Immediate Family

Did your relationship with your brother or your parents change throughout writing or after you finished writing the book?

I talked about the book with my family throughout all the years I was writing it, they read early drafts and later drafts, and I wouldn’t have continued it without their support. But Immediate Family is a novel that’s wary of redemptive tales, so I will be, too. I didn’t write the book to improve or save our relationship or our story. I wrote it to tell what I hope can feel like a more universal story about the many ways we make a family.

I will say it has led to more conversations between my brother and me around racial difference in a predominantly White American culture and about the ways I can continue to be a good ally as well as a good sister. We’ve talked about this increasingly over the last year and a half, with the horrific uptick in violence against the AAPI community.

You’re a cofounder and publisher of Transit Books—what new or upcoming books are you excited about on your list?

In September, we’re publishing a dreamlike novel on new motherhood, Imminence, by Mariana Dimópulos, translated by Alice Whitmore. Over the span of an evening, the narrator recalls past relationships with lovers and friends as the reality of life as a mother sets in. It’s a fascinating exploration of the role of a woman and that inevitable tension between what we want and what is expected.

We’re also having a lot of fun with our new Undelivered Lectures series: slim, book-length essays published in handsome editions. The latest is Migratory Birds, by Mexican essayist Mariana Oliver, translated by Julia Sanches, which examines migration in its many forms, moving between real cities and other territories such as language, memory, pain, desire, and the body.

Tell us what a typical Saturday looks like.

I write on the weekends, so I spend Saturday mornings wearing noise-canceling headphones in our home office while my husband runs around the other rooms with our two-year-old son. My husband and I used to do a lot of work for Transit on the weekends, but we’ve had to reconfigure that time into other pockets of the week to accommodate our new toddler roommate.

There are a lot of great regional parks in the East Bay, where we live, so the three of us usually trek out to one of those in the afternoon. In the evenings we might have friends over for drinks in our backyard while my son pushes around a giant red truck (pronounced tooch) that he’s obsessed with.

What are your favorite books about siblings, family, or motherhood?

Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy, translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman, is a stunning series of memoirs about motherhood, family, and art. This chronicle of a writer’s life takes readers through a childhood amid Hitler’s ascent to power, through three marriages and several pregnancies, through her rise in Danish literary society, and finally through the depths of her addiction.

Chia-Chia Lin’s The Unpassing is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read about family. The novel is narrated by a young boy in a Taiwanese immigrant family of six and follows the family in the aftermath of the death of one of the children, as the truth about the death is slowly revealed.

Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic is a work of narrative nonfiction that explores the ways we understand the traumas we inherit and the systems that sustain them. Tumarkin asks questions about loss, grief, and how our particular histories inform the people we become in the world. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, period.

Your go-to Oakland and SF bookstores?

We have so many great bookstores in the Bay Area. The first handful that come to mind: Point Reyes Books (Point Reyes), East Bay Booksellers (Oakland), Green Apple Books on the Park (San Francisco), The Booksmith (San Francisco), City Lights Booksellers and Publishers (San Francisco).

What makes a wedding toast compelling?

Some of the best wedding toasts I’ve heard stay away from inside jokes and bring the room into the story of the speaker’s relationship with the bride or the groom. There’s a poignancy, too, at a wedding that isn’t often directly addressed but still feels present in a good toast, whether it’s coming from parents or best friends or roommates or siblings. You hear them letting go of something a little bit—a closeness perhaps once belonging to them is given to the couple. As with a good book, the audience always wants in on that closeness, whatever its shape may be.