Fire island With Little Fires Everywhere coming to Amazon Prime this week, Donal O’Donoghue talks to author Celeste Ng
With Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng’s 2017 novel is given a new life on screen with Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington centre stage. Donal O’Donoghue talks to the author
“Iwas watching Big Little Lies and was so struck by Reese Witherspoon’s performance that I said to my husband ‘wouldn’t it be amazing if in some magical-reality world, Reese Witherspoon read my book, wanted to option it and then wanted to star in it?’” says Celeste Ng of her wild hopes for her 2017 best-seller Little Fires Everywhere. “I don’t know how that happened, but it did. And when they decided to bring in Kerry Washington, it was so perfect that now when I read my book, I see both of them as the characters, Elena and Mia.’
Ironically Little Fires Everywhere, the eightpart adaptation of Ng’s novel, is most likely to be measured against Big Little Lies with its take on motherhood in all its complexities. It too is set in a seemingly idyllic suburban neighbourhood, the real life Shaker Heights in Ohio where Ng lived from 1990 to 1998. Here Witherspoon’s supermom, Elena, is queen bee, but things fall apart with the arrival of Washington’s enigmatic artist, Mia. “I didn’t want to be the screenwriter because I believed that I’d be the wrong person to adapt my own work,” says Ng who acted as “a tuning fork” for the writers as well as having a producer credit. The most significant difference from the novel is that Mia and her daughter, Pearl, are African-American. “I wanted originally to make them people of colour, because so much of what I was writing about was class and that’s usually tied to race,” says Ng. “But I didn’t feel that I was the right person to try and imagine what a black woman’s experience in the US might be like, so I wrote them thinking of them as white characters. I was delighted when the producers decided to cast Kerry as Mia. It was an opportunity to explore a dynamic I was not able to explore in the book.”
Reese Witherspoon’s Elena also differs, given a back-story that the novel doesn’t accommodate. “When we see Reese Witherspoon, one of America’s screen sweethearts, playing a person who is doing unsympathetic things, we have to reckon with that: we want to like her, but she is doing this thing that is terrible. That makes us empathise with Elena Richardson in the TV series in a way that readers of the book may not. When you see someone on screen which you are conditioned to like, it forces us to identify with her in a way that is both powerful and useful.”
Shortly after publication in 2017, Ng who is Asian-American, said that Little Fires Everywhere, which is set in the 1990s, still “resonates with everything happening now.” Three years on, amid a pandemic, she believes that to be even more the case. “With so many of us locked down in our homes, we see how it’s all about who has the money and the resources. The virus is exposing a lot of the weakness in US society, but I hope this will be a moment of reckoning for us, a good time for us to think about how the world is and how we would like it to be in the future.”
Celeste Ng is currently working on a new novel (“it has become dark and dystopian,
I can’t imagine why!”) and her debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, is being adapted for the big screen with Julia Roberts reportedly attached. The writer also has a cameo role in Little Fires Everywhere (“make me look as different from normal me as possible” was her request to the filmmakers for her fleeting appearance as a book club member). As for starting little fires everywhere, the novelist hopes to continue shaking up the status quo with her next work and has a stack of titles on her desk (“all about dictators and totalitarianism”) to help stoke the flames.
With so many of us locked down in our homes, we see how it’s all about who has the money and the resources