Was I really writing a story about my family? Were the characters actually modeled after my relatives? The answer, I found, was no, and beneath that no were the ambiguities of fact and fiction I’d yet to tackle. Was someone in my family a murderer? Who was the sexy brother? From friends and strangers, there was almost morbid interest in how things connected. I was hit with a deluge of family stories, many of which were helpful and fascinating - but these stories also came with the expectation that they would be used, that somewhere in our family’s saga, some piece of them would appear. My answer, when people ask about the book’s veracity, has been crafted by trial and error.Įarly on, because of the book’s Hawaiian inception, and because people seemed excited by the idea of knowing real family secrets, I said I was indeed writing a book about my family, not knowing how the flood gates would open.

I used real facts from real family history, but dropped them into a fictional plot. I named characters after real family members, but made them entirely different people.

When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.' At times, I feel like I set a trap for myself by writing my novel the way I did. Tayari Jones said it perfectly: 'When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. While reading Cutting Teeth, I entered “Julia Fierro young children” into the search bar and worried that my wording was creepy, that I would be added to a neighborhood watch list in the nicest part of Brooklyn. In This Is How You Lose Her, I googled endlessly trying to figure out if Junot Díaz actually lost his fiancée by cheating with fifty women. I’m extremely guilty of this, drawing tenuous parallels between fact and fiction. Neither is the presumption from readers that the main character is the author, or that the mother figure is modeled after an actual mother. Writing stories based in personal experience, in family lore, is nothing new. It’s difficult not to draw conclusions, and while I always searched for a satisfying response, I answered this question incorrectly for months. When I describe my novel to someone new and they hear it’s the story of a Chinese-Hawaiian family, while simultaneously seeing my Chinese-Hawaiian face, I inevitably get the same question: So, is this book about you? Is Diamond Head based on a true story? It becomes even harder to deflect when they see the cover - a girl with the same coloring as me, who could easily be my blood relation.

Diamond head by cecily wong