When Jemimah Wei and I met as Stegner Fellows in fiction at Stanford in 2023, we became instant friends. And during our time there, I got to workshop what would become her first novel, The Original Daughter (368 pages; Doubleday), a story about betrayal and complicated relationships that won my heart from the start.
There’s something magical about watching what was once a Word document become a beautiful, finished book. (The novel’s official publication date is today!) Part coming of age, part coming apart, this book, set in Singapore, charts the course of two unforgettable characters, Gen and Arin, from girlhood to adulthood. I talked with Jemimah over text and email about her writing journey, about thorny sisterhood, and the importance of stability in the creative life.
The following has been edited for clarity.
ZYZZYVA: How do you feel?
Jemimah Wei: I feel pretty good. The hard part was writing it, and now I get to do the fun stuff, like yapping about it with friends.
Z: Tell us about the timeline of this book. Sometimes I struggle to write and I’m so inspired by your international journey to write The Original Daughter, part of which took place during another troubled era for creativity: the COVID pandemic.
JW: I’d been working on the novel ––or versions of it–– for years, since 2014. And after years of laboring at it I finally took the leap and pivoted hard by putting my life on hold and moving to the States for my MFA in 2019. It was this massive investment, but it did feel like I was finally taking this huge step toward my dream of a life orientated around writing.
Well, within six months we all know what happened. I was stuck in quarantine back in Singapore and completely felled by the pandemic. All my shit was still in New York and I was hemorrhaging money. I couldn’t write for months. I would still try, like I’d just sit at my desk for hours and write rubbish and then cry. I started writing flash [fiction] then, because during the pandemic my mind would automatically tap out at about 1,000 words anyway, but I really thought that was the end of the road for this novel.
Of course, now I know that being in limbo and under immense visa and financial precarity during a global pandemic is a very unhealthy space for writing a novel; back then I just thought it meant I was a terrible writer. And then the new year came and went, and I was so sick and tired of being jerked around on a string by the shifting global situation that I put a block on my phone to restrict certain keywords from appearing on my newsfeed. After that I finished the first draft in three months. It was insane.
It took another two years to revise the book fully, and then another two years for it to get published. And now here we are.
Z: What were the key words? 👀
JW: “America.”
Z: Oof. I feel that in my chest. And I’ll say that place is one of the elements I most admire in The Original Daughter. There’s such a rich attention to setting and place–– I almost feel like I’ve walked the streets of Singapore myself after reading this book. Where did you find it easiest to write about Singapore? When you were there or when you were in the U.S.?
JW: Thanks to aforementioned pandemic, I wrote a lot of [the novel] while physically in Singapore. I did a lot of revision in the States. Both were important stages for the novel. But I think a lot of a writer’s journey is managing your relationship to your work, which is separate from the actual work itself. And I needed to get out of my own head, be in an unfamiliar place, because otherwise the imagined voices of my home would crowd my mind and restrain my risks. So having that distance was actually helpful, for me.
Z: What did this project teach you about the creative process?
JW: Honestly? That it takes the time it takes. It’s very humbling. But also, that being in a space of anxious limbo is devastating to the psyche. Maybe some people can write from a fractured state, I can’t. I think psychological security is very important to writers, no matter what form that takes—mental, economic, geographic, interpersonal. If you want to support the writers in your life, give them money.
Z: Absolutely. It can be so hard to focus when the world is falling apart. And speaking of fractured states, especially the interpersonal kind: complicated sisterhood is one of the emotional engines of this novel. The relationship between Gen and Arin is deliciously nuanced––there is betrayal, conflict, and envy–– but there are also moments in which each is the other’s hero and champion. What inspirations helped you shape this dynamic and how did your perception of these characters evolve over the course of the book?
JW: While working with these girls I kept asking myself what love could endure, what keeps us choosing each other over and over every morning when the choice to walk away and live a life society might perceive as individually free is right there. I was really interrogating what a relationship could mean when it’s not externally quantifiable in the way a more socially affirmed relationship structure ––say a marriage, a parent-child relationship, a domestic partnership––might be.
A lot of that was thinking about sisterhood, yes, but also about friendship, because I do think that the deepest relationships see us trying to be friends with the people in our lives, even if they’re our parents, lovers, etcetera. For Gen and Arin, they’re sisters, but also self-declared partners, plotters, and collaborators facing life down; for me, their relationship feels analogous to the most intense female friendships. I knew they had to want to be the best people for each other, yet in reality bring out the worst in each other. And so, I kept discovering through the writing, the different ways their negotiation of individuality and intimacy impacted their vision of themselves, the world, and vice versa. I got to know them both intimately by the end of the writing, when at the start all I had was a vision of two hopeful, stubborn girls.
Yohanca Delgado’s recent fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories 2022, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2022, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021, The Paris Review, One Story, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. Her recent essays appear in TIME, The Believer, and The New York Times Magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University and is a graduate of the Clarion workshop and the National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellows program. She is a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts fellow.