Harvard Authors Profile: Celeste Ng Cares About More Than the Truth

To author Celeste L. Ng ’02, articulating objective truth isn’t a worthy enough goal. Instead, she writes her fiction novels wielding a metaphorical crowbar, prying apart stories that initially appear objective to reveal inner nuances to her readers and herself.

Formerly a Harvard English concentrator and Leverett House resident, Ng is now a bestselling author of multiple highly acclaimed books, including “Little Fires Everywhere.” Her work is characterized by shared themes of identity, race, truth, and personhood. In an interview with The Harvard Crimson, Ng discussed her approach to storytelling, why she writes, and the lessons she carries with her from her time at Harvard.

The key to Ng’s work is her crucial examination of the unknown and unknowable. Her recognition of what she does not understand about the world grew particularly salient in college.

“If I had to sum up my whole Harvard experience, it would be realizing that there is a lot more out there than I even realized,” Ng said. “There was always the moment where you felt like, ‘Oh God. I’m the mistake.’”

Ng recalled sitting in various house dining halls with her friends as they engaged in fierce debates about a variety of issues.

“We were really concerned with figuring out what we think,” Ng said with a grin. “And part of that is debating, and arguing, and trying to convince people that we’re right, and trying to figure out what an objective truth is.”

As she grew older, however, Ng added more nuance to her formulation of the world.

“One of the most important things we can do is to hold open space for individuality and nuance,” Ng said. “There’s more to life than being right. So recognizing our humanness is a priority for me.”

Ng now uses her novels to deliver that same complex understanding to her readers. She expressed appreciation for those who finish her novels with the realization that there was much more to the story that they originally “didn’t know was happening.”

“A lot of the stories that I find myself drawn to writing are really, at heart, about recognizing that there are multiple ways to view a situation,” Ng said.

In all three of her novels, Ng intentionally begins with an illusion of simplicity, slowly revealing complexity as the plots progress.

“I think we want things to be simple. As humans, we would like there to be very clear, definitive answers and hard and fast rules,” Ng said. “And life is actually really complicated. Humans are really complicated and messy. And I think that’s actually kind of a good thing.”

Ng believes that holding space for complexity will be a core element of all her future works as well — “unless I radically change my personality,” she said, laughing.

This nuance-forward storytelling comes through in a particularly authentic manner because of Ng’s instinctive approach to her writing.

“When I’m writing, it’s because I’m trying to figure something out,” Ng said. “A story comes to me, and it sticks with me because there’s something in there that I have questions about, and that I’m trying to articulate to myself.”

In a world with countless questions to answer and issues to resolve, Ng has a steadfast approach to selecting which stories she wants to tell.

“If it feels like the story that keeps tapping you on the shoulder whenever you try and walk away from it, if it’s the story that keeps coming back to you, then I think you owe it to yourself to try and write it,” Ng said.

Most recently, the issue that has kept tapping her on the shoulder has been parenting in a tumultuous world.

“How do you parent in a world where it feels like everything is really falling apart? Which, generously speaking, is kind of how I feel about the world right now,” Ng said.

Her latest book, “Our Missing Hearts,” is a moving and timely story about a mother and son navigating a complex dystopian society. As a mother to her own son, Ng realized that this writing process ultimately arose from a quest to articulate to herself: “Why bother?”

To Ng, the most successful books are “almost like a crowbar.” She laughed at her own analogy.

“They’re just prying a lid off of something,” she said. “There’s not necessarily an answer inside that can, to continue that analogy, but they’re just opening it up and showing that there’s other stuff in there that I hadn’t put in there yet.”

Part of the success of her complex approach to storytelling comes from the deep empathy Ng holds for her characters, particularly those with a diverse range of experiences that she may or may not share.

“Maybe this person has a physical handicap, and I don’t have that. But there is something about the way that they feel judged by the world, they feel like everyone is looking at them, they feel like they have something to prove,” Ng said. “That I know about. I grew up as a Chinese American in a place where there weren’t very many. So I know what it’s like to feel like everyone’s immediately looking at me like ‘You’re different.’ I can see you.”

For each of her characters, Ng seeks out a “core feeling” — like the feeling of being judged — that she shares with them, on a quest to deeply understand their feelings. The result is that each character she writes, even those who make profoundly unjustifiable decisions, are still rational and three-dimensional beings worthy of empathy from a thoughtful reader.

Although she writes to figure things out, Ng acknowledges that no book will ever give clear, perfect answers to the readers or the author. Instead, she is secure in the knowledge that her stories allow people to open their minds to questions and nuances that they may never have considered before. As a result, Ng conveys more than just objective truth — she writes the authentic human experience, as subjective and irreconcilable as that may be.

—Staff writer Stella A. Gilbert can be reached at stella.gilbert@thecrimson.com.