we reject all the sandboxes of white supremacy and patriarchy, we find those three things that you just said. Maybe that’s what’s next, is changing the world. One thing that I found so amazing in this book is that even your front liners are librarians. That’s so wild right now. I mean I know they kind of always are, but right now the librarians are the ones who are protecting the written word, protecting marginalized communities who write. That’s so amazing.

Celeste Ng:

Yeah. I wish that reality were not bending closer to the novel. But I mean part of that comes out of the fact that I feel like librarians have always been unsung heroes. I grew up going to public libraries with my parents and even as an adult, I will take my laptop to the library and work, and I hear and see sort of what the librarians are doing. And their job is really, “If you want information, I will help you try to get it. It doesn’t really matter what it is. If you need to do your taxes, I will help you figure out which forms you use and help you find the right books to fill it out. And I’ll help you figure out where to send it. If you need to get on the internet, if you’re questioning your sexuality and you want to read more, I’ll help you find some books that maybe will help you sort that out. And I’m not going to tell anybody because this is your information.”

Celeste Ng:

There was one time that I was at the library and I sat near the reference desk and I heard the reference librarian coaching someone on the phone to get directions from where they were to someplace, which turned out to be actually quite close by, on Google Maps, and spent 20 minutes walking them through how to do this. And in the end finally it was like, “Would it be easier for you if I just told you the directions and you could just write them down?” This is just a sort of small silly story, but the sense in which they were like, “If you want to know, that’s enough for me, I’m going to try and help you.”

Celeste Ng:

It makes sense in a way that in this world the librarians would be the ones who are like, “There’s information that you need. You are trying to find out what’s going on in this world and how to fix it. I’ll help you with that.” And it makes sense that in our real world, the librarians are the ones who are like, “No, I think it is important that children, or people, not always even children, but just public libraries are under attack too. They’re like, “It is important that people be able to access this information.” And so in a way it’s sort of like, “Oh, of course they’re the ones who are going to be the front line.” We just don’t think of them as heroes like that.

Amanda Doyle:

My husband works for the trucking industry and it’s always fascinating because they are a leading indicator of the economy, because when people buy less companies ship less, the economy is turning down. That’s how banning books is. Like banning books is a leading indicator of a really dangerous, powerful ideology that’s coming. If you’re not paying attention to the banning of the books, you are not taking care of your future self because that’s just the leading indicator. It is coming. They are the people protecting people’s desire for information, which is power. So they’re removing the power, and the librarians are the warriors trying to keep our ability to have power through information. So scary.

Glennon Doyle:

Celeste, how do you talk to your little boy about surviving and thriving in America? How do you, because it’s three parts, you said it’s three parts. You’re making a safe space for him. Your art is out in the world. This book is going to open hearts and minds a hundred percent. So you’ve done that check, check. So the middle one.

Amanda Doyle:

You can rest now.

Glennon Doyle:

The middle one. How do you prepare your son for all of the macro and microaggressions he will experience in America?

Celeste Ng:

It’s really hard. I think that many families and Black families in particular have wrestled with this for a long time, with the idea that you have to have a talk at some point and you have to kind of lay out for your child, here’s how the world tends to work and here are the things you have to be careful of. And there’s sort of warring impulses, at least in me, of feeling like, “I don’t want to tell you these things. I want to keep you protected as long as I can.” Because you don’t want to tell your child, “Hey, so there’s some people out there who are going to want to hurt you.” Nobody ever wants to tell their child that. But at the same time, I also worry, “If I don’t tell you this, I don’t want you to learn it out there. I don’t want you to learn this when something happens.”

Celeste Ng:

And so it’s a sort of delicate balance. And I feel really lucky that I have a kid who is pretty mellow, but he does think about these things. And so when we’ve talked about this, so for example, when the Black Lives Matter movements started taking off and we were talking about what had happened to George Floyd, I tried to explain it in sort of age appropriate terms. And also yet to give him a sense of, hey, these are things that happen. They’ve been happening for a long time and we’re trying to fix them, but this is kind of the ongoing work that we need to do. Even though you are not Black, this is something that affects all of us. And then to talk to him a little bit about experiences that I had with racism, so that he has a sense of what’s out there.

Celeste Ng:

And not to scare him, but just to slowly paint in the context around the world that he’s got. I think when you’re a young child, you’ve got a small world and then as you get older, you zoom out, your aperture gets wider and your picture gets bigger and it fills in more around the outside. And if you zoom out too fast, sometimes, you know, you get kind of whiplash. But if you kind of gently paint in more and more of the picture … I don’t know that I’m doing it right for sure. But I think that’s the struggle that many parents have, is how do you balance what they can handle with what they need to know? And it’s very slowly talking about it as it comes up, but also talking about it. It would be way easier to just be like, “Well, let’s just talk about the movie that we watched and not talk about this over dinner.”

Celeste Ng:

But sometimes we do. And I’m fortunate that my partner at dinner, sometimes if we start talking about this, he will join in and he’ll say, “You know what? These are things that I had not had to think about for a while because I’m a tall white man, but it’s still important to me, and here’s why. Here’s why this kind of system is bad for all of us.” And it’s always unclear with kids. You’re not always sure how much of this is sinking in. But I feel like in some ways, creating the space for that conversation to happen and making it so that he’s aware that these are things that exist, then he will be ready to have those conversations when we do really need to have them.

Glennon Doyle:

That’s right.

Celeste Ng:

At least that’s my hope.

Glennon Doyle:

Do you think that writing fiction makes you a more compassionate person? Because I was listening to you say at one point a while back that if you have a character, like you were in workshop or something. I think it was about Elena. It all comes back to Elena for some reason, today. But your workshop people were like, “We need to understand why Elena’s like this, because we’re not feeling very sympathetic.” So you said when people can’t understand why someone is a certain way, you as a fiction writer go back, work your way back and put a bread crumb in the beginning so that they can see why they turned out that way.

Glennon Doyle:

So I just have to tell you this story, Celeste, is that I am in the middle of adapting Untamed into a TV show. I was sitting in a meeting recently with a producer, with a wonderful producer, and we had just pitched this whole thing about the divorce and the bulimia and the mental health and the coming out and the whatever, and the producer sat there quietly and then he said this. “I have one question and I just think it’s going to be what a lot of people have. And so I’m just going to say it. And with all due respect, my question is, what is Glennon’s problem?”

Glennon Doyle:

And I was like, “Huh.”

Amanda Doyle: 

“I’m going to go back and add some breadcrumbs to that.” 

Glennon Doyle:

Celeste, I can’t add any breadcrumbs. I don’t know what it is.

Celeste Ng:

Yeah, I think that it is true that when I’m writing, I always think I know the characters and I always think I’m being really compassionate to them. And then other people will sometimes read and go, “You know, it really seems like you are not portraying her in a nice light at all. She just seems awful.” And I do firmly believe that you can understand people. It doesn’t mean that you excuse anything. It doesn’t mean you agree, but that in a way you can be like, “Okay, I understand how from your point of view that sounded really different, or this looks really different.”

Celeste Ng:

And I feel like that’s the point that I’m always trying to get to as a writer with all of my characters and in life as well. Although it is, it’s hard in real life to go, “Okay, you are really, really, really bothering me right now. Let me try and see it from your point of view. I’m still not going to agree with you, but at least I can understand and maybe we can reach some kind of an understanding if I can get into your mind frame somehow. And hopefully vice versa, you’ll try and get into my mind frame.” So I do think there is something to that, of saying, if you can connect with somebody on a, and it’s usually on a very, very human level, then you can start to understand what their problem is. Right.

Celeste Ng:

But in a sense, I mean there’s all kinds of ways that I think that gets said where you’re just like, “I don’t know. I don’t get her.” There’s lots of reasons we have to not connect with each other or understand each other or try to sit in someone else’s position. It’s protective, right? It can be a scary thing to do. But I do feel like, again, it goes back to that question of humanity. If you can connect with someone on a very small level, oftentimes what it means is like, “Oh, you are also a person like me and we have this one very small point of resonance.” It doesn’t have to be the same, but just, “Oh, I also know what that feels like in some level.” It seems really small, but in a way it’s a way of saying, “Okay, so you’re also a person and that means that you also matter to me.”

Celeste Ng:

Which sounds so basic. Again, it goes back to the things that we’re trying to teach our third graders and our young children. But it is that sense of being like, “Oh, what happens to you is also relevant to me.” That sense of what happens to you is not completely divorced from what happens to me. And that there is a point of connection, and I feel like whatever the form of art is, whether it’s a novel, whether it’s a TV show, whatever it is, it’s a memoir. It’s always about trying to find those moments of resonance. Not necessarily the same. It might not always be exactly the same, because everyone’s experience is going to be different. But that feeling like, “Oh, I hear what you’re saying. I felt something like that.”

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah. It’s like they say, it’s not the same but it rhymes.

Celeste Ng:

Exactly.

Glennon Doyle:

I think it was Dr. Maya Angelou who said, “I am human so nothing human can be foreign to me.” Right. There’s something that connects.

Celeste Ng:

I always think of it as being like, if you got a tuning fork, one of those old school like in cartoons tuning fork, and you ring it hard enough, other things that would be at that same frequency will also resonate a little bit. So this is the science behind why opera singers can sing, and if they sing at just the right note, the wine glass will break because it’s shaking so much. But that idea that if you hit one note, other notes that would be in harmony with it, or the same note but a different octave will also shake just a little bit. That feeling of being like, “Oh, we’re … ” It’s not the same, but like you say, it rhymes. It’s some kind of resonant frequency that happens. I feel like if we can get more of that in the world, there may be a little bit more space for understanding what other people are going through without it having to be exactly who they are. That’s just a little bit more grace for everybody.

Glennon Doyle:

Yeah. And if there are people who don’t rhyme with us at all, we can just plant a fake seed. We can just be like, “You know what? I’m just going to make up some crap that happened to that guy so I can make it through the day and be sympathetic.” 

Amanda Doyle:

“I’m going to make sense of your life through a detail completely foreign to you that you’ll never know I believe about you.”

Glennon Doyle:

And there comes empathy.

Celeste Ng:

I mean, in a way that’s sort of what fiction does, right? It’s sort of like, I mean, you’re saying, “Okay, so these people don’t exist. This has not happened. They are not you and they are not me. But I’m going to ask you, what if, if they happened, if they were real and this happened to them, does that open up anything for you?” And that idea that maybe it’s an opportunity, again, as we were saying at the beginning, to prop the door open and be like, “Huh. So I’ve never had that experience. I’ve never met anyone had that experience. But now I’m thinking about it and I know that that is a thing that could happen,” right? In a way, it’s this kind of gentle prying open of what had seemed to be a really sort of closed box. Now you’re like, “If I’ve planted that seed in your mind that maybe a person could be like this, or maybe this is an experience someone could have, it’s in there. And my hope is that eventually it’ll start to kind of widen up and let some light in.”

Glennon Doyle:

Well, Our Missing Hearts is going to shake people in that opera singer way. I find it to be a truly powerful act, not just of art, but of motherhood. Like you have just mothered the hell out of your kid through this book. You have mothered the hell out of the world through this book. I think it’s going to ask questions that change how people are looking at mothering and their responsibilities in the world. It’s really special. And that’s going to be our next right thing. Everybody go get Our Missing Hearts. It’s just a really important book for this moment. And Celeste, thank you for teaching us through your imagination.

Celeste Ng:

Thank you, Glennon, so much for having me on. Thank you, Amanda, for this amazing conversation. And thank you also for those kind words about my book. It means a lot coming from you, and I hope you’re right. I hope it just gets people thinking and feeling.

Glennon Doyle:

It will. I’m about to read it again, so. Okay, Pod Squad. We love you. We will see you here very soon. Bye.