Aimee Liu
Aimee Liu is the author of Glorious Boy (May 2020), as well as the bestselling novels Flash House, Cloud Mountain, and Face, and the memoirs Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders and Solitaire. She is the editor of Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk About Writing, and Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives: Guidance and Reflections on Recovery from Eating Disorders. Her articles have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Ms., Cosmopolitan, Self, Glamour, The Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications. Her novels include a Literary Guild Super Release and have been published in more than twelve languages and serialized in Good Housekeeping. She’s received a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers award and special mention by the Pushcart Prize and teaches in Goddard College’s low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Port Townsend, WA.
Twitter: @aimee_liu
Instagram: @aimeeeliu
What period of history do you wish you knew more about?
I seem to be fixated on the years around World War II. As a Baby Boomer, I grew up listening to lots of stories about the Great Depression and the war years – stories that are resonating very loudly with me now as we all struggle through the global pandemic and face threats of rationing and supply profiteering, as well as positive community efforts analogous to victory gardens and volunteer brigades. But WWII was so massive and complex that there are always hidden corners. Did you know that there were Vichy French islands and German submarines in the Caribbean? Did you know that the westernmost border of Japanese occupation was a chain of islands occupied primarily by indigenous tribes in the Bay of Bengal? Did you know that thousands of Chinese in Chungking survived the war by moving into caves to escape the bombings?
My father’s family was separated during the war. My Chinese grandfather was responsible for assigning families to those cave shelters, while the rest of his own family managed to get to America. My Shanghai-born uncle served in the U.S. Army, was captured in France, and wound up in a German prison camp. There are millions of similar WWII stories. They epitomize the worst and the best that we humans are capable of – and most of them are confoundingly fascinating!
I realized only the other day that all of my novels take place around this era. My new book, Glorious Boy, is set on those occupied islands in the Bay of Bengal and revolves around a family separation much more brutal than my father’s. Writing it taught me about everything from the British Raj to the role of those indigenous tribes as British spies against the Japanese, with medicinal orchids thrown in for good measure! The time and place were so extraordinary and unexpected that I couldn’t not write the book.
What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?
This is an easy question for me because my “day job” is ghostwriting books for other “authors.” That had better be “writing!” In that mode, I’m trying to honor the voice, vision, and ambitions of someone else. It’s an act of ventriloquism and mind reading, coupled with a fair amount of teaching. My ego and angst have no place in this type of writing; it’s all about getting the job done to the best of my abilities so that someone else can shine. In this, it’s a lot like my MFA teaching job, which is all about helping students find and refine their own voices and skills, not imposing mine.
As an author, my job is much more difficult. My heart and my ego are involved. I care much more deeply, and I tend to be more conflicted about the many choices I face in the work. I will admit that shifting gears from ghostwriting to my own work is challenging. It took me 17 years to write my new novel Glorious Boy, during which time I wrote four nonfiction bestsellers for other authors. When I’m in the thick of a ghostwriting project, I have to suspend my own work, so I need to be incredibly selective in choosing those “writing” assignments!
Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance?
I was a painting major in college, and although I stopped painting almost as soon as I graduated, I love visual art and photography. Just last fall, at the urging of my book publicist, I began posting on Instagram and that has radically changed my daily life. First, I discovered that there’s a fabulous community of writers on Instagram who post art photographs. That inspired me to poke around with the app’s editing tools, and I quickly discovered that I could create faux paintings that don’t require paint, canvas, or a studio. So I’ve been posting #phopaintings / #photopaintings of images that I capture on my daily walks, wherever I happen to be. Lately I’ve been adding 1-word tags to relate the images to aspects of the pandemic that I’m feeling. I am having more fun with this than I’ve had in years, and it’s an incredibly therapeutic outlet right now. Plus, it’s connected me to other photographers and artists and writers all over the world!
Is there a work of art that you love. Why? Have you ever visited it in person?
The art that I love straddles the line between photo-realism and impressionism, with lots of narrative content. Edward Hopper and Johannes Vermeer fall into this category for me. Both of them worked miracles with light, and their distant portraits evoke emotions I can only feel without naming. I did travel to Amsterdam to the Rijksmuseum to see the Vermeers there, especially “Woman Reading a Letter.” And my favorite Hoppers are “Gas” and “Nighthawks,” both of which I’ve seen multiple times.
Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?
As a teenager I was in love with Audrey Hepburn. Much later I realized that my mother had looked like Hepburn in her youth, but at the time, I wanted to be her. I must have seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s a dozen times. As soon as I read the original novella it was based on, I adopted Truman Capote as my favorite author, and Holly Golightly, as flawed and feisty and vulnerable as she was, became a role model for many of the characters in my own novels. My protagonists tend to be wounded adventurers. I never realized this before, but that idea was probably first planted by Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
