Poured Over: Vanessa Chan on The Storm We Made

By Jenna Seery / January 2, 2024 at 6:15 am

“Our ancestors, our grandparents, love us by not speaking…”

The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan follows one family in 1945 Malaya as they face the realities of a life shaped by war and colonization. Chan joined us to talk about her family connection to her novel, her unique journey to becoming an author, the things about writing that surprised her and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.               

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.            

Featured Books (Episode):
The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan
Sea Change by Gina Chung
The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade
In Memoriam by Alice Winn

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer. I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I’ve been waiting to have this conversation with Vanessa Chan. We actually met through Gina Chung, who was the author of our discover pick, Sea Change. So shout out to Gina for that introduction. But The Storm We Made is Vanessa’s debut. It’s coming out in January. We’re actually taping this in advance, of course, but I’m going to ask Vanessa to introduce herself and the novel because it is in fact her debut.

Vanessa Chan
Hi, everyone. Hi, Miwa. Well, thank you for having me. I’m Vanessa Chan and my debut novel The Storm We Madecomes out January 2, it is about a discontent and dissatisfied housewife named Cecily Alcantara in 1930s, British Malaya who in her quest for self-actualization, and for fulfillment, become seduced by an ideology and a man and becomes a spy as one does, apparently, and accidentally ushers in the worst, most violent occupation her country has ever seen.

MM
We’re talking about the Japanese invasion. Yeah, Malaya and the colonization. I, you know, World War Two obviously looms large, right, in a lot of literature, not just history. I mean, obviously, there’s a lot of historical fiction. And people really do love to consume it and read it. And Asia seems to be a place where there are some gaps. So you really are walking into a space. And I’m, I do want to ask you how we ended up here. And I know you grew up in what is now Malaysia. And your grandparents are part of the origin story for this novel. And I really, I want to start with your grandparents. And the things they don’t talk about,

Like you said, I grew up in Malaysia, I basically spent my entire childhood there until undergrad and then I came here for that I grew up, you know, surrounded by family, I was the eldest grandchild on my grandparents on my father’s side. And so I spent a ton of time with them. I say that I was the favorite grandchild. I don’t know if the rest would agree. But I think it’s true. And I spent lots of time with them after school, just you know, all the time. You know, if I were to ask my grandmother, who’s the chattier of the two, you know, what happened during the war, grandma, like, what was life like, she just, you know, told me to mind my own business, you know, go back to my chores, and leave her alone. And, you know, I think that, that is the way that our ancestors deal with trauma, they, they want to get on with life, you know, they feel we survived. We don’t, we don’t want to spend, you know, an endless amount of time reliving these horrific things that happened to us. You know, I think it’s in the author’s note in the book, but I say, you know, our ancestors, our grandparents love us by not speaking, they just, they just don’t want to address those times. But also, like I said, my grandma is a very chatty woman. So, you know, if I asked her directly, she told me to piss off. But if I just let her talk, you know, let her live her day, do chores, my grandma just loved to story tell. And along the way, as I was growing up, all of those years spent in her house, I’d learned all these different stories, some joyful, some hopeful, some horrific and terrible, and they kind of knitted themselves together in my in my brain for years becomes a part of you, as you would expect. And when I was ready to write this novel, those stories, you know, how to avoid getting hit by an airstrike, for example, was a piece of information that she just carried with her and let me know one day, or the prank that she played on her siblings, where she gleefully tells me that they thought she died while she was cycling home because a bomb had hit in the path. But actually, she was alive. And she was thrilled about it and tells him like a joke. But you know, it’s not really a joke. And all those things, you know, came together for me when it was time for me to write my novel and became like the setting and the backdrop on which I based this family going through, you know, some stuff.

It’s a lot of stuff. It’s very, it’s very, very intensive. I think, too, it’s important to acknowledge that the Japanese Imperial Army did a lot of very, very terrible things. I mean, obviously, there was Nan Jiang, there was Manchuria, there was Burma, and like, the list goes on. And this idea that the Japanese wanted to create sort of this Asian universe, right, that obviously they would be in charge of. It’s a piece of the context like we need to have that context is what I’m saying. Like, we need to know that this was not a good thing. This is wholly separate, however, from the Japanese American experience, in incarceration camps and I’m just hoping that people don’t conflate the two, it’s not a conversation we often have about World War Two. I mean, certainly people know about the Pacific Theater and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and you know, all sorts of stuff. But I think this is going to be a really interesting journey for some readers, I think they may not know exactly, quite what it was like. And I feel like you did a ton of research. I know, we started with your grandparents in the very personal but let’s talk about the research for a second, because you really you do cover this very pivotal, 10 year period between sort of the mid 30s and the mid 40s.

Yeah. But you know, going back to what you were saying about American experience versus the experience of Japan, the Imperial Japan is an occupier in Asia. You know, actually, someone asked me yesterday, you know, did your grandparents, did your grandmother harbor any ill will towards Japan. And in my case, and then this may not be true if you know, other people’s grandparents. Okay, so my grandmother was always very, very determined to separate out the Imperial Japan and the government, from its civilians. And you’ll see some of that in the book, because they’re, you know, there are civilians who are who are kind we actually, our family knows about a very kind civilian, on who the character of Mr. Takahashi is based in the novel, who was very kind to my grandmother and her sisters, and who actually returned after the war to find them, he called down the phonebook one after the other to try to find the family. And when he did, they drove, they were living outside a column by the time they drove that little car and went to meet him, and he burst into tears. And he’s like, I didn’t know that you made it. And after that corresponded with them through the end of his life, he would send her drawings he would write about his family, he sent her photographs. And so, you know, our family has always had this understanding that Japan’s Asia for Asia occupation mindset and ideology at the time is very different than its civilians.

You clearly did a lot of work with not just sort of British Empire, I mean, Malaya was a British colony. And then it was a Japanese colony. I mean, this is the history of a lot of places like Singapore, or India, or Myanmar, or, you know, there was a British presence before the Japanese came in, but the community, Rachel Heng writes about this really beautifully in The Great Reclamation of her novel from early last year, and you have a character, I mean, Cecily, his husband works for the British government, and he actually just thinks he’s doing the right thing.

Yes. You know, I think that this was true at the time, and still, in some ways, it’s sort of true, you know, colonialism, and the mentality of colonialism kind of seeps into you seeps into your culture, it seeps into your body, people inadvertently start thinking that, you know, white is right at the closer we get to the mentality, or even the skin tone of white colonizers, you know, the better our lives will be and the more that they will accept us. And I think one of the things that was important for me to explain in the book that you, you can’t get there, like you will always be separate than them, in the case of the book to the characters are Eurasian, which means something very different in Malaysia than it does here.

Let’s explain that, you know, again, Asia and Asian America get conflated quite frequently. And I do think we sort of have an opportunity in this conversation. You and I just sort of play with these ideas, you know, there. Yeah, you grew up in Malaya. I’ve spent lots of time in both Japan and Taiwan. I’m still a kid from Boston.

And I think I will always be I know a girl from Old Town market in Malaysia. Okay. Yeah, so back to being Eurasian. So, in Malaysia, being Eurasian is defined as people who were descended from usually the Portuguese, but also all of our other colonizers. We have had Portuguese, Dutch, British and Japanese colonizers for over five years. People who are descended from any number of these European colonizers are Eurasian, they have their own separate culture, often they have their own sort of separate language separate.

I didn’t know about the language. I didn’t know about the separate language thing that’s wild to me.

It’s actually quite sad because the language is primarily oral. It’s sort of like a mix between Portuguese and Malay. And it’s sort of dying out because it’s not written down. But my grandma used to speak it and I know some words but not many. They have their own sort of, essentially mysteries of culture. And that is what one side of my family is descended from. But, you know, because there is literal white blood in the veins of this community, some people in this community, you know, try to aim to be a little closer to their white side, as opposed to their intermixed local side. That’s what Eurasians are defined as in in Malaysia. But back to the research, I definitely, you know, a lot of the stories became sort of the foundation of the novel. But I also had to do a fair amount of research into obviously, the dates of things that happened, and actually into life, what life was like during the British era, because in a surprise to no one, there is much more written about that time than there is about the Japanese occupation. And so live in the 1930s, and also live at the labor camp, which one of the children ends up in there has a fair amount of history written about it, there’s a fair amount of documentation because both of those places featured Europeans, when it was, you know, Asian colonizing Asian, that was much less information out there. And I had to rely a lot more on memory and stories that I was told.

When did you start working on this, though, you came to the states to do your undergrad, you had a different career before you established yourself as a writer. And I do want to talk about that for a second. Because it sounds like you kind of dropped everything mid-career or mid or late career and decided to go get an MFA, which not everyone makes that decision. So where did this book come from? Like, did you know were you walking around with this book in the back of your brain as you were, let’s tell people what your job used to be.

So I came to the US for undergrad actually went to UC Berkeley, I lived in the Bay Area for a long time. And then I graduated and took whichever job would have me because I needed a work visa and I had worked at this consulting firm that worked with bankrupt companies. It was weird, you know, hopping around here and there. My final job before I started writing full time, which is the Director of Communications at Facebook and Instagram. Well, now it’s called Meta, which I can’t get used to. But so for six years, I worked there. And I was one of the sort of younger members of senior management and the only people of color for a while. And then I like to say I, it’s a bit of an over simplification. But I finally got residency in the US, which meant I had some level of freedom to go and figure out what it is I wanted to do. And so I chose to engage in the millennial midlife crisis that I was having, which was, you know, what am I doing with my life? Like, what is it I really want to do? Where do I want to be? And so then I did in a very organized way, dropped everything, because I’m quite an organized person. And I’ll started apply for MFA programs, and I moved to New York and started a program which it did not finish, but that’s because of the pandemic. And then at that program, during a class prompt, right, the author Marie Helene Bertino, who we love, came the earliest 5000 words, essentially of the story, which I thought was a short story and an assignment I was going to throw away after the semester. As good teachers do, she told me, you know, I think, hold up, you know, I think you have the very earliest stages of a novel, so maybe go and try it out. And then I did and that was 2019. And two years, I had written this novel, but I guess I was kind of carrying it with me until I didn’t really realize it. I always had these days. I would tell them at cocktail parties, you know, I would talk about them. They’re just like a part of our family’s lives.

When did you realize though, I mean, you’re, you’re telling me here that you thought it was a story. You thought it was kind of a lark, you sort of thought that…

I didn’t think I was a novelist.

You didn’t think you, all right.

I thought that, you know, when I was in my MFA, I thought I was a short story writer. And then I, when I was in my earliest 20s, I wrote some sort of auto fiction about how much I hated all my coworkers, but that wasn’t you know, that that wasn’t really anything, that’s just pages in a drawer. So I always liked to write but I didn’t think you know, I was like a historical fiction novelist that that was never a part of my ability to comprehend myself.

And yet here we are. So you’re working on these 5000 words that you think are going to be a tossed away homework assignment. And Marie Helene, who is fantastic.

Everyone gets an A if you just had to do it, and you don’t have to…

But she’s saying hey, look at the stuff, yes. You also studied with Mira Jacob who I mean talk about changing métier right? Like she goes from writing novels to writing a graphic memoir, she’s working on a new book that is not a graphic memoir, or is not a graphic project at all. And I’m really excited. And I really can’t wait to see that manuscript. But you needed community outside of what you’d known before in order to write this book.

Yeah, definitely needed some distance from, from the workplace. I know, I know, there are people who are able to write in the morning and then go to work. And then you know, edit in the evening, and I’m just not one of those people. I can’t multitask. I need like, my brain to be completely clear. I can’t have emails pinging me at all hours of the day. And so first, I needed to do that I needed to clear my brain and myself to give myself unstructured time to be creative. And then yeah, I think it just, you know, I went to graduate school, Mira Jacob became my mentor, Marie Helene became a friend. As you mentioned earlier, Gina Chung was also the same program. And she’s a very close friend of mine. And I think I was very fortunate to meet a lot of different people in New York City, who are writers who became have become friends over the years, and I think this community is has helped me, there are first readers a lot of the people that I mentioned, but also I think, they helped me realize that you can build a life a creative life, I had never had that before in my life before had consistent of solving other people’s problems, trying to get promoted, and trying not to be deported if I lost my visa. And so I was existing in a sort of, I hesitate to use word precarious, because it was not financially precarious, per se, but it was, it was just a place where I was always sort of measuring risk and trying to make sure that, you know, I wouldn’t do anything wrong. And I think I’m now because you know, I’m not so immigration really precarious anymore. I have the ability to just, you know, engage with the people around me engage with the stories in my head and produce something.

It sounds like you were living in a really liminal space. Yes, like a strangely liminal space.

I thought. I mean, I was, I still believed I was very fortunate, you know, not many people get to work in tech and get to learn all the things that I learned and have the security that I had fairly early. But also it was, it was tough. It was really tough and a struggle, and I had no space for anything else. I just day to day, I just had to get my stuff done. And then I would go home, and try not to die.

It’s a lot. It’s a lot. So I’m assuming Cecily was the first character who sort of appeared for you now. Okay, you’re shaking your head. Alright, who showed up first?

When I first started to write this novel, it was a novel about three sad children living through, nothing wrong with three sad children living through. But my personal circumstances sort of changed while I was writing this. This was early, you know, I started in late 2019, then the pandemic happened. And I went through a series of personal griefs, you know, my mother and my uncle passed away. And because we were all locked down shelter in place, I couldn’t go see my family. So I was going to write about home without being able to go home, it felt like the most tragic of, you know, contract, being a little dramatic, but it was, it was, it seemed pretty tragic. And I needed some agency that I didn’t have. And so I gave it to I just experimented with a character who was a spy I really like spy narratives. That was like, I’m going to give this adult character the ability to run around and be an idiot to make good decisions and bad decisions and needs to do stuff and seduce you know, and all these things that I couldn’t do, because I was stuck in this apartment and see my family. And lo and behold, this experiment became the emotional core of the novel as the main character, but it started off as a novel about sad children with no agency living through a war.

I’m glad you made the switch to because there’s a lot that Cecily goes through, puts herself through puts others through that, I think is wildly relatable, and it isn’t reliant on this 1935 to 1945 kind of window that I mean, she doesn’t particularly like being a mom, she loves her children, but she doesn’t really like being a mom. She doesn’t really like being a housewife. She doesn’t really like her husband. She doesn’t hate him, but, you know, she’s disgruntled and her options were so low compared to where you and I might be now, but I think that’s something that’s so relatable for a lot of folks where it’s just like, you’re sort of feel like your back is in a corner. And you don’t really know what to do with yourself, and you get this idea. And you think, Oh, this is a really good thing. Like she really genuinely believes in this idea of Asia for Asians. And she really does want the British to go. Even though her family has benefited quite nicely from this relationship with the breads because of her husband’s job and whatnot, and he keeps getting promoted. It’s not enough. None of it’s enough.

I think I’ve always been, you know, really preoccupied with the idea of like, wanting more like you can be happy, but you can also be insatiable, I think that especially for women, right, that makes us unlikable. That makes us just unfeminine. But I have always been preoccupied with this idea. Some of my other stories are also preoccupied with. And I think it just sort of swept in there, this idea of this woman who seems to have it pretty good, you know, maybe not the best, but she’s, she’s pretty good. But she just she wants something else. She isn’t sure what it is. But then something else appears to her. And she’s like, alright, that I’m going to I’m going to try that. I’m going to try to usher in a different colonizer that will make things better for our country or so I think. But also the idea that she’s so limited in her thinking that the idea of independence were to her or anyone living at the time, it just has to be another ruler, because you are limited by what you’ve seen around you.

There were moments where I was rooting for Cecily. And then there are moments where I’m like, Yep, you’re a product of your history. You’re a product of your time, I have to show you a little bit of grace girl because oh, there were readers will discover what I’m talking about. But she does as you say she makes some decisions, but she makes those decisions. It’s not like life happens to her. And yes, this is we are talking about the context of World War Two and you know, the invasion of her country, but she makes decisions. She doesn’t always like the outcome, certainly, and she’s always a little surprised. Which again, she’s a product of her time. She’s a product of her class. She’s a product of her upbringing, she Cecily, she’s who she is,

I think she’s not always the most likable, but I hope she real right that’s my you know, that’s what I tried to write. I tried to write characters that feel like maybe like incessantly say, it’s maybe a friend that you know, who you’re always like, Why always do it this way? It’s raw.

You know, that friend? Yeah, I super don’t need my characters to be likable. I need the story to be grounded. There are moments where the dialogue is very funny and very snappy. Because like, here’s the thing life goes on in war, right? Like you have to keep…

You have your grievances. And yeah, and you share and your crushes and your obsessions and all the silly things that you gossip about.

Exactly. And but I get who Cecily is like, I understand her. Even if there are times where there were a couple of moments where I rolled my eyes at her and I’m like, come on. I know I understand the door you’re about to walk through but real. Okay. Okay, here we go. And, you know, you find out who your characters are in the course of the story, right? I did feel like I was fully in a world that I had not experienced before in fiction that I was firmly in this piece of the Pacific theater that doesn’t really get talked about all that much. I felt like you had done a ton of research, but you weren’t showing me all of the seams and all of the threads, right? Like there’s a lot of detail about certain things where I was like, yeah, there had to have been some lifting on your end right? You can’t make up all of it you can make up a lot of it, but not all of it.

I think I included what serves the story. I am, at my heart I think I like to tell stories I’m also I think I you know, I’ve tried to you know, say that I may not but I am a writer that loves plot. I am a writer that write plot in a traditional sense like I love it. I love it turn, I love to read them and they love to write them and so I details that would serve that and some of the other stuff. They just they stay in your in your folder for something else.

You’re also switching POVs between characters. You’re also flipping back and forth in time. I mean, you’re doing some stuff that for a first novel some people might say is ambitious, it fits this story. And no, it all fits the story. And it all fits what you’re doing. But I do want to talk about the structure for a second, you could have done this as a straight first person POV and would have worked in a different way. Right? But your third person on like, when did you settle on the structure? How did we get here? How many rewrites did it take?

So the first thing to know about the structure is that it’s for different points of views, across two different timelines just for anyone. So I think the points the fact that it was going to be multi POV, I think was always the case. And you know, when I’m reading, I also come from a large, extended family where everyone talks at the same time, I have friend groups like this, we have a lot of group chats, I’m used to processing information across multiple strands, and then bringing them together and being like, what’s happening. So it’s like a loud, noisy family where everyone is performing and shrieking at the top of their lungs. And that’s just how I ended up writing. I just write a lot of things at the same time. And then hopefully, they come together. So that was always, I think that was there from the beginning. Of course, it started with three POVs. And then I added their mother later, like we discussed earlier, the fact that it’s two different timelines. So three of the children exist, kind of in the last three or six months of the war in 1945, whereas their mother exists across 10 years from 1935 to 1945. And it’s a cause and effect narrative. So the things that she does, causes the things that they’re going through, and that I love to see that. Now that required me to march around my apartment gets going, we were locked out, muttering to myself and drawing mind maps in my head. And it was it was it was a tough time because it was I couldn’t figure it out for a long time. Actually, I think it was, I was having a conversation with Mira Jacob, who we talked about earlier now. Just if I write this mother in, I have to do so much flashback. And she goes, Why can’t you have two timelines? I’m like, because the rules say that when you have four points of view, you can only have one timeline. And she was like, who wrote the rules? And I was like, I don’t know, I wrote the rules. She goes, we’ll change our rules. So, you know, with her stern, but loving guidance, I changed the rules and wrote my own.

Let’s talk about influencers for a second because obviously, you’ve got access to a really talented pool of people when you get an MFA. But you were a reader long before that. I mean, yeah, there was the little break while you were working and whatnot and had no time for anything else. But I want to talk about some childhood influences. I want to talk about the books you loved when you were younger, and then also sort of who you’ve been reading and who you consider sort of foundational for you as Vanessa Chan novelist as two different answers. They’re very different answers, I’m sure but…

28:06

I grew up in post-colonial Malaysia, I read a lot of post-colonial literature in a Malaysian child of a certain age read reads these books by Enid Blyton, which are about you know, girls going to boarding school in Cornwall, or, you know, all these very British things, you know, their little child detective solving crime and she’s very prolific and, you know, read a ton of those, you know, I read a lot of 17 Magazine as well for my American culture. And, you know, I read everything when I was a child, I read literally everything. And then you know, in the more recent years, we have had access wonderfully, and for good reason to a lot of writing by, you know, writers of color writing from places that are less familiar, you know, to the wider reader. And when I was writing this book, I would say that although the timelines are different, the locations and the races of the people are different. The Vanishing Half was actually a big totem for me, mostly because of the way she jumps in time. The way she has a lot of, Brit Bennett has a lot of confidence when she just wants something to happen. She doesn’t feel the need to lead you up to it. She just goes something happened.

It is one of the best books I’ve read in the last 10 years without it like hands down. It is one of the absolute best books I’ve read in the last 10 years.

I also love all these like messy narrators as you would expect. I really loved Kirstin Valdez Quade’s The Five Wounds is a windshield wiper entrepreneur in there who is a worst human, most useless human I’ve ever met in a book whom I love. And gosh, I mean, oh, Rachel Heng’s The Great Reclamation, was wonderful to read another take on the history of Southeast Asia. They’re still many books, I’m so glad to exist in this timeline in this multiverse with all these books that may not have existed some years ago.

Did you surprise yourself while you were writing The Storm We Made? Did your character surprise you?

All the time? Yeah. All the time. I mean, I didn’t know I was gonna write a spy. I am not a mother myself. I don’t know very much about motherhood. I didn’t expect to write a mother. I didn’t expect to write a historical fiction novel me well.

I mean, that’s totally fair.

So everything about this novel is a surprise, its reception is a surprise, though. The whole thing is just me clutching my pearls being like, is this happening right now?

Yes, yes. Vanessa, it is happening.

I’m very glad for it. But it is it is pretty much it’s unbelievable to me at times that first of all, this is the novel that I wrote, this is going out to the world with and that it’s going to exist in the world.

Is it really the historical fiction piece? That’s sort of sitting with you in a wow, this is the thing that happened? Or is it the honesty of the story?

I didn’t know. I don’t know if I am person to weigh the honesty of my stories. I hope that it is I hope that it reads honestly.

I think there’s an emotional honesty to this book, I think your characters behave in ways that human beings would behave. I think some people might be uncomfortable. I do. I think some readers might, you know, their eyebrows might go up a little bit. But it felt very emotionally true to me. And now, I don’t have personal experience of Malaya in World War Two. But I think human behavior is kind of what it is right? And people show us who they are, especially when they’re under pressure. And I think you let your characters do what the story needs. And it’s not, I didn’t ever feel like you were sending me on a path of I need to make a point, it was always more I’m going to tell you a story.

Thank you for pointing that out. Because I think that is always my priority. I want the story, in this case, you know, it happened to exist on a backdrop of, you know, a very trying time for this family. But at the heart, I have always been preoccupied with people, like we talked about living their daily minutia and having their, you know, daily complaints, enjoy happinesses and irritations and obsessions the way and you know, having their like physical manifestations of their anxiety, their sweating, their, you know, whatever it is. And it’s just the backdrop in which I placed them in, right. You know, I was thinking about it the other day, I think that, you know, we’re starting to see the advent of a few more pandemic novels, and I think are going to be the most successful are again, the ones where, you know, we’re just out here, living our lives against a backdrop of, you know, great horror, and 2030 years down the line, our grandchildren are going to ask us, you know, what was it like, during the pandemic, the same way, I asked my grandparents, and we’re gonna tell them, nothing happened. We just sat down and had the same frustrations, except a larger looming grief. And, you know, I think that I think that my novel is that it’s people. Just a big, bad backdrop.

You know, Alice Winn does something sort of similar in her world war one novel In Memoriam, which came out earlier in ‘23. And she balances these really intense scenes of war, like serious, serious trench warfare. And it was obvious she had done also quite a lot of research. But then you’ve got these two boys, essentially, these young men who are making their way in the world and figuring out what their story is going to be. And she does this balancing act, and you’re doing something very similar here. I think with The Storm We Made where again, there are some pretty significant moments of discomfort. There’s some stuff that happens, and it is, you know, part of the historical record, right? Like it is part of what happened during this war and in this place. And if we’re going to create art, out of our experience, we kind of have to be able to hold both in a chant, right? Like, you’ve got the good and the bad, like you can’t just have one or the other because if it’s relentlessly morbid, you don’t give the reader space to breathe right?

Especially if you want to create art that’s true to life because life, always relentless. There are moments of levity and moments of, of stupidity and moments of joy. Again, back to my grandma, she talks about, you know, oh, we were starving. And so our mother used to, you know, boil paper to have as you know, survive, which terrible thing. But also she’s like, also, sometimes at night after curfew, we would crawl through the hole that we made to our neighbor’s house, and we will have dance parties, all this occupation, both of those things can exist in tandem, because that human experiences as your grandmother read the book, I hate to bring up death so much when my grandmother passed in January. She was 94. And still, I was writing the book. And in fact, she was, I was actually with her. And I sold the book in January. And she was thrilled. But also, again, she told me to get back to my chores, because I was wasting time prattling on about this, but she was a very matter of fact. She had not read it, but she is in the dedication. And she was aware that I was writing it, she gifted me some of her memory books, which essentially were journals, but just, you know, stories that she’d written down, so she wouldn’t forget them. And we just talked a lot about her life and this book.

That must be a little wild for you, though, reading your grandmother’s diary.

Yeah, it’s funny, because I think she wrote them as intended to have an audience so there was nothing too spicy in there…

Okay. All right. Sorry. Thank you for answering the question was like, How do I ask about your grandma?

I found some letters that she had, her and my grandfather had written and, those are a little… And my aunt keeps them, I find them awkward.

I understand that. What do you want readers to really know about The Storm We Made? I mean, it is your first novel. There’s a story collection coming next year?. So they’re gonna have time to sit with The Storm We Made. But what do you want readers to know?

I just want them to, you know, hopefully hold and remember some of the stories in The Storm We Made right? Because I think, you know, remembering is how history is made. Remembering is how people love and I hope you know that they carry a little bit of you know, Cecily’s drama and her eldest daughters, you know, stories of both anger and hope and Abel and Jasmine’s stories. I hope that they come away from this book with like, some memory of the book. Yeah, sometimes read a book, no remember anything about it, I hope that they remember something of it. Because there’s history in there. And when you remember something, it becomes history and I want that to happen.

I think too, the humanity and the history don’t get separated, right? Like, you can’t have a history without the humanity of the thing. I’m hoping that readers come to this with an open mind. Because again, like you are kind of in slightly uncharted territory for American publishing, right? Like, keep an open mind, right. Like, there’s a lot of sort of emotional happenings where you are, obviously, spoiler free in this conversation. So I know it sounds like we’re dancing around stuff. But one of the great pleasures for me when I was reading this book, and I read it early, early, I mean, I was working off of a bound manuscript, so I didn’t see the jacket until very late. And we’re going to end on the jacket, because the jackets pretty spectacular, but I hadn’t seen the jacket. I hadn’t actually met you yet. And I just read it. And I said, I think I read it straight through in a single setting kind of thing, because I just needed to know where you were going. And you know, who was going to live who was not going to live. And again, you don’t necessarily need to have a huge understanding of what was happening in that time period, right? Like you just need to trust that Vanessa is going to tell you a story. It is a quick propulsive read you are the plot, you do not skimp on plot. But I also got some great sentences too, which made me very happy. But before I let you go, we got to talk about this jacket because the jacket is amazing. And there’s a little bit of a backstory that I think kind of sums up a little bit of how you approach the world, didn’t you find this painting and you were like this is what I want am I misremembering the story?

I expected to have a full long drawn out you know cover selection process which is such as with writers your team presents you with options and then you hate all of them and they presented with new options that you got to tweak and tweak and tweak it could take them of my team presented me with three options to that were designed and one that was literally a piece of art that they found on Google. Like, that’s it.

Your team. I thought you found it.

Later they told me, Oh, do you know that this, this piece of art is painted by a Malaysian artist? Like y’all could have started with that. That is very important. And it all sort of, you know, came together in a multitude of wonderful coincidences. And we basically picked the jacket in a day, they just put some words on this amazing piece of art. We went to the gallery artist and secured the rights for it, and now it’s going to be in the US but also in multiple covers around the world.

That is so great. I just for some reason, I had it in the back of my head that you had found the piece of art but okay. Oh, no, the team did. Well, yay team. Yay Marysue Rucci Books.

And, yeah, it’s a Malaysian artist on the jacket, a Malaysian audiobook narrator as well.

You know, Vanessa, I think that’s pretty much the perfect place to end this episode. So thank you so much for making the time for us. It’s always really good to see you. The Storm We Made is out now. And since we went spoiler free in this conversation, everyone can run out and just read it for themselves and enjoy it and be astonished by it. How does that sound?

Wonderful. Thank you for having me. It’s always a joy to talk to you.