What Writers Can Learn From <i>Goodnight Moon</i>
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Colum McCann, George Saunders, Emma Donoghue, Michael Chabon, and more.
Celeste Ng’s books feature the hallmarks of classic mystery novels—a crime to be solved, a roster of suspects, chilling details that aren’t quite what they seem. Her bestselling debut, Everything I Never Told You, fixates on the strange circumstances surrounding a young woman’s death by drowning; a devastating act of suspected arson rages at the center of her new novel, Little Fires Everywhere. But while standard whodunits build momentum through intricately plotted twists and turns, Ng’s interest lies in the private emotional lives of people. Her novels may be page-turners that push toward a final revelation, but the suspense stems less from the who and the how than the why.
Ng’s interest in that persistent question——helps to explain her attraction to the children’s classic . In a conversation for this series, she discussed how the subtle, mysterious illustrations have more in common with Christie and Conan Doyle than you might think, asking the careful reader to provide solutions to a series of confounding puzzles. Ultimately, the book’s structure helps illuminate Ng’s own creative process, the way she uses a
