Little Fires Everywhere
Little Fires Everywhere
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Celeste Ng on Little Fires Everywhere
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A hometown she had to leave before she could see itNg grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, but her debut novel, ‘Everything I Never Told You,’ used a fictional Ohio town instead. Distance from the place she knew best was the thing she needed before she could write about it directly.
I had gotten to that point in my life where I had been away from Shaker Heights long enough that I was able to look back and see it with a bit of clarity. [When I started working on Little Fires Everywhere] I had been away for ten years and I started to realize a lot of things that I thought were normal based on my hometown were actually nothing of the kind.
Once she had settled on Shaker Heights as the setting, Ng needed an opening situation she could not yet explain. Her method, consistent across both novels, is to plant a question and then write toward its answer.
I always start writing because there’s a situation that puzzles me. ‘What would lead someone to burn down their house?’ I start to imagine the circumstances that might have led the characters to this place, and the story emerges from there.
The arson is not a mystery the novel withholds. Ng tells readers on the first page who set it. What the book pursues across its full length is the sequence of decisions that made it feel, to that character, like the only option left.
The custody dispute at the novel’s center, over a Chinese immigrant mother who left her infant at a fire station and then wants her back, let Ng examine a part of American racial life she felt fiction had consistently sidestepped.
I wanted to tackle the experience of being a Chinese-American in a community where we think mostly about black and white. In the US, we’re thinking about race largely in terms of black and white. As an Asian-American, I’m in this very weird middle-ground. I don’t fit into that binary system, and yet at the same time, I’m clearly affected by both.
How she wrote it
Six years of notes, one unconscious obsessionNg traces the book’s gestation to a fire she witnessed in her Cambridge neighborhood while she was still finishing her debut. The date she later found for that event turned a private timeline into something she could measure.
A church in my neighborhood had an electrical fire and it basically burned to the studs. I went to take notes on it because I knew there were going to be fires in my next book. What did it look like? What did it smell like? Out of curiosity I went back and googled the date of that fire. It was in 2009. I had actually been thinking about the book for around six years before it was finished.
Two years on tour for ‘Everything I Never Told You’ gave Ng time she hadn’t expected. By the time she sat down to draft ‘Little Fires Everywhere,’ the story had already been running in her head long enough that the actual writing moved faster than her debut had.
I had thought about Little Fires Everywhere so much while I was on my book tour that when it came to writing, it happened pretty quickly.
When Ng’s agent searched the finished manuscript for a title, she found something Ng herself had not noticed. The discovery sent her back through the draft with new instructions for herself.
I didn’t realize until we pulled that out and put it at the top of the page how much fire imagery there was in the book. It had been an unconscious thing. Once we had sold the book and I was doing another round of edits with my editor, I went back to all the moments of ‘there’s that spark in her’ or ‘something catches fire in her,’ and I wanted to make sure that I had sort of a double-edged sword.
The 1990s setting carries its own argumentative weight. Ng chose that decade because it sits at exactly the right distance: close enough that many readers remember it personally, far enough that its assumptions have started to look strange.
The ‘90s is sort of just far enough away that we can see it with some clarity, but it’s also close enough that we remember it. It forces us to reckon with, well, how far have we actually come? Have we actually changed that much?
The language Shaker Heights characters use in the novel to signal their open-mindedness was the dominant vocabulary of Ng’s own adolescence there. At the 2018 National Book Festival, she explained what that vocabulary actually communicated to the people it was meant to reassure.
The book was set in the nineties, and what I remember about the nineties, when I was a teenager then, is that was sort of how you showed your racial awareness. You thought the best thing was to be race-blind. And if you don’t see race, you’re essentially saying, ‘I don’t notice this big part of your lived experience. I’m going to pretend that the world doesn’t treat you differently than it treats me.’ [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
A middle-ground that doesn’t fit the binaryWhen Ng decided to make Mia Warren a woman of color for the Hulu adaptation, she was explicit about the limits that had shaped her original decision. The casting of Kerry Washington opened territory the novel had deliberately left closed.
I don’t want to do a J.K. Rowling and pretend that, all along, I had thought of this. I thought of her as a white character, but still exploring those larger issues of power. With Kerry, you have a way to explore the racial dynamics that I wasn’t able to explore in the book. And that, to me, told me that they were looking at the show the same way that I looked at the book.
Ng’s own position as a first-generation Asian American, married to a white man and the mother of a mixed-race child, sits directly beneath the novel’s most charged questions. The self-recognition she describes in Elena Richardson is not flattering, and she does not treat it as such.
I think many of us have a little bit of Mrs. Richardson inside us — I know that I do. One of the parts of the book that I hope will spark some conversation is sort of looking carefully at ourselves and recognizing the ways in which we might be conformist, or we might be rigidly holding onto things that we need to be flexible about.
On what the book is wrestling with
Good intentions and the damage they do anywayNg built the novel so that neither Elena Richardson nor Mia Warren is easy to condemn. That refusal of simple moral sorting is not a structural accident; it is the argument she was trying to make.
I wanted to say that so many people try to do what they think is right. Even when they do things that end up being terrible, it often comes out of a place with good intentions. All the characters in Little Fires Everywhere are doing something they think is justified and moral.
Motherhood is the other pressure point the novel refuses to resolve. Ng traces the criticism that follows every deviation from a particular ideal, and the scope of what she lists makes clear how many ways there are to be judged as failing.
When we try to turn a concept as huge and multifaceted as motherhood into an ideal, we lose sight of all the complexities of what being a mother actually means. Anyone who deviates from that platonic and, frankly, largely imagined ideal mother gets criticized and judged: for having a child too young, for having a child too old, for not wanting children, for not being able to have children, for having too many, for undergoing IVF or using a surrogate — the list goes on and on.
Empathy is the capacity the novel asks readers to exercise toward characters who do not always make it easy. Ng described its mechanics in terms that make the demand explicit: imagining yourself into someone else’s experience means doing it for the characters you are least inclined to excuse.
For me, it speaks to what I’m always thinking about when I’m writing fiction, which is empathy, the ability to imagine yourself into somebody else’s experience.
What she wants us to sit with
Complication as the only honest outcomeNg designed the novel’s ending to leave readers without a verdict they could deliver cleanly. The goal she described to IndieWire is not ambiguity for its own sake but a more accurate account of how the world actually works.
I wanted the readers to leave with a more complicated view of the world and these characters than they had when they came in.
That complication, for Ng, is what fiction is specifically suited to produce. Alongside a screenplay or an op-ed, a novel is one of the few forms that can hold contradictory truths about the same person in the same space without forcing a resolution that the material does not support.