Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You, and Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread: Life after Disaster

When I asked my younger sister, who has been through quite a lot and is miraculously still alive, how she was doing, she said, “Well. I am well. I live with my family in my happy home where we are all safe and nothing bad is happening to us.” Before I can question that, because in fact there is quite a lot going on with the multiple generations of that household (and their dog, cat, and gecko), she said, “But I have an internet connection.” 

We talked about the news, our grief and outrage, our current action plans and how they are going. And in the course of talking about the role of storytelling in these times, she said she wanted stories where everything has been totally smashed up, but by the end, people are putting themselves back together. Novels that show us how we survive hard times, but also novels that give us great pleasures along the way.

Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng’s first novel begins, “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous fact: Lydia is late for breakfast.”  

We’re not getting to hope that she’s okay, we know only that we are ignorant and the family is ignorant, and the book is taking us into a story of the loss of a daughter, a sister. The story investigates the mystery of how it happened, offering an entwined examination of the past that has led to the death and the novel’s present-time in which the aftermath unfurls.  

Everything I Never Told You is gripping and moving, brisk and meditative, full of information for writers as well as readers. Every time I reread it, I learn from Ng’s handling of backstory and exposition, interweaving of two timelines, management of a sizable cast of memorable and touching POV characters, and particular ways of writing about racism, both subtle and explicit.  

The paragraph below comes near the end of the book, where Marilyn, Lydia’s mother, remembers the innocent/ignorant before-time, the last night she had with her daughter: 

At the doorway to Lydia’s room, she pauses with her hand on the knob and rests her head against the frame, remembering that last evening together: how a glint of light had caught Lydia’s water glass and she looked at her daughter across the table and smiled. Spinning out her daughter’s future, brimming with confidence, she’d never imagined even for a second that it might not happen. That she might be wrong about anything.           

Marilyn, of course, now knows this was the final moment, an ending she didn’t know she’d reached. Ng has exactly caught that way in which the memory of someone beloved, lost to us, can appear as a series of images, here the light on a glass and a smile. Marilyn isn’t chastising herself in this moment, but she is no longer the confident one who doesn’t even know that she believes she’s omniscient, infallible, that she can predict the future. Water is basic: we don’t think about it until we don’t have it, at which point we remember it’s essential. A glass is also fragile, and the light glinting off it transient.

Marilyn isn’t yet ready to clean out the room. She’s on the verge of a vision of Lydia sleeping in her bed, which will give her a temporary comfort, one she tries to absorb. She wishes to go back in time, not to change anything (having learned too much to allow herself to imagine revising the past), but to have the experience of seeing Lydia one final time. 

By the ending of the book, we have watched the characters grow into the people they need to be to survive their desperate loss. But they don’t mistake themselves for the people they were before it all happened, and there’s no false promise of repair. The book does move towards healing, but its primary task is to explore the territory it has set out, and then to offer truthfulness, embodying a movement to a new, more honest and aware state of being.  

When we’ve been smashed up, we’re not going to be the same. Does that go without saying? Apparently not. Right now, I see a lot of despair around me, have to fight it myself, work hard at it. Maybe, like the characters in these novels, we were already smashed up, and it took massive losses for us to wake up. It’s dangerous, waking up: we can leap too easily from denial to despair. But, countering that impulse, there’s the real-life heroism of being able to face the past realistically and the future with ferocious inventiveness.

Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread

Sometimes we see reality best through dreams, as in Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread. This wild, twisty, amusement-park journey of a book takes us into a set of lives where gingerbread is nourishment, poison, pathway into and out of other worlds, and a key part of the connection between three generations of women, each with her own stories of love, enmity, friendship, and otherworldly travel. Also, not the least of the book’s pleasures is spending time with a group of judgmental life-size talking dolls.

The novel begins: “Harriet Lee’s gingerbread is not comfort food. There’s no nostalgia baked into it, no hearkening back to innocent indulgences and jolly times at nursery. It is not humble, nor is it dusty in the crumb.”

Consider yourself warned.

This next paragraph is from a story within a story, a memory of a different kind of before-time. Harriet, the protagonist, daughter of Margot and mother of Perdita, tells Perdita’s dolls, after what seems to be a catastrophe for Perdita, about her time in (Oyeyemi’s wildly imagined but realistic country) Druhàstrana, which the book describes, on the country’s “Wikipedia page,” as “an alleged nation state of indeterminable geographic location.”

In this story that takes place in her girlhood, Harriet’s on a series of night errands: she’s delivering her mother Margot’s extraordinary gingerbread to local cottages. She justifies her way into skipping her last delivery, wanting the gingerbread for herself, but when she’s pursued, she drops it into a well, known as “Gretel’s Well.” A voice from inside the well says she loves gingerbread, and, as the pursuers come closer, “stomping and whooping,” a girl emerges and announces herself as Gretel. This girl, who will become crucial in Harriet’s life, is a stranger, and when she sees that Harriet is speechless at her appearance, she displays great self-possession. 

She asked if Harriet was going to get into a flap. Harriet quickly turned her torch on and off. She saw that the girl was no more than three years older than her, if that. She saw that the girl was of a similar build in skin color to her, but she didn’t wear her hair in the dreadlocks typical to black peasants in Druhàstrana. This girl’s hair was gathered up into a bun of modest size. No freshly baked bun could look softer or be more of an impeccable sphere. Must be a city girl: Margot Lee had worn her hair like this until farmstead life had forced her to give up. Harriet flicked the flashlight on and off again to check a couple more details: She coveted the girl’s ever so slightly turned-up nose. And the girl had two pupils in each eye; that’s why her eyes looked like bottomless lakes in the torchlight.

Harriet’s taking in tiny bits of information with the flashing on and off of her torch (flashlight: as a British friend once said to me in South Korea, “Darling, we are divided by a common language.”). She’s rather falling for Gretel, a being out of a fairytale – climbing out of the well with her double pupils, speaking in a down-to-earth vernacular. She has a sophisticated deliciousness, and Harriet already looks up to her and wants to be like her.  

It’s dangerous to be too smitten with anyone who climbs out of a well. They are likely to lead you somewhere quite strange. In a story more directly referencing the laws of fairy tales, this being might have offered Harriet food, but instead she has seized Harriet’s. Harriet snatches it back, and Gretel pleads for it, making her promises that Harriet doesn’t trust. A fitting beginning to their complex relationship. Later, in adulthood, in another country (one rather more like our own), after a series of adventures and mishaps, Harriet is settled into a fairly good life when Perdita commits a rash act, in search of Gretel and her secrets.  

This novel is more playful, less tragic than Everything I Never Told You, but it has frightening moments. Some disasters appear to be reversible, though, in Oyeyemi’s fairytale world. And though she has written what I heard her call “duty books” at an event in SF (White Is for Witching, for example, another one of my favorites), this one is fully committed to pleasure and resilience, depicting remarkable women embarking on quests and adventures, loving each other, not denying the conditions of the world as they tell their own stories and stand in their own power.

 As one of the talking dolls says,

“Suppose we’re not even character characters but figments of another character’s imagination…”

“I’d be humiliated,” Lollipop bursts out. “Humiliated!”

“Well, it’s not like we just sit back and take it,” Prim adds. “We still get our side of the story. It’s like having a return ticket. We can all go there and back together, can’t we.”