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. She is married and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.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. She graduated from Barnard College in 2010. Wong was born in Hawaii and raised in Oregon. Her second novel, Kaleidoscope will be published in 2022. Wong is the co-author of Gastro Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to Food and a writer at Atlas Obscura. Her work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the LA Review of Books, Self Magazine, and Bustle. ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Ĭecily Wong is a writer best known for her novel Diamond Head, published by HarperCollins in 2015. JSTOR ( March 2016) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message).If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's notability guideline for biographies.

Diamond head by cecily wong