At a certain point, it felt dishonest to not acknowledge the issues that were so pervasive in the real world and the questions I found myself wrestling with because of the social climate we were in. This was in October 2016 - and very soon after, with the 2016 presidential election, the rise of the far right, and everything else that came in the following years, it started to feel like we were living in a dystopia. Q: When did you start writing this novel, and did it change over time?Ī: I began writing this novel right after finishing “Little Fires Everywhere.” At the time, I thought of it as a fairly conventional story about a mother who was creative and a son who didn’t understand why his mother was drawn to this kind of work. It’s perhaps less of a dystopia and more our reality with the volume bumped up a notch. Everything in the novel has some precedent in our past, or in many cases, our present.

I suspect that will sound familiar to many of us, and that’s on purpose. The America in the book is shaped by fear: The country is recovering from a huge economic crisis, anti-Asian sentiment is all too prevalent, and there are dire consequences for “un-American” behavior. Q: Please describe the society these characters live in.Ī: This world isn’t quite our world, but it isn’t not our world either. As the book opens, Bird gets a mysterious letter from his mother and is drawn into a quest to find her. Three years earlier, Margaret left the family in mysterious circumstances. A: “Our Missing Hearts” focuses on Margaret, a Chinese-American poet, her Caucasian husband Ethan and their 12-year-old son, Bird.

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