My husband happened to tell me a story about his school days: when he was about 8, he was at a friend’s house when the friend pushed his own little sister into a pond in the backyard.

The novel emerged, as most of my work does, when several seemingly unrelated things collided in my mind and I had to try and figure out why my mind was connecting them.

How did the idea for this novel come to you? Was it difficult working on such a tragic story, and why did you decide to focus on such tough issues - misunderstanding and racism and unfulfilled dreams and the grief of losing a child?Ĭeleste Ng: Thank you! Both for the kind words and for sharing. By the end I was crying and slightly traumatized, but I loved it.” My sister particularly enjoyed it her exact words were: “Thank you. My husband bought it for me, and then I bought it for half a dozen of my friends and relatives, and every single one of them sang its praises. Nicole Chung: Celeste, I have told you this so many times it must be getting old by now, but I absolutely loved your novel. Celeste and I first connected on Twitter after I read her book, and she graciously agreed to chat with me about the novel, her writing routine, being part of and writing about interracial families, how to address issues of race and representation without being pigeonholed, writing outside one’s own culture, what she’s working on now, and much more! Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the ALA’s Alex Award, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including the Ohioana Award, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Massachusetts Book Award.Ĭeleste grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio, in a family of scientists. Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications.

Everything i told you