Idea for best-selling novel grew over time for Celeste Ng

Celeste Ng can identify both a plot seed and a theme seed from which her bestselling novel 'Everything I Never Told You” bloomed.

The plot seed was a story her husband told her about a childhood friend who pushed his own little sister into a pond. Ng found the story intriguing. In a phone interview, she remembered how that simple tale got her thinking.

'Why would a brother push his sister into the lake... and how did that change their relationship when they grow older?” Ng wondered.

The thematic seed for the book came from the author's own youth. She grew up in a suburb of Cleveland in what she calls 'a lovely, progressive town.” But then three young women from her high school were murdered in unrelated incidents.

'As you can imagine, that really affected me deeply,” she says. 'It was my first experience with the death of someone my own age.” She remembers wondering if the deaths could have been prevented if those close to the girls had just known more about them and their lives.

In 'Everything I Never Told You,” the death of Lydia Lee - a girl once pushed into a lake by her older brother and later dies by drowning in mysterious circumstances - drives the book. The question of whether her death could have been prevented if her family understood her better haunts nearly every page.

'I've always been really interested in the ways we understand or don't understand each other... To what extent is it possible to understand each other about small things and even big things?” Ng says.

In the novel, characters talk to one another while missing each other's meaning entirely. 'Words are an imperfect medium for explaining,” Ng says.

The one person in the book who seems to have the best grasp of what is happening and why is Hannah, the youngest child in the Lee family. 'She stands in for the reader - and even the writer - as the observer,” Ng explains. While her youth prevents her from changing the course of events, by book's end, Hannah represents what Ng calls, 'an opportunity to start over or to do things differently.”

That opportunity is important as Ng explores 'to what extent can you change who you are or the dynamic you have with another person.”

Much of the book's success resides in its complex but subtle structure, something the author worked hard to achieve.

'The structure is really the thing I struggled with the most... how to move between time periods. Every draft went through a really big structural change... I tried all kinds of crazy things.”

She finally found the guidance she needed by studying other books with similar structures, including 'The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy, 'Amy and Isabelle” by Elizabeth Strout, and 'Bel Canto” by Ann Patchett.

Ng, like her character James Lee, is an Asian-American born in the United States. She's profoundly aware of the difficult space her characters occupy, including the tendency for such individuals to believe everyone is fundamentally the same even as they 'end up becoming the spokesman” by default for people who share their background.

For her part, Ng has resisted being labeled an Asian-American writer. It was also important to her that 'Everything I Never Told You” not be pigeonholed.

'I didn't plan for it to have any sort of message,” she says. 'I'm glad that it hasn't been received as a ‘message' book or as secretly being a textbook on how to been a Chinese-American.”

On the other hand, she's been delighted to hear from readers to whom the book has spoken. She has heard from readers of mixed race who have told her how happy they are to see themselves in the book. But those sorts of comments extend beyond matters of race. Other readers, for example, have told her they recognize their relationship with their mother in the book's depiction of Lydia and Marilyn Lee.

With her touring responsibilities winding down and her young son recently starting school, Ng is turning her attention to her next novel. Readers of 'Everything Thing I Never Told You” will no doubt await it eagerly.