Book Club

5 takeaways from Book Club’s author discussion with Malinda Lo

"I am neither a scientist nor an artist. So this is how I live those lives — by writing these fictional characters who actually do these things."

Sharona Jacobs

May 31, 2023

Malinda Lo always knew she wanted to be a writer, but growing up in the 1980s, reading books with strong female protagonists like in “Nancy Drew,” “Anne of Green Gables,” and “Little Women,” it didn’t occur to her that a book could have characters that more closely resembled her identity as a mixed Asian American.

“I had some well-meaning teachers who tried to give me books with Asians in them and that was like, you know, ‘Woman Warrior’ and ‘Joy Luck Club’ and I totally did not identify with those books,” she said. “I mean, I’m like 13 years old. What am I going to get out of ‘The Woman Warrior’?”

It wasn’t until she read queer love story “Tipping the Velvet” by Sarah Waters as an adult that she started seeking out greater representation in her reading and writing. She sought out more books that reflected her own experiences both as a lesbian and a Chinese American.

“Writing my novels ever since then has really been me putting lesbians in the story, and bisexual characters, queer women, in stories that have been written before that have not included us,” she said.

Her latest book, “A Scatter of Light,” is a young adult coming-of-age novel about a young girl who discovers new parts of her identity and sexuality when she spends a summer with her grandmother in California and gets introduced to a working-class queer community through her grandmother’s gardener.

Boston.com recently hosted a discussion with Lo and Kimi Loughlin, manager of Buttonwood Books & Toys, about the book. The two talked about the importance of telling queer Asian American stories, getting through the tougher parts of the writing process, and how the writing community should fight back against book bans.

Read on for takeaways from their discussion or watch the video below and sign up for more Book Club updates.

“Scatter of Light” took nine years to complete.

Lo started working on this novel in 2013 but wasn’t able to sell it to any publishers when she originally completed it. Instead, she moved on to other ideas and one of those books became the critically-acclaimed “Last Night at the Telegraph Club.” The two novels share some characters as well as many of the same themes of identity and sexuality, although “Telegraph Club” is a historical fiction novel set during the Red Scare. By the time she was able to sell her latest novel, nearly a decade had passed and she had learned new lessons as a writer that helped her flesh out the skeleton she’d built.

“The funny thing about this novel is I started it like three books ago, so I had changed as a writer by the time I got around to revising it,” Lo said. “I can see that rougher 2013 first draft in this book because I worked on it for nine years. So sometimes I’m like, oh, that thing is still in there but I don’t really think that readers can see it.”

Lo’s time in Massachusetts and the Bay Area greatly shaped the novel.

“Scatter of Light” starts in Wellesley, where the protagonist, Aria, lives with her family. She plans to spend the summer in Martha’s Vineyard before starting college at MIT in the fall but is sent to stay with her grandmother in the Bay Area after she gets in trouble with her parents. Lo lived in Massachusetts for several years while attending Wellesley College and later Harvard. She also lived for 15 years in northern California and put a number of real-life locations into her novel.

“I just took all the real places and changed their names or didn’t actually say their names. They all exist,” she said.

Lo taught herself physics to write this book.

In the novel, Aria connects with several key characters through a love of art and science. While she stays in California with her artist grandmother, Aria learns more about her late grandfather by watching his videotaped lectures about the universe. In order to accurately write those conversations, Lo took an online college-level physics course and used the video classes as a storytelling device in the novel.

“I had to learn what light scattering was and I literally could not comprehend it just by reading articles, so I watched this physics course and now I see light scattering everywhere,” Lo said. “I’m really fascinated by science and I’m really fascinated by art…but I am neither a scientist nor an artist. So this is how I live those lives — by writing these fictional characters who actually do these things.”

The writing process isn’t always fun — and that’s okay.

When she’s working on a novel, Lo makes sure to write at least one thousand words a day, but sometimes those thousand words come out in fifteen minutes, and other times it takes her a full workday. Writing a first draft is her least favorite part of the writing process, but she stays focused by “writing some bad sentences” that get her into the flow and “brings some good sentences.”

“I think that a lot of…beginner writers or tend to think that if they’re not driven by a flash of inspiration, and it instantly comes out, then it’s not going to work. And the thing is, that’s not how writing works,” she said. “You have to sit there for a while. You have to wait for the words to come. What I do when I feel stuck is I sit there for a while and I just I try some stuff.”

As book banning spreads, Lo is focused on telling the stories that matter.

Efforts to have books dealing with LGBT issues and BIPOC or other minority groups removed from schools and public libraries have gained steam across the country. As a writer of books about queer Asian American girls, Lo said she takes the issue seriously but has stepped back from speaking at events on book banning to focus her energy on writing.

“I think that the right way for me to be involved is to continue writing my books and essentially ignore…the right-wing criticism because it’s irrelevant to the stuff I write,” she said.

Her publisher, Penguin Random House, recently filed a lawsuit against a Florida school district over book banning and Lo said she’s encouraged to see these restrictions being fought in the legal system.

“I feel like we need to actually use the law because the law is on our side,” the author said. “Freedom of speech is in the First Amendment. It’s not okay for them to be doing this to books in schools or libraries.”