Our Missing Hearts with Celeste Ng

Annmarie Kelly:

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You guys, I have the best job. Every once in a while, I'll try to belly ache. I have so much reading to do. I haven't had time to write questions, and then I just have to pinch myself. I get to read books and talk to creative people. That's bananas! This is the best job ever, especially today, because the brilliant and marvelous and altogether magical Celeste Ng is here. Celeste is basically a literary rockstar both here in my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio and all around the world. She's the author of three novels, her first publication, Everything I Never Told You, was a New York Times Best Seller and named the Best Book of the Year by over a dozen publications.

Everything I Never Told You has been translated into over 30 languages and is being adapted for the screen. Celeste Ng's second novel, Little Fires Everywhere, was named a Best Book of the year by over two dozen publications and spent more than 52 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List. It's also been published in more than 30 languages and has been adapted as a Hulu series starring Kerry Washington and Reese Witherspoon. Celeste Ng's third novel, Our Missing Hearts, is new this fall. It's been named a most anticipated book of the year by more publications than I can count.

Booklist described Our Missing Hearts in this way, "As lyrical as it is chilling, as astonishing as it is empathic. Literary perfection." I was fortunate enough to read an early copy and I can't wait to talk about it. Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She graduated from Harvard and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and many other publications. She's a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Celeste Ng, welcome to Wild Precious Life.

Celeste Ng:

Thank you so much for having me.

Annmarie Kelly:

I am so excited to have you here with us today to talk about your newest novel, Our Missing Hearts, which is a story about power and art and about the legacies we pass on to our children. I mean, so many of us spent our childhoods in libraries, easing forbidden titles from the stacks and reading to make sense of ourselves. However, in Our Missing Hearts, you introduced us to a world where this kind of literary curiosity is no longer possible. You recently interviewed Tony Marra about his new book and I loved your opening question. I wonder if we could just start with that. Will you tell us about the seeds of Our Missing Hearts and which parts came to you first and what inspired you to write this book?

Celeste Ng:

Sure. I started writing this book right after I finished my second novel, Little Fires Everywhere. At the time, I thought it was just going to be a fairly conventional mother-son story. That was really the beginning of the whole thing. It was about a relationship between a mother who was an artist. I knew she was going to be something creative, whether a writer, a visual artist, and her son who didn't really understand why she was so drawn to this work and maybe even resented it or saw it a little bit as a rival for his attention. I started off writing it and it was a fairly conventional story, as I said.

And then that was about September-October 2016. Fairly soon thereafter, a lot of really dark things started to happen in our country. There was the election. There was the rise of the far-right. A lot of things that had been simmering under the surface really came right up to the top. The novel itself started to take a much darker turn I think because it felt like we were living in a dystopia, and we can talk later on about whether this book really is a dystopia. But at the time, it really felt like we were living in sort of a horror novel, and the novel felt like it had to take on some of those topics in order to feel honest.

It was weird to write a book where Trump had never become president and just pretend like, "Oh, that didn't happen in this world." It needed to be a world that I think acknowledged some of the darkness that was happening off the page. The book really grew from there, but I tried to keep it a mother-son story at its heart because for me that was where it all started.

Annmarie Kelly:

The son in this book is named Bird. I'm not giving anything away here, but we open the novel, Bird has just received a letter from his mother who left home mysteriously a certain number of years earlier. We quickly get a sense of this world, right? He's living in the era of something called PACT, the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. Under the excuse of so-called national security, books by Asian Americans are banned. The government reads citizens' mail, hate crimes against Asian Americans go unpunished, and the government removes children from their homes if parents are deemed unfit, which often just means parents simply questioned those barbaric rules.

Our Missing Hearts is a work of fiction, but as a reader, so much of your made up world felt so believable. As a writer myself, I like to escape into my fictional worlds I'm creating. But I wonder, did you have any escape here? Were you ever shocked or disillusioned by the world you were creating?

Celeste Ng:

I was. It was really a difficult book to write. Honestly, part of the reason that it took so long, I told you I started writing it in the fall of 2016, was partly that I didn't want to write it. I didn't want to have to dwell in these worlds, and I didn't want to think about these issues. Enough was happening in the real world. I wanted to escape. As you said, as a writer, part of the fun of writing is that you get to not deal at least directly with what's going on. But that ended up becoming part of the book, that desire that I think we have totally reasonably to look away or to escape or to step out of these things that are happening.

And that ended up being one of the questions that the characters in the book have to face. Can you ignore these things going on if you really, really, really want to? I mean, it's easier. There's lots of reasons too, but then there's also reasons maybe that we have to look closely at it. And that was what I ended up having to do in the novel.

Annmarie Kelly:

I mean, as you mentioned in your authors note, "The world of this novel isn't exactly our world, but it isn't not ours either," and I knew that you were drawing inspiration from many real life events both past and, in fact, current because there's a long history in the United States and elsewhere of removing children. You mentioned this, removing children as a means of political control. This is something we have done and continue to do. We may want to look away from that because it might be easier.

But as you said, it's terrifying that this is happening. The forced separation of children from their parents is happening inside of your book and inside of our world. Was it important to you to shed light on this as you wrote?

Celeste Ng:

It really was. I took as my guiding principle something Margaret Atwood famously said about writing The Handmaid's Tale. She said if she was making an imaginary garden, she wanted the toads in the garden to be real. In other words, she said nothing that she put in that book was completely made up. And that felt really important to me too to try and take that same kind of baseline and say that nothing in the book was going to be completely without precedent. Everything that takes place has some tie to the real world, either something that's happened in the past or, as you said many times, something that is happening right now.

Once that was the case, it felt really important to point out to the reader, hey, I didn't make this up and this isn't something that happened long, long time ago. This is something that still happens here. It still happens in other countries. It is probably still going to happen again unless we really finally take a look at the past and try to acknowledge and learn from what we've done.

Annmarie Kelly:

I mean, Bird's dad works at this university library where this is not a time when research is welcomed into... The kinds of curiosity and questions that we might ask as researchers is often frowned on in their world. But he has a provost who I think you wrote something like, if we fear something, it is all the more imperative we study it thoroughly. I thought about that and the way it's such a fascinating mirror into what our country is struggling with right now. I mean, are those individuals who are opposed to teaching critical race theory, are they truly reading and immersing themselves in a study of the subject?

Are they reading Ibram X. Kendi's work before they go into these board meetings demanding that we not teach these things again and again? I was just thinking about our current political climate, and we are not figuring these things out and our children are watching and they're inheriting these messes that we're making. Don't you think?

Celeste Ng:

Yeah, absolutely. I think the other thing that our children are inheriting sometimes is the fear without the context or the understanding. It strikes me. I'm glad you brought up the debate over critical race theory because that seems to me to be a case where people are really afraid of what they'll find out. In a way, they've decided they're not even going to look. They're like, "Don't even open that box and don't even bring it over here. It might be important for us to know, but we're just going to pretend that whole thing doesn't exist. Anybody who even tries to acknowledge that there might be something to learn, we're going to shut down."

I think about what message that sends to the next generation, which is there are some things that are so terrifying that we can't learn from them. It's better to be ignorant than it is to admit that you made a mistake and try and learn from it. That's a terrifying thing to think about being passed onto the next generation. I mean, my own point of view is that everybody can learn from the past, and that's in theory what will allow us to do better in the future. But if we don't look at the past, we're probably not going to learn anything and we're probably just going to make the same mistakes over again.

Again, I'm thinking about the changes that are starting to happen in school districts or libraries. A lot of the things that I wrote about in the novel that were happening occasionally are happening in a more widespread way now. I'm thinking about, how is this going to affect the education of the next generation? They're not even going to know about a lot of these things if we don't teach it to them.

Annmarie Kelly:

There's a point that you write about and it's, "Bird wonders, who decided which books were too dangerous to keep and who it was that had to hunt down and collect the condemned books, like an executioner faring them to their doom?" Because that's just it, isn't it? I mean, once we start banning books, who's in charge of that? Who makes the decisions about what survives and what's condemned and why? I don't know about you, but if a book is banned, I know that's a book I want to read.

Celeste Ng:

I think that's how I feel too, and I think that's how a lot of people feel. I take some hope in that in a way. The idea that if you are being told that something is too dangerous for you, in a way, there's a sense that you almost need to find out what that is. I mean, I guess it's akin to if you're in a cafe and then people next to you start whispering, the first thing you do is you lean in because you're like, "There's something here that I want to know. There's something here that's being kept from me." Sometimes it turns out to be something really boring, but a lot of times it's something that's fascinating. I think that's true too of knowledge.

We were talking at the beginning about going to libraries and pulling forbidden books off the shelf. It doesn't even need to be anything salacious. It's just something that you didn't know was there and that you're interested in. That's one of the things that I've loved about libraries. I also was one of those kids who spent my childhood in a library. The idea that there was all this information and it was available to you and you could just walk up to it and take it down and see if it was interesting to you, that was really powerful to feel. It's something that I think everybody should get to experience, that idea that knowledge is there for you if you want it.

Annmarie Kelly:

And that you're not alone. One of my favorite things about books was that you learned that other people felt the way you did or other people lived the way you did. And then the converse was like, oh my gosh, they went through something so different and that's amazing too. I spent most of my childhood and probably would still duck into a book to just live there instead of out here.

Celeste Ng:

Yes, absolutely. It's what you said. I mean, it's the theory of mirrors and windows that books can reflect part of you back to you and make you feel seen and recognized and less alone, which I think is so, so valuable. They can also be a window into something totally new. The fact that they can do both of those things is really amazing. If you think about what's happening with a lot of the book bans, in a way, you don't want them to be mirrors and you also don't want them to be windows, right?

It's sort of like you just want a wall, and that's essentially what's happening. If there's any positive aspect to what's happening now, I hope it's that a lot of people are starting to think really carefully about what it means to say, "You can't read this book, or no child can read this book. We're going to take this book away."

Annmarie Kelly:

No, absolutely, lest I give readers the wrong idea. Like you said, we could talk about whether this is a dystopian novel or not, but I want to make sure that folks also understand that this is not a book of all bad news. Yes, this is a world in Our Missing Hearts where the truth is indeed under attack, but because of that, it's also a world in which librarians and poets and knitters and sculptors are occasional superheroes. I love that.

Celeste Ng:

Yeah, I'm glad you said that, because as much as this was a hard book to write, I ended up writing into that fear and that darkness by asking myself, okay, how are we supposed to hold onto hope? How are you supposed to have any belief that there can be a better future? I mean, the alternative I guess is just to give up and despair. But if you're thinking about the future, if you are raising a child or you know children, that was very much on my mind. I have a kid. The answer that I came to in as much as it's an answer as you said is this sense that there are people out there who are trying to do the opposite of what the book banners are doing. They're trying to express themselves.

They're trying to make it easier for other people to express themselves. They're trying to find connections, and they're trying to make a community, whether that's through their art or through their writing or through some kind of activism or through, as you said, the librarians end up being some of the heroes of the book and connecting people with the information they need and then connecting people with the people that they're trying to find. That's one of the things that I came away thinking about is the ways that you can find other people who, like you said, are with you, are feeling the same things, and that you're not alone, even in the moments when it feels like you are.

Annmarie Kelly:

Like bajillions of readers the world over, I, of course, loved your previous two books, Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere. They're both big books about families and secrets and how we do or do not welcome the stranger. I felt those same themes present here, but I also felt you doing something different. It's good that you told me the background of your book, but I definitely as a reader felt you, Celeste Ng the writer, echoing the call to action that the knitters and the librarians were summoning in the pages of this book.

There was something meta about you stepping forward as an artist and a change agent when there were artists and change agents in your book stepping forward. Is that a fair observation? Did you feel yourself moved a little differently when you were writing this?

Celeste Ng:

I did. I'm glad you said both of those things because I also see a similarity with my first two books. I think a lot of the themes are the same, which is what do we pass on to our children? Can you ever actually explain your own experience to somebody else? And can they really understand what it's like to be you? And then the questions about what is the role of art in the world? Can it make a change? Can it reveal something to you? Can it connect you? Is it just a waste of time? All those big questions.

But while I was writing this, because it was happening during the Trump years and then particularly during the pandemic, I really picked up writing the book in I would say about April or May of 2020, which was a pretty isolated time for most of us. It felt like the book that was calling to me. I had actually set it aside and I was working on another book because this book was just so difficult. I didn't know how to write it. I didn't know what I was doing, and I didn't want to spend time in that world. I came back to it because it felt so resonant with the things that I was asking myself.

I'd opened up an email and I started writing to my agent and I said, "Hey, you know how I was working on this other book? I think I have to go and work on this other one that's sort of dystopian." She'd seen pieces. She wrote back and said, "I actually was just emailing you the same thing, that I keep thinking about that other book." I was so relieved because it felt like being given permission to dive in. But during the pandemic in particular, I was asking myself a lot of questions about like, what am I doing? I get to sit in my office and I make up stories. I play with words. I talk about people who didn't exist.

I should go get a medical degree and try and actually help people. I should become a labor organizer or an epidemiologist or anything that felt more tangible. A friend of mine has this saying, they always say, give the problem of your book to your book. I liked that idea because in a sense, the issues that you're struggling with are going to make their way into the book. I tried to do that. I tried to put that question of, what is the purpose of art? Can one person make a difference? Can art make any difference? I tried to put that into the novel. In a way, Margaret, who is Bird's mother, is trying to figure out what art can do.

She's a poet and she's thinking, "Does this mean anything? Does telling a story mean anything, or is it just a waste in the face of more practical things?" I think the answer that she comes up with is that it does do something, and that's at least what I would like to believe too. I hope that telling a story in some way or allowing someone else's story to be told has an effect, even if it's not as immediate and clear as saving someone's life in an operating room.

Annmarie Kelly:

100%. I feel like we all did this reevaluation, whether it was in 2016 or during the pandemic. What is it that we're doing with our lives, and does it have meaning, and does it have value? I worked in a political campaign for a time thinking that I should stop being a storyteller and work on this campaign to change votes. My job on that campaign ended up being the storyteller, because it turns out what changed people votes and changes their minds is actually stories.

Celeste Ng:

Exactly.

Annmarie Kelly:

You think it's policy. You think what you do is you go with a pen and you compare education policies. It's not. It's stories, and stories do matter. There's that article, I think it's by Rebecca Makkai about... She said something like art is a radical act. Coming back to that again and again, that this book seems like a radical act because I do think it is a radical act. And then the characters in this book are acting radically and what they're doing is love of art, is love of language, is love of truth, is love of their children. And that shouldn't be radical, but it is.

Celeste Ng:

It is. I think what that boils down to in its largest sense is love of humanity, not just in the individual human being sense, but in the kind of messiness and complication of what it is to be human. When you start thinking in abstractions, like you said in policy, you can say, "Well, 42% of Americans agree that," that may change some people's minds, but a lot of times it's more accessible when someone is telling a story about themselves, or the person you're talking to connects their own experience to this previously abstract idea. I loved what you said about that idea of art as being radical because I think art is one of the things that sometimes can cut through those abstractions.

I always think of it as coming in at you sideways. It bypasses all the rationality. It bypasses all the logic, all the parts of you that are like, well, how much money am I going to save by doing this? It sneaks in and it gets you emotionally. And then ideally, you have to sit with that emotion for a minute and you have to think, "Oh, I'm feeling something. What am I feeling?" You have to figure out what you're feeling and then you have to figure out what does that mean. That means that actually I don't want this, or I do want this, or this maybe is not right. It's a very slow process and it's a very indirect way of reaching people.

But I feel like sometimes we have our defenses up against the rational statistics, logical, common sense kind of things. The emotion is more immediately accessible in a way. It gets at you, and then it can create a more lasting change sometimes.

Annmarie Kelly:

Sure. Art tells the truth but tells it slant. Emily Dickinson.

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Annmarie Kelly:

I think this is also a book about the love of language, and I don't want to gloss over it too much, but plenty of high school kids learn Latin roots, but I never thought about the word behind the word. Bird's father tells him that the word library comes from the root liber, which means book. I feel like most of us, that's as far as we went with words, but then Bird's father goes on to, "It comes from the Latin word meaning the inner bark of trees, which comes from the word to strip, to peel. Early peoples pulled off thin strips for writing material."

There are all kinds of gems, whether it's Bird's mother's last name or the word conspiracy, all kinds of just delicious word art and love of language in here. I think only a true lover of words could have written this. I wondered who taught you to love words?

Celeste Ng:

I mean, I've always been a word lover, and I'm glad you called this up because I am a word nerd and I love it. I did have a Latin teacher who I think was really formative in this. I loved language before, but I think she made me much more aware of the stories that are packed into the DNA of words. I think before that, I liked words that sounded pretty or that sounded cool, often the longer the better, the ones that were towards the end of the Thesaurus entry. And then I had this amazing teacher, Ms. Cusick, in seventh and eighth grade. We had to take a language and one of the choices was Latin, and I heard she was great.

She every day would talk to us about an English word and then she would talk to us about the Latin roots of it. And that was how she taught us Latin. What I found fascinating was how metaphorical a lot of those connotations were. She'd teach us about the word sanguine, for example, and how it comes from the Latin word for blood. The word sanguine in English means you're cheerful in outlook, or like consanguination. She'd take one Latin word and she'd show us all of its descendants. I love that idea that there were these stories and that people basically were thinking in metaphors all along.

Because a lot of times, like the example in the book, the inner bark of trees moving to books, it's sort of literal, in that they peeled off the paper for trees. There's a story there about how books came into being, but there's also this metaphorical layer about peeling back all the layers of a word or a story. And then when you think about a library as being lots and lots of layers of story, there's such a richness there. It was a place where I got to nerd out a little bit and express my love of words and particularly the stories that they just have embedded inside them.

Annmarie Kelly:

There's this beautiful effect of a book about limiting truth and limiting stories and limiting books and limiting language and access at the same time being written in such a lush way that helped you to know that these things can actually never be taken away, that they are there inside of us. Those things that Bird's father could no longer access computers, they're just in him. You can't take that knowledge away.

Celeste Ng:

They get passed on too. I mean, a lot of times I think we discount the family stories that we hear, the stories that just someone will tell you, but they stick with you. I mean, I guess that's the modern equivalent of the oral tradition. When people would pass down the stories or their family heritage or their folk tales, that's how they would get passed on. They would morph a little bit, but they were always alive even if they weren't written down. There's a lot of folk tales and fairy tales in the book. Part of that is because, again, I was thinking about how those stories get passed down in times when they can't be written down for whatever reason. There's a mention of a Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova.

Annmarie Kelly:

This was haunting. I didn't know her.

Celeste Ng:

I didn't know her either until part way through the book, and she appeared and she clicked all these pieces of the book together. She was writing during the time of Stalin and the Terror, and she wasn't allowed to write her poetry because she was considered an enemy of the state. What she did was she would work on her poems at night, and then in the morning, she would remember everything that she'd written and she'd just burn the paper. And then when it came to be nightfall again, she'd write down what she did before and she'd go on. The way that she published her work was that she would teach those poems to friends and let them be the holders of those poems.

There's a lot more to her story, but I was really struck by that idea of this... It's a little philosophical. It's like if the tree falls in the forest, no one hears it. If you write this poem, but it's not written down anywhere, how does it continue to live? One of the ways I think that happens is that people remember it. If people remember a work in a way, it's still alive, even if it's not set down in paper. There's still a continuity to that language.

Annmarie Kelly:

I thought that was beautiful, and I had never heard of her. I think every writer has wanted to set fire to their work feeling like it's no good, but the notion that every day you had to destroy it, every day you had to commit it to memory, every day you had to tell people. It probably wouldn't all live, but enough of it would. That even a poem that didn't exist could still exist. I found that story hauntingly beautiful and really tied together so much of what you were doing here. I know that our time is limited and you do tons of interviews and you're always asked the same questions again. I always try to end with just a few little glimpses into the human behind, the author behind the book.

Celeste Ng:

Oh yay! I love this. My favorite thing about any interview is finding out like, oh, these are real people that we're talking to.

Annmarie Kelly:

Absolutely. All right, well, let's just start with a few multiple choice. These are just pick one. Coffee or tea?

Celeste Ng:

Tea.

Annmarie Kelly:

Mountains or beach?

Celeste Ng:

Beach.

Annmarie Kelly:

Dogs or cats?

Celeste Ng:

Cats.

Annmarie Kelly:

Early bird or night owl?

Celeste Ng:

Night owl.

Annmarie Kelly:

And are you a risk taker or are you the person who always knows where the band aids are?

Celeste Ng:

I definitely know where the band aids are, and I have several kinds.

Annmarie Kelly:

Excellent. Now, if you fill in the blanks, if I wasn't working as a writer, I would be a?

Celeste Ng:

I would probably be a miniaturist.

Annmarie Kelly:

What is a miniaturist?

Celeste Ng:

I was going to say, I see follow up questions coming. For a while, I worked as a scale miniaturist. I would make a very small one inch to the foot scale miniatures for dollhouse collectors. That means that if you're making let's say a cake and the cake would ordinarily be 12 inches across, it's one inch across. Food was my specialty and that was my little sideline for a while. That was how I made extra spending money. I grew up with a dollhouse and I loved it. I don't know why, but I have the miniaturist gene. I'm fascinated by small things. Even now, if I have spare time, I tinker with miniatures.

Annmarie Kelly:

That is most excellent. I love knowing that. That kind of feeds into my next question, which is something you might have just answered it, but what is something quirky that folks don't know about you, likes or loves or pet peeves?

Celeste Ng:

That's one of the big ones. Although people are starting to know because my publicist made me go on Instagram, but she didn't tell me what I needed to put on, so I decided I would just put pictures of my miniatures and whatever I was working on.

Annmarie Kelly:

That's probably exactly what she meant.

Celeste Ng:

What I love is I get more people talking to me about the miniatures than they do about my books. In fact, a couple people followed me for the miniatures and then they were like, "I didn't know you wrote books. Well, I'm going to go get your books."

Annmarie Kelly:

Oh my gosh.

Celeste Ng:

Which I kind of love. But I love when I follow somebody on social media and I learn something about them that isn't their public persona, because there is again that sense that, oh, you're a human being. I did not know, Ari Shapiro, that you also were a cabaret singer, but I kind of love this. There's a WBUR radio anchor. I just learned because he was on America's Got Talent, I think. He's a whip cracker. He grew up in the circus. He has Simon Cowell hold... Look it up on YouTube afterwards.

Annmarie Kelly:

I am going to.

Celeste Ng:

He had Simon Cowell hold like a stick in between his knees and then he cracks the whip and he snaps the stick and he doesn't hit Simon Cowell. I just love this idea that humans are, I think, infinitely weird and wonderful, and knowing things about each other like this makes us seem more real. The miniature is one big thing. I guess another thing is that I snack a lot while I'm writing especially. I have a drawer, I guess it's technically a cabinet, in my desk where I just keep candy that I can eat while I'm working.

Annmarie Kelly:

If I were to go in your house, which I probably won't, but go in that drawer, which if you're inviting me, I will, what's in there? What would we find?

Celeste Ng:

Well, I can tell you what's in there right now. I have a big bag of strawberry sour belts, and I have a bag of these vegan gummy bears, which I'm not a vegan, but I really like the texture of these ones. I used to have something chocolate in there, I don't remember, but I finished that one. There's always at least a couple kinds of candy in there, because I feel like it's good for your brain.

Annmarie Kelly:

Right? If you're not hiding candy in your desk, are you really writing?

Celeste Ng:

That's what I was going to say. What kind of life are you living? What are the drawers in your desk for? You only need to keep so many pencils and pens.

Annmarie Kelly:

Oh my gosh! Hey, what's a favorite movie? A favorite movie, it doesn't have to be the favorite movie.

Celeste Ng:

Well, I will say this just because my son and I were quoting it at lunch. I love The Muppet Movie. Probably not the movie that you expect me to say. I have many other more serious choices, but I genuinely love The Muppet Movie. I don't remember why it came up, but one of us made a reference, as we so often do. It's just part of the family parlance.

Annmarie Kelly:

I never hear Kermit the Frog sing The Rainbow Connection without crying a little. It's one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard, and the Frog singing it.

Celeste Ng:

It legitimately is. I just went to visit my mother. She's been cleaning out her condo and she pulled out all these old records. I took them home, like vinyl records, and one of them is The Muppet Movie soundtrack. I was just listening to it yesterday. It's a little warped, so there's a couple skips in it. But I was struck again by how beautiful and profound a song that is and how witty all the songs are. I'm a diehard Muppets fan and I will defend them as one of the pinnacles of our culture.

Annmarie Kelly:

We could actually go back to the top of this interview and just talk about Miss Piggy and my hesitancy as a young person to come to feminism because of the way Miss Piggy was treated by all The Muppets. And that when I fully embraced Miss Piggy is when I came into my own as a feminist and as a woman. I've got all kinds of theories about this.

Celeste Ng:

I feel like there's a lot to say about this, and I feel like The Muppets are really underappreciated and underused as a form of, I guess, social commentary. There's a political theorist, Dahlia Lithwick, who talks about her theory about Chaos Muppets and Order Muppets. She theorizes that basically all Muppets and by extension all people can be split into Chaos Muppets and Order Muppets. Order Muppets are Kermit, trying to keep things straight, Scooter, Sam the Eagle. Chaos Muppets are Cookie Monster, Animal.

Annmarie Kelly:

Gonzo.

Celeste Ng:

Gonzo, exactly. The sense that you can make a broad distinction between the Order Muppets who are trying to keep things straight and then the Chaos Muppets who are really just trying to blow things up. Lew Zealand, for example, with his boomerang fish. Crazy Harry, who's blowing stuff up. This is a quirky thing about me, that I spend a fair amount of time thinking about these things to the extent where in an interview I referred offhand to a Chaos Muppet, and then I had to backtrack and explain to the audience and interviewer what a Chaos Muppet was. I was like, "I'm sorry, I have led you far, far, far down the garden path."

Annmarie Kelly:

I love everything about this. As a Kermit myself, I feel like I've spent a lifetime as an orderly Muppet longing to be and know Chaos Muppets. Oh my gosh! That might even be why I'm a writer. Celeste, this is amazing to me.

Celeste Ng:

This is cracking things open.

Annmarie Kelly:

Oh my gosh!

Celeste Ng:

It's kind of a revolutionary theory and it does explain a lot. I mean, even if you go to Sesame Street and The Muppets, you look at Bert and Ernie, for example, and the Chaos and the Order and which one is trying to keep it together, but they need each other. You can't have just one without the other. They tend to come in pairs.

Annmarie Kelly:

This is amazing. Oh my gosh!

Celeste Ng:

I'm so glad to have introduced the Grand Unified Muppet Theory into your life. I wish I could take credit for it, but I'm just evangelical about it.

Annmarie Kelly:

I am now too. I think I was before, but now you've introduced me to the whole scholarly work. I'll be doing that right after this. Last two questions, I promise. Maybe. What's your favorite ice cream?

Celeste Ng:

It honestly depends on the season. I mean, in the summer, I really love a good mint chocolate chip, preferably a green one. In other seasons, you really can't go wrong with cookies and cream, but I won't say no to pretty much any kind of ice cream.

Annmarie Kelly:

I don't know if Mitchell's been here when you lived here.

Celeste Ng:

I know Mitchell's.

Annmarie Kelly:

Well, Mitchell's in the springtime, roundabout Shamrock Shake time, they combine cookies and cream and mint and they put them together. They make a Cookie Monster Sundae just to bring it all full round here. It's a Mint Cookie Monster Sundae. Come back and visit and the next one's on me.

Celeste Ng:

I will. I'm going to have to come back at that time. I've never been at that time, but I love Mitchell's every time I'm there. I'm usually there in the summer. I will get a big thing of their raspberry sorbet, which is one of the best raspberry sorbets I have ever had.

Annmarie Kelly:

Amen.

Celeste Ng:

I will have to make an exception. Come back around St. Patrick's Day and get the Cookie Monster. It sounds delicious.

Annmarie Kelly:

If you're not here at that time, I've heard of someone maybe who buys it to have in a four seasons kind of situation. I'm not going to out that person because that'd be weird. I'm just saying it is available in some homes.

Celeste Ng:

I was going to say, I also feel like it could be the kind of thing where if you go in, it's like if you go to In-N-Out Burger and you know how to order off the secret menu, maybe if you go into Mitchell's and you order off the secret menu, maybe they would do that. COVID willing, I am going to be in Cleveland this fall to do a book event. I think I'm going to have to make a stop at Mitchell's. I'll just say, is there any possible way that you could make me... It's called the Cookie Monster?

Annmarie Kelly:

The Cookie Monster Sundae. The Mint Cookie Monster Sundae.

Celeste Ng:

Mint Cookie Monster Sundae. All right, this is very useful information.

Annmarie Kelly:

All right. You heard it here folks. All right, and the last one, if we were to take a picture of you really happy and doing something you love, what would we see you doing?

Celeste Ng:

Probably, honestly, I would be on the couch with a cup of tea nearby, snuggled up in a big fuzzy blanket and reading a book. It's so boring, but it's really true.

Annmarie Kelly:

You are just going to be an Orderly Muppet and that's perfect.

Celeste Ng:

I am orderly and I have a very fuzzy blanket that my husband says... It's green and it's furry and he calls it my Muppet blanket. That's how I transform into my Muppet self.

Annmarie Kelly:

I love everything about that. Well, Celeste Ng, thank you so much for sitting down with us today. I'm thinking a lot about how we write the wrongs of the past, and we do that with truth and we do that with story and with passing down those things to our children so they're not stuck with the burdens of what we didn't finish and fix. I'm just so grateful for your time.

Celeste Ng:

Thank you so much for having me on. This was such a fun conversation, and I really appreciate it.

Annmarie Kelly:

Wild Precious Life is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Special thanks to executive producers Gerardo Orlando and Michael DeAloia, producer Sarah Willgrube, and audio engineer Ian Douglas. Be sure to subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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