Little Fires Everywhere is the latest smash hit TV show we're all about to dive into, but for many of us, who read the novel of the same name by Celeste Ng, the story won't be anything new.
The book, Celeste's second novel, has already been a worldwide smash of its own since its 2017 release – and was picked up by the publishing and TV powerhouse that is Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine company before it was even released. Not only did they option the story for filming, but they included it as one of their book club picks - a sticker that almost guarantees success and sales.
We spoke to Celeste about what it's like when your show is developed by Reese Witherspoon, what she thought about the changes made - and how it feels seeing your teenage crush, Joshua Jackson, cast to wear dad pants...
How did you feel when you heard Reese Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine were interested in your book?
Before the book came out, I was in London and everyone was talking about Big Little Lies, so it’s spring 2017. I was watching the TV show and I said to my husband, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if in some magical universe Reese Witherspoon not only read my book, but somehow wanted to produce it and then also wanted to be Elena Richardson?’ – and then somehow magically that’s what happened. I feel really lucky.
I work with a great film agent and I guess she was thinking the same – that there’s some similarities between Reese’s character in Big Little Lies [Madeline Mackenzie] and Elena Richardson. They’re both about wanting to look like they have it all together, but of course they don’t. He sent the novel to Reese’s production partner at Hello Sunshine who read it and really liked it and said, ‘I think Reese will really connect to it.’ So, when we got the word that Reese had read it and really liked it and wanted to bring it to the screen, I felt like I was having a very magical dream.
When I talked with her about it, I was so impressed. She had so many specific points about the book, like ‘I want to talk to you about this passage,’ and ‘What were you thinking when you wrote this page?’ She’s really a reader and I think what they’ve been doing really comes from their love of this book and books in general – they really are passionate about it.
You’re a producer on the show – how involved were you?
Different people have different comfort levels. For me, I really wanted to have some connection to what was going on and be one of the voices at the table. But it was really important to give this project space. I think about it like a covers album – you don’t want to hear the exact same songs you already know. You do want to hear what the new artist is going to do with that material and the new spin they’re going to put on it. It was important to me I not be the author reading over their shoulders like, ‘That’s not how it happened in the book’. I trusted them because they had such palpable love for the book, that any changes they made would be in keeping with the heart of the book, it would be true to the characters. And that trust was totally repaid. I loved the ideas they had, they were exploring things I was interested in, in ways I hadn’t got to in the book. So all the genius, all the credit goes to them. And I really am grateful they let me be the tuning fork.
The portrayal of Mia is probably the most obvious change…
There are some small ones and couple of big ones. But I think the most obvious is casting Kerry Washington as Mia. Kerry Washington, obviously, is a black actress. And in the book Mia’s race wasn’t mentioned.
But the truth is, that when I was starting to write this book, I thought Mia and Pearl might be people of colour. A lot of what I was interested in was this power and this privilege dynamic and because I’m a woman of colour, that was a dynamic I was interested in writing about. But when I started doing the story I realised there was going to be the sub-plot involving the adoption of an Asian-American baby and it seemed to me, to make Mia and Pearl Asian-Americans, which was my first thought because it’s my own experience, made that equation a little too neat. Maybe people would think it was too obvious – that of course Mia would side with another Asian-American woman. But I also didn’t feel I could fully imagine what it would be like to be a black woman in America or a Latina woman in America and I didn’t want to presume that I could speak to that experience.
So I wrote Mia and Pearl, thinking of them as working class white people, but their race isn’t specified. And I was thrilled when Reese and her producing partners came and said, ‘We’re thinking about Kerry Washington as Mia’. Because it said to me they weren’t going to shy away from talking about issues of race, they were going to lean into talking about issues of race. And it puts a different filter over the whole story. Now, every interaction is going to be obviously tinged with race – it is, everything in American is tinged with race, class and race are so closely tied. But because you can see it on the screen, it brings that right up to the surface in a way that I couldn’t do in the novel. I really loved that they did that.
The show is so brilliantly nostalgic of the 1990s – why did you set the book then?
At first it was a matter of comfort zone, because I was a teenager in the 90s, I would’ve been the same age as Lexi. So this was a world I knew very well. But as I went through the book, I realised the 90s was a very particular time that fit this story. It was a time when, in the US, we kind of thought we had it all together. We had this great new President, Bill Clinton, and this powerful First Lady. It was this girl power time when we had a female Secretary of State and the first female Attorney General. We thought we were post-racial, I don’t know why? There was this great new thing called the internet, which was going to make everybody rich and had no downside. We weren’t at the time in any major wars, it was pre 9/11. There was this sense that we knew what we were doing. And, of course now we look back and realise all those problems were still there – racism and sexism were still there. But it seemed to me a time that spoke to the same story that the Richardsons and Warrens are going through – they think they have it all figured out, that everything is good and will be only progress. But of course we can see that’s not true. It seemed like the perfect time to tell a story about a family who are realising their whole world is actually kind of taped over.
Talking of 90s nostalgia, it’s great to see Joshua Jackson back on our screens – especially in his pants…
I like emitted this squeal, straight from my 15-year-old heart [when I heard about the casting]. He was lovely, I think I babbled incoherently for a minute and he was very nice about it. He and I are about the same age actually and it’s fun to see him in the 90s setting. It’s like a little bit of fan service to those who remember him from Dawson’s Creek to be like, he’s still here and is just as talented. I don’t know when you get to see him in his underwear [ed: It’s the first episode]. It was this moment like, ‘Oh Joshua Jackson is in dad underwear’. It’s a very definite moment for certain people and he was a great sport about it.
The issue of hiring other women to work in your home plays a part in the story – it seems like in lots of ways, especially at the moment, we’ve not moved on from those debates.
It’s a big thing here with the lockdown – it really throws into relief the power imbalance, who can stay at home and who has to go out and work. I hear people saying, ‘You should pay your cleaning person because you can stay home and they can’t’. And I hope it’s bringing home to people how much privilege they have that they don’t realise until something like this happens. Of course in the 90s that was happening, but we’re still doing it too. We can see how far we’ve come, or how far we haven’t come at all.
The book is so anchored on issues of motherhood – why did you choose to explore that?
I think that’s one of the reasons so many people have connected in the book. So much of who we become is tied into our relationships with our mothers - whether it was supportive or fraught or you didn’t have a relationship with your mother. And then your own relationship with motherhood – if you do want to be a mother, if you don’t want to be a mother. There’s so much emotional weight that comes with it, and guilt – everybody’s got an opinion. Which I learned when I was pregnant. Even when I went on a book tour with my first novel, people would say to me, ‘Where is your son?’ like I had left him at home in the closet. I was like, ‘He’s with his father.’ It’s very real now, if not more so because all the complicated feelings that society has and that we take on ourselves about motherhood. I love that they explored many facets of that in the show – they brought, the writers on the show, a number of people who were adopted and who weren’t yet mothers. In the show, it says something like, ‘Mothering is hard for everybody, money just hides it for some people.’ I like that’s something they explicitly explored.
You have a cameo in the series…
I was prepared to wheedle and beg my way on and when I got to visit the set they were like, ‘We’re going to have you do a cameo,’ so I was thrilled. What they did was said, ‘You’re going to be the new member of the book club and you don’t know what’s going on, so look like you have no idea what’s going on,’ and I was like, ‘I can do that.’
What are you working on? Will you have a new novel out soon?
There’s an adaptation of Everything I Never Told You, my first book – it’s been in the works for some time and it looks like it’s taking a slightly new form, but I’m waiting for them to announce so I can actually tell people. But in between homeschooling my child and cooking everything from scratch like everyone is at this time, I’m also trying to get some work down on another novel. I’m still figuring it out, but I think it will deal with a lot of the same themes – parents and children, what we pass onto the next generation, what we take from the generation before us, and questions about the role of art. Those are all the issues I find myself wrestling to in my own life, I keep coming back to. So eventually another novel, I hope.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, is available now,. You can watch the show on Amazon Prime now.
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