Jessamine Chan on Writing a "Too Dark" Book
In Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers, Frida Liu leaves her baby, Harriet, alone at home for a few hours while she runs into work. This lapse in judgment changes her life. Over the course of several days, she abandons any pretense at privacy or normalcy to regain custody of her daughter from her ex-husband Gust and his fiancée Susanna. When the government decides Frida is a good candidate for their reform school for mothers, she commits to a year of retraining to try to get Harriet back. Part satire, part speculative fiction, and completely engrossing, Chan’s debut novel takes sharp aim at the systems that judge parents and how parents judge themselves.
I spoke to Jessamine Chan over Zoom about her process and influences. What follows is a transcription, shortened and edited for clarity.
Rachel Mans McKenny: I noticed in your bio that you wrote reviews for Publishers Weekly. Does that critical lens inform your craft?
Jessamine Chan: I only wrote a couple of reviews when I was a nonfiction reviews editor. At some point early on, I accepted that writing criticism was not my gift. Part of the problem is I am incredibly slow. I remember the first longer piece I turned in, 500 or 600 words, and I explained to my boss the process I’d gone through, all the notes I’d taken. And she was kind of horrified like, “Oh, you took handwritten notes. Then you typed those notes, and then you turned into a piece.” I work at a pace that is not really fit for journalism. I’ve talked to Emma [Copley Eisenberg] about that. She said, “Yeah, if you’re obsessing about every sentence, journalism is not for you.”
RMM: Tell me about your process for novel writing. Was The School for Good Mothers your first completed long-form project?
JC: I have about a hundred pages of a terrible first novel in a drawer. Actually, it’s somewhere in my parents’ basement. I started the novel with no plot at all. It was about a birth cult where all the women are named Alice, and it’s the end times. It’s all just this blob without characters or plot or action or dialogue or any of the things that a novel needs. It was basically a hundred pages of images.
It took me a long time to learn how to write a story with forward movement, action, and narrative. I started writing fiction at Brown as an undergrad, which was a very different school of writing than Columbia. At Brown, experimental fiction was the norm. For instance, I didn’t read Alice Munro or Lorrie Moore until grad school. I started out reading Ben Marcus, Carol Maso, Robert Coover—the hypertext folks. That was my introduction to how to write fiction. It’s an exciting place to begin because it feels like total freedom, and you’re very focused on the language. I thought it was a fruitful way to begin as a college student, though it took a long time to understand some of the bigger craft concerns, and when I did start to read the classics like Lorrie Moore or Alice Munro that was an exciting part of my education too. It’s been a slow journey to get here.
RMM: How long did it take to write the book? I know you started it before becoming a parent, and you became a parent during that process.
JC: I started it in early 2014. I had my daughter in early 2017. We sold the book in 2019, and originally it was scheduled to be published in summer 2021 and it got moved to January 2022. I’m publishing my first book at 43, but I’ve been writing since I was 18. It’s not that I’ve been writing this novel the whole time, but I’ve been living my life privately offline, working toward this goal.
I think there’s a certain That came out of nowhere! to how the book has launched. My editor has, in some events we’ve done, referred to the launch as a Cinderella story. And in many ways it is, but what’s not pictured is the two decades of life and work that existed offline.
I deliberately chose not to be a person on the Internet until I sold my book. I think it’s not the standard advice you’re given, because nowadays people tell writers to build a Twitter profile and get followers. But I didn’t have any public social media and was kind of unfindable on the Internet until the fall of 2019 when I sold the book. Even now, I find Twitter kind of gives me a heart attack. I put that sentiment out there because there is another way of doing things. It’s just not necessarily a popular one.
RMM: That’s so heartening for people to hear, that you don’t have that big brand to get noticed.
JC: Yeah, I had no brand whatsoever. When I did hear from agents over the years for short stories, they somehow tracked me down to Facebook and began by saying, “I’m so sorry to bother you on Facebook. I couldn’t find your email anywhere!” But I decided to just wait until I had a full manuscript before querying. I found my agent, Meredith, via her slush pile and I didn’t even know if she would respond.
RMM: So, you started this book before becoming a parent. You’re a parent now. How did that writing process go when you’re starting to tie in external research on your own experience as a parent? What was it like to develop Frida and the other mothers through research versus your personal lens?
JC: I had a really good writing day in early 2014. At the time, I was ruminating hard on the question of whether to have a baby, because I felt very not ready and ambivalent about it. My husband would bring up the melting of Greenland and “How can we have a child if the earth is ending?” Stuff like that. I felt the biological clock pressure was bearing down on my life. And a few months before that, I had read the Rachel Aviv piece that’s mentioned in the acknowledgments called “Where Is Your Mother?”
And so, on that really good writing day, I didn’t have the conscious thought of And now I will begin a big project that I am going to spend the next seven years of my life on. It was more that I started scribbling. It was one of those days that you dream of having where you just write for six hours. What was there from the very beginning was Frida and Harriet, the dolls, and women in pink lab coats. Gustav and Susanna. Even Tucker. It had the voice too, so I had something to build from.
I wrote the whole first, messy, gigantic draft before doing research, partly because I didn’t want to get so bogged down that I would never get to the end. I did more reading in 2016. Once I started revising chapter by chapter, I did a lot more reading, which coincided with the time when I was pregnant.
I was reading these very grim books about the family court system and alarming books about American parenting culture and how everyone is so unhappy. I read the Rachel Cusk memoir, A Life's Work. My pregnancy reading was not very lighthearted.
RMM: As a white mother, it was really interesting to watch the primarily white systems as they interact with Frida, a second-generation immigrant woman of color.
JC: I did want to call into question who is making the standards and who is setting the bar for those expectations. I wouldn’t necessarily know how to do that in a purely realistic novel, but I use some of the speculative and surreal elements to draw some attention to those areas in our society in a way that I don’t think they could have accessed fully through realism.
RMM: Talk a little bit about the robot children, since we’re talking about the speculative aspects of the book. In the book, the government uses these robot children as a testing tool to measure the engagement and care of the mothers at the school, as stand-ins for real children. Did they come onto the page early in the writing process or later on?
JC: That was in the very first draft. I mean, when I say it was a good writing day, it was like the kind of writing day I dreamed of having for 20 years. They were partly inspired by this element within the Rachel Aviv piece and the way government officials spoke to that mom. It felt so clinical and really chilling because officials talked about affection and maternal feelings and warmth in this way that just felt so terrifying, as if it’s possible to measure those things. The book takes the idea of measurement and makes it literal. The robot children were there from the very beginning, and so was the blue goo.
RMM: I’m so glad you did. I was in a friend’s DMs on Instagram the second I finished the book because I knew she had read it too. I needed to process, especially the last thirty pages. The book is just elegantly plotted.
JC: Thank you. A lot of that came together in editing. To get to the very sleek last 30 pages, I threw out hundreds of pages along the way.
You know, when the voice is pulling you, don’t stop to self-edit. Keep going. I feel like Carmen Machado said it much better in an interview, but you have to just commit to the wild idea of writing a book and see it through to completion. There were definitely so many times while writing where I thought, What am I doing? I definitely had people tell me along the way that the book was too dark, or not sellable because it was too dark. I just chose to plow ahead.
RMM: What has it been like to have your book finally out in the world?
JC: I couldn’t have predicted that my book was coming out around the same time as the Lost Daughter film adaptation. But that has been a really, really exciting conversation to be a part of. And I couldn't have predicted that the book would be coming at a time when people have been having a parenting emergency for two years. The book wasn’t intended to be as timely as it is. Who could have imagined that the world was going to be this grim?
RMM: But it’s nourishing to read hard things too, and you make the hard thing interesting. Also, I know it can be hard to read when you’re in the middle of launching, but typically who do you turn to for inspiration? What lights your fire?
JC: This might be an unusual response because I wrote a pretty plotty book, but I read much less plot-driven stuff in my search for inspiration. I really love Dorthe Nors’ short story collection, Karate Chop. I’m obsessed with Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls. I don’t think Mrs. Caliban is on everyone’s TBR pile, but it really should be. It’s a perfect novel. I love Carmen Maria Machado’s work. I’m really inspired by Diane Cook's work.
I read a lot of Patricia Highsmith in the last year. I really like The Price of Salt. That was probably not an obvious instructional text for my book, but I was reading The Price of Salt one or two pages at a time while I was revising and developing the secondary characters of the moms. I was working on developing Frida as a character and giving her more dimension, and that book is perfect for learning about interiority. I don’t know what it is, but sometimes you just have to put beauty into your brain and hope that it turns into something.
Jessamine Chan’s (@jessaminechan) short stories have appeared in Tin House and Epoch. A former reviews editor at Publishers Weekly, she holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Brown University. Her work has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Wurlitzer Foundation, Jentel, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Anderson Center, VCCA, and Ragdale. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter.
Rachel Mans McKenny is a writer and humorist from the Midwest, recently published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Elle Magazine, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, and The New York Times. She also co-hosts the literary matchmaking podcast Blind Date with a Book. Her first novel, The Butterfly Effect, was selected as the 2022 All-Iowa Reads for Adults. She is on Twitter @rmmckenny.