“Stranger than fiction” seems meaningless during a time—our time, now—when the unimaginable is a daily reality. Yet in her new novel, Our Missing Hearts, published in October by Penguin Press, Celeste Ng creates a dystopian setting that is a reminder of what is at stake, what we have to lose: “It started slowly at first, the way most things did,” she writes midway through the book. “[P]eople began to lose their confidence, their sense of purpose, the willingness to wake up in the morning, their ability to keep trying, their optimism that something could be different, their memory that anything had ever been different, their hope that anything would ever improve.” Those ominous sentences sound eerily familiar and refuse to let us turn away, capturing the tone for Ng’s third novel. “None of the things that are in this book are completely made up out of thin air,” the author acknowledges—or laments.
Ng says that she “spent a lot of time trying not to write this book.” Her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, was published by Penguin Press in 2014, followed three years later by Little Fires Everywhere (Penguin Press, 2017), but Our Missing Hearts took nearly seven years to complete. It was, she says, “a difficult book to write” because, for one, she was working on another novel at the same time: “I had two ideas and was figuring out which one had the heat of the moment and was drawing me to it.” Currency was initially a source of concern: “My first two novels take place in the not-too-far-away past. It’s always been harder for me to write about things happening now because I need distance to step back and think about them—not with objectivity because I don’t know if that’s possible or even what writers should be doing. But with perspective.” She and her agent had agreed to move forward on the other novel and let this one percolate; then during the start of the pandemic, Ng says, “I realized this book was calling to me.” It was the book she needed to write not despite but because of its immediacy.
With the novel approaching publication, Ng began bookmarking articles that resonated, intending to follow Margaret Atwood’s statement, itself fashioned from a line of poetry by Marianne Moore: “If I was to create an imaginary garden I wanted the toads in it to is governed by PACT, an acronym for Preserving American Culture and Traditions—a system that “is not about race, the president was always saying, it is about patriotism and mindset.” PACT, dedicated to “keeping
