Jemimah Wei whose debut novel, The Original Daughter, was published by Doubleday in May, introduced by Jonathan Escoffery, author of the story collection If I Survive You, published by MCD in 2022. (Credit: Wei: Shane Lim; Escoffery: Cola Casados)
In her heartbreakingly beautiful debut novel, The Original Daughter, Jemimah Wei crafts a resonant tale that explores the complexities of familial codependence and the often fraught pursuit of autonomy and self-actualization. Set against the backdrop of Singapore’s working class, where the pressures of academic achievement loom large, the story follows Genevieve and her inherited sister, Arin, as they navigate a stifling home life while daring to dream of a brighter future. Wei’s evocative prose captures the emotional push and pull of relationships constrained by duty and desire.
With a deft and compassionate hand, Wei examines the fractures and bonds that define sisterhood and mother-daughter relationships. She paints vivid portraits of moments that both strain and fortify these connections, offering insight into the ways love can both hurt and heal.
As someone who both cherishes sibling relationships and writes about sibling rivalry, I absolutely loved The Original Daughter. What led you to write about this particular kind of sisterhood?
When you work on a book for close to a decade, the origins are various. But one of the things that stayed constant through my many ways into the book was this idea of chosen family choosing each other over and over again. It’s very much a book about our relationship to love and navigating love.
You’re a big sister in real life. Were there challenges, real or imagined, to writing about sisterhood and family in this way, knowing your family might read the novel?
I do have two younger sisters, but interestingly I didn’t think so much about my relationships with them as I did the silences around children who are given away and adopted, and the way these silences create fissures that run deep even as love springs up—which I’ve seen so often in my interpersonal experiences, but which isn’t the situation my sisters and I are in. So the challenges were more imagined, knowing readers would assume [a level of] autobiography in anything I wrote, especially since I share the characters’ context of being a millennial, female, and Singaporean in a publishing landscape where there aren’t that many of us. I don’t care if people assume those things about me, but for a long while I did hold back in my writing because I wanted to protect my loved ones from those assumptions. But that makes for bad art. I had to really work to detach myself from that, so I could push the questions I had about relationships in crisis, identity, intimacy, and independence to the absolute brink.
Another prominent thread in the book is both sisters’ relationships with social media, legacy media, stardom, and the personas people don to be successful in these arenas. Having yourself had a career as an on-screen presenter and host before writing The Original Daughter, was there specific insight you were hoping to share with readers?
You can have a relationship with your vision of yourself that can be aspirational, companionable, or draining. That relationship is the only one fully within your control, that you can actually work on—not the relationship others have with your various personas, and not their interpretations of the way you exist in the world. Knowing that can adjust the way we exist in the life we have.
Before your book deal you earned an MFA from Columbia University and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. How has your educational or career background prepared you to successfully launch a debut novel? Or is it a faulty assumption that these factors have played a role?
I’m sure Columbia and the Stegner got my manuscript read faster by agents and publishers, but not having been on the other side of that decision-making process, it’s ultimately all guesswork. It still blows my mind how many stars had to align for me to be standing here, on the cusp of publishing my debut internationally, many factors of which were out of my control and are potentially still unknown to me.
My previous career prepared me psychologically for the business aspect of writing. Being a freelancer for years gave me my sea legs for extended existence in uncertainty, and working in media meant I became very adept at separating my private from my external-facing self, which helps with the transition from artist to businessperson. Publishing is a business, but one that deals in dreams, and that can be very emotionally tricky for a debut. But I didn’t ever feel like I had to do it alone.
When I sold my book, I wrote to several friends who were further along in their writing lives than I was—including you, Jonathan!—and asked what advice they would have given their younger selves going into launching a debut, and one of the biggest things I took away from my various conversations was how little control the writer has over anything. That freed me up to enjoy the fact that I labored very hard on a book I’m proud of, rather than stressing about things outside my purview. My debut is my firstborn, out there in the world doing her own thing, and while I’m proud and affectionate, my job now is to show up for her where I can while working on the next book and beyond.
I think of you as a writer who values having a lot of strong friendships. At the same time, you’re someone who is adept at prioritizing your writing. This can be a difficult balance for many writers to maintain, yet friendship is often acknowledged as a cornerstone of a life well lived. Do you have any advice for the shut-in writers out there? Is there a relationship between being good with, and to, people and creating intriguing characters on the page?
It’s a generous perception of myself, and one I aspire toward. I do have great ambitions for love in all forms, and I have simultaneously worked hard to organize my life around writing, even when those two things seem to exist in pragmatic opposition to each other. But I also believe that art isn’t created in a vacuum, and the less efficient path can often be the exact one we need. So my advice is less for shut-in writers and more general questions for any reader: In life, art, and your endeavors, what ambitions have you held on to and what are their origins—inherited or designed? What do you want, and why do you want it? Interrogating our desires is a way of intentionally cultivating the vision our art grows out of, which comes back to asking the age-old question of how we want to live. Ultimately all we can do is make choices we can live with, and so we must.
An excerpt from The Original Daughter
1
Arin was somewhere in Germany when my mother got sick again. She’d been sick before, but never like this, and I knew it was only a matter of time before she would change her mind and start asking for Arin. The prospect filled me with dread. My sister and I hadn’t spoken for years, not since she first got famous, not even when my mother was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer a couple of years ago. Back then, too, I’d been afraid that if things got really bad, my mother would want Arin there. But we’d had her breasts lopped off, one after the other, and it appeared to have stopped the cancer’s spread. The subject of Arin never came up.
Our relationship hadn’t been good for a long time, and in recent years my mother’s irreverence had dampened into a more respectable muteness. But after she recovered, my mother immediately became irritating again. She’d lost so much weight from the chemotherapy, it didn’t seem to matter that she had no breasts. She sheared off her fluffy black hair, wore nothing but singlets and shorts, and gleefully told everyone passing by the photocopy shop that between this and menopause, she was finally relieved of the trappings of being a woman. The word she used, one I caught her selecting carefully from the Oxford English Dictionary by our sole electric night-light, was “liberation.”
Liberation? When had she ever not acted exactly as she pleased? I felt that she was baiting me; I refused to respond. Then, a few days ago, I woke to find my mother still in bed beside me, one arm thrown over her face.
“Ma,” I said. “It’s eight.”
She was usually out of the house by six, either at the wet market or doing exercises at Bedok Reservoir Park with her tai chi group before opening the photocopy shop. To her, sleeping in was something only rich people did, a sign of weak character.
My mother peeked at me from under her arm and didn’t say a word. Rare for her to forgo a chance to tease. I put my face to her wrist, her neck, sniffing. When I clambered over her body and saw the milky splatter of vomit on the floor, beside the massive potted sansevieria my mother insisted on keeping by our bedside as an air filter, she hid her face again.
“Get dressed,” I said after a long moment. “I’m calling Dana.”
Dana was her oncologist, one my mother had scammed into friendship. When they first met, she told Dana she’d been involved with a church deacon years ago who abandoned her when she became pregnant with me, and sweet Dana, in spite of everything one might assume about doctors and intelligence, truly believed God had called her to be the attending physician the day I brought my mother in. All lies. My mother wasn’t religious, and my father was a taxi driver. But when I confronted her, she waved me off with a laugh and stayed in touch with Dana, forwarding her prayers and Bible verses on WhatsApp.
It worked. Dana loved my mother. She dropped by the photocopy shop frequently to bring her food, or just to chat, and even ordered me to bypass the hospital’s call center and ring her directly if we needed anything. When the neighborhood aunties found out, they teased us relentlessly—of course Su Yang would charm the famously stuffy hospital staff, of course she would be the person to pull the wool over their eyes. Whoever heard of a doctor giving out her personal number, it was absurd, it wasn’t done. But in all their ribbing there was a sense of glee, as if we had won something. Not to me. I found my mother’s relationship with Dana deceitful; I swore we would never call on this favor.
Yet here we were.
It turned out to be leptomeningeal disease. Neither my mother nor I had heard the term before, but Dana was crying as she delivered the news. She knew we couldn’t afford surgery; we were still paying off debt from the first one. Because of her preexisting health conditions, we didn’t qualify for the experimental drug trials. Because my mother belonged to the generation too poor, and therefore too proud, for insurance, there were no secret reserves of cash that could be accessible to us via a sleight of hand in the medical paperwork. It was a terminal diagnosis. Terminal: that I understood. I wanted to know how long she had.
“Anywhere from three to six months with treatment.”
“And without?”
“Four to six weeks.”
I was stunned. Beside me, my mother let out a little sigh. “No treatment. I don’t want to do that again.”
The diagnosis invigorated her. She stood and stretched, then hopped around Dana’s office, peering at confidential folders, fingering the stethoscope and green swimming goggles hanging by the door; making Dana laugh, teasing her for crying. But her voice was too bright, her eyes tired. As soon as we got home, she showered and changed into a fresh set of clothes. We stared each other down in our bedroom.
“Where are you going?”
“To work.”
“They can manage without you, you should rest.”
She didn’t even stop. “Rest isn’t going to cure me. You want me to lie at home like a useless person for the next six weeks?”
I could see her rib cage through the singlet arm holes. She’d gotten so skinny, I hadn’t even realized. She watched my face twist and said quickly: “If you want to help, Genevieve, call your sister.”
“She’s not my sister.”
“I want to see you and Arin together one last time.” I kept quiet, and she pushed further. “I never ask you for anything.” It was another one of her untruths; she was full of requests, both vocal and implied. “Promise me.”
“No.”
“Then you might as well kill me yourself.”
Excerpted from The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Jemimah Wei.
