[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. The latest novel from National Book Award finalist Lisa Ko takes readers from 1980s New York City up through the year 2040. The vision she paints of the future of our city is not very bright. The novel is titled Memory Piece and it centers on three friends trying to follow their dreams in the Big Apple.

There's Giselle, who is willing to put her safety on the line in pursuit of radical performance art. There's Jackie, computer-obsessed introvert who creates a popular online diary website that leads her into a world of corruption and greed. Then there's Ellen, an activist fighting gentrification on the Lower East Side by squatting in an abandoned building. As these three friends drift in and out of each other's lives, we see how their goals and ambitions shift as they're faced with the real-life challenges of adulthood and as they grapple with the changing landscape of the city itself.

The novel takes a turn into speculative fiction when it jumps ahead to the year 2040 and presents a pretty dystopian picture of the capitalist surveillance state that Lisa imagines might be the future of New York. Memory Piece was our selection for the May Get Lit with All Of It book club. Lisa Ko joined Get Lit producer Jordan Lauf earlier this week for a conversation in front of a packed crowd at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. Let's hear some of that conversation now.

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Jordan Lauf: You told Lit Hub, "I never start a novel knowing where I'm going." Where did you think you were going with this novel at first? What was the first germ of the idea that would become Memory Piece?

Lisa Ko: Well, I think the first germ was really wanting to write about the long arc of friendship. I was just always very interested in writing about how a friendship changes over many decades, thinking a little bit about my own friendships where you might have met circumstantially through things like Chinese school because your parents happened to be immigrants from the same ethnic diaspora like these characters in Memory Piece.

Your lives might diverge in really different ways, but there's still some sort of early bond or experience that ties you to one another. You end up influencing one another in ways you don't even realize. I think that these three friends push and pull. Even though they're not in contact sometimes for months or years, they're always thinking, "What would Ellen think or would Jackie approve of this choice that I've made?" They're always part of one another's lives, I think. Their work also was deeply impactful for one another.

Jordan Lauf: What is it that you think keeps them in each other's lives for so long? Because I thought that was a realistic part too that there are people who come in and out of your life. There are people who are there for just a few years and you lose touch. Why do they always stay in touch even if the decades stretch out?

Lisa Ko: I think in some ways, it's their personalities and their interests. They are also all very invested and ambitious in doing their creative work. That was also something I wanted to write about, to write about women who were very interested in ambitious and creative work, especially Asian-American women. They have this experience, I think, of feeling misunderstood, wanting, belonging, and feeling a little bit on the outside. There's a way that they all understand one another. I think when you do have that early bonding experience, it just is something that ends up staying with you throughout the years.

Jordan Lauf: Of the three friends, who came to you the most easily and who was the hardest to figure out?

Lisa Ko: That's interesting. I started with Giselle and Jackie actually. Both of them have some autobiographical commonalities with myself. I also grew up in 1980s New Jersey like Giselle. I'm the child of Chinese-Filipino immigrants. Like Jackie, I also worked tangentially in the early dot-com business at the turn of the century in Y2K. Writing those two characters was also very fun, I think, because it allowed me to look back at parts of my life and to use that as emotional material.

I actually just realized about one or two years into the writing process that Ellen was actually the third protagonist and arguably even the protagonist of the entire novel, that she was not just a friend that they had in common that was horning in on the narrative, but somebody who played actually a really large part in the book. Figuring that out actually made me realize how much her story tied together with the other stories.

Jordan Lauf: Is that why you wrote her piece in the first person and the other two in third or how did that come about?

Lisa Ko: I think it's because I wanted the book to mimic the experience of moving through time. It goes from the '80s to the 2040s, which is over 60 years, and arguably the span of a lifetime. I wanted the feeling of reading the book to be similar to moving from this mundane '80s childhood. Giselle's section in the beginning is different stylistically and tonally in the way that it tells her early development as an artist. Then Jackie's, I chose to write in first person in present tense because there's a highly dramatic stakes moment of Y2K and will these dot-com companies go public.

It's something that feels very absurd, I think, in retrospect. Then Ellen's section was meant to portray this frog in boiling water effect of-- It's a very New York City novel of waking up in New York City. One day, you realize everyone is a stranger around you. The city itself is a stranger. Maybe you're the stranger. It made sense to have that section be written in first person in past tense. It had that nostalgic feel. She's looking backwards as well as forwards.

Jordan Lauf: I thought something else interesting about the way you structured the book is because it's from three points of view, we get to see each character, how they see themselves, and then how their two friends see them. You get to see Giselle from her point of view and then, "Oh, here's what Ellen thinks about Giselle and here's what Jackie thinks about Giselle." What did you most enjoy about getting to play around with perspective and impressions and ideas about people?

Lisa Ko: It's a really fun strategic thing to use as a writer like you mentioned. It's also all our worst fears, knowing what our friends and frenemies might be thinking of each other and things that people never tell you. I think as a dramatic device, it could be really useful because, for instance, you see Jackie and Giselle projecting all these ideas onto Ellen. Ellen is very confident. Ellen is not afraid of anything. Then when you get to Ellen's section, you realize she's actually insecure and vulnerable and just a regular person like everybody else. By playing with all those different angles, you allow the reader to see the way that they misinterpret one another, I think, and the choices they make based on that.

Jordan Lauf: It's a cliché to say, "Oh, New York City is the fourth main character of this book," but it really is in this case. Even though it was only a few decades ago, the New York of the '90s that you present in this book feels really far away and different from the New York we're living in today. Did you live here in the '90s?

Lisa Ko: I did, yes. I first moved to New York in the late '90s.

Jordan Lauf: What about that experience did you want to make sure you captured on the page in this book?

Lisa Ko: Really everything. I think so much of the book is about how New York has changed and might continue to change because the book also goes a little bit into the future as well. It's using New York City as a microcosm of the larger political economy of the US. All the ways that gentrification has changed the choices that we can make, I think that's something that's deeply changed since the '90s.

A lot of the choices that characters can make about selling out and making their art or even deciding to refurbish an abandoned building in the East Village and become a squatter in a communal living situation, which Ellen does, that's not a possibility now, but that was maybe 30 years ago. I think all these things have really changed, our concerns around the city, I think. So many things are also the same. They've just become more intensified. There's new technologies and ways to expedite some of the changes that have been made.

Jordan Lauf: It's interesting that you bring up that idea of selling out because that was something that really resonated with me reading this novel is that balance between you're a young person and you come into the world as an adult with all these ideas about who you want to be and the morals you want to stick to and the lines you want to draw on the sand. Then you have to butt up against the realities of, "Oh, I have bills to pay and I want to live somewhere and eat food." I think all of the characters grapple with that line in some way, that struggle.

Lisa Ko: Absolutely.

Jordan Lauf: Is that a dilemma that you've faced in your life?

Lisa Ko: Yes, I think it's a very familiar thing to not only artists and writers but probably to everybody. It's something that Giselle plays with too in her performance. I think all the characters are really making those choices because they have their passion projects and their art, and that any kind of passion project or work you love is likely not necessarily going to be materially compensated. You have the dilemma of needing time to do your art or your creative projects, but needing money to buy time, but needing time to work to get money. How does that equation work out? I think that's something that so many artists and writers are very familiar with. How can you gain the system to buy time? How can you figure out a way to create your art?

Jordan Lauf: Which one of these characters struggles with that the most, do you think?

Lisa Ko: I think definitely Giselle does in some ways. Giselle has this performance piece early in the book where she decides to solve that problem, the time, work, money conundrum by deciding to live in an abandoned room in the mall. She's a child of the '90s. She's responding in some ways to these performance art pieces of the '70s and '80s. She's a Jersey girl, so her solution is to squat in the Paramus Park mall, which is my home mall. She doesn't have to pay rent for a year and she's creating art. She's changing the definition of what art can be by deciding to make a different kind of art.

Jordan Lauf: You mentioned that mall piece. That's a high-risk piece of art. That's no joke. She's living in a mall. As I think her mother mentions like, "You could have died in there. What were you doing?"

Lisa Ko: No one would know.

Jordan Lauf: Not everyone has it in them to make that kind of performance art. What do you think is driving Giselle to be making that art?

Lisa Ko: I think she's really incorporated performance as part of her life in a way that I know, for me, writing fictional characters was just a skill that I honed early in my childhood as a way to fight the boredom. I don't know. Growing up before the internet. Giselle's method of seeing life as a situation or life as a performance becomes a sort of mode of living. I think that drives her. She's also deeply ambitious. She wants to gain recognition. She wants to be taken seriously. She's continually coming up against all the expectations that are put on her.

Jordan Lauf: The next character that we get to in the book is Jackie, who grows up disappearing into this world of the internet. What is she finding in that online world, in that online community that she's not finding in her everyday life?

Lisa Ko: I think she's finding a sort of freedom. When I look back on those early years of the internet before it was taken over by Meta and Elon Musk, there was such optimism in a moment of being able to publish for free online, disseminate information for free online, and also be whoever you want to be. For Jackie, she finds a sense of freedom and being like, "I can be a boy or a girl. I can be any race. I don't even have to be a person really." There's such excitement and optimism, I think, in that moment, in a time when she's feeling very alone and isolated. She's an only child. She's one of the only Asian kids in her school. Being able to do this gives her all this possibility for her future.

Jordan Lauf: Of the three, Jackie for a little while is the one who has the most stable job and she has an apartment, but then that falls through. She joins Ellen in this squatting community, which, at first, she's like, "I don't know about all this." Then she seems to really enjoy her experience at Sola. The house that Ellen and her friends have created in this community. What is it that she finds there that she finds rewarding?

Lisa Ko: I think she finds other people. It's really about the analog world versus the digital world. She's finding a group of people that's having really different concerns and ambitions than the world that she's encountering during her day job, which is at a tech company, which is like a prototypical Uber Eats seamless about delivering goods within an hour to your apartment. In Ellen's squat, there's this idealistic communal living where people are like, "What is the internet? We're just going to grow our own vegetables. We're going to feed each other." I think for Jackie, it surprises her how much she's missed having that sort of energy.

Jordan Lauf: Of all the three characters, why is Ellen the one who stays? Because Giselle and Jackie eventually leave New York, but Ellen is the one who remains. Why is she the one who stays?

Lisa Ko: I think Ellen is really deeply tied to New York and I think she has created this home. She's part of the squatters movement that ends up being able to purchase her home. It's through a very little-known program. In the early 2000s, we're the last remaining squats in the East Village and the Lower East Side. The residents were given the ability to have a mortgage and to owe that money to a co-op, a nonprofit, and own their own home. She's put so many years into building this house. Her identity is wrapped up in her community and also in her city and in her neighborhood. That sense of attachment and meeting, I think, is what drives her to stay. It makes it hard for her to leave.

Jordan Lauf: One thing I thought was interesting about Ellen's section because we get her in the future when she's older and you have this intergenerational play with Ellen who meets this young woman named Hunter, who's the daughter of a friend. Hunter and her friends are organizing in the Bronx. They're doing the kind of activism that Ellen and her friends used to do. Ellen now is feeling a little more cautious than she might have in the past.

Her friends, especially that she lived with, are like, "Don't encourage this young girl to be doing this. It's not safe." What did you want to explore in that sort of intergenerational play? Because I think that's a familiar concept to people that, "Oh, when I was younger, I was radical, and then I got old. I realized this is the way the world works or I become disillusioned or what have you." What did you want to play with in that dynamic?

Lisa Ko: I think I really wanted to look at just the way that memory functions in a way that, for Ellen, she's living in-- It's a separate conversation, whether it's dystopia or actually just a continuation of the status quo today. I tend to think the latter. She's living in a time when memory becomes a liability. That's something that is not dissimilar from now when we're being ushered into having a collective amnesia about the recent past or even the present.

Because of that, I feel like there's such a power and a struggle to also remember and to not forget. It's these two forces where she as a movement elder has been forced to forget some of the work of her past just for her own survival, I think. She's now working with these young people who haven't experienced that because they haven't experienced the periods of repression that she's lived through. It's forcing her, I think, to confront, not only her own memory but to confront her past in order to figure out what the future is.

Kousha Navidar: You're listening to Get Lit producer Jordan Lauf's conversation with author Lisa Ko. We spent the month reading her new novel, Memory Piece. There'll be more of that interview plus some questions from the in-person audience. That's after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Kousha Navidar: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar in for Alison Stewart. We continue airing highlights from our May Get Lit with All Of It book club event with author Lisa Ko. We spent the month reading her novel. It's called Memory Piece. It's the story of three friends and their lives in New York from the 1980s all the way to the year 2040. Thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library. 2,783 of you were able to check out a copy of the book and read along with us this month. As always, our audience had some great questions for our author. You'll hear some of those in a minute. First, here is more of Get Lit producer Jordan Lauf's conversation with author Lisa Ko.

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Jordan Lauf: When we get to Ellen in this future section in the 2040s, when did you know you wanted to go that far in the future?

Lisa Ko: I think I realized at some point when Ellen became a main character that I was really writing not only a friendship novel but a novel about what's changed and might continue to change over my lifetime as a New Yorker. Part of that just meant as I was writing about the past, it felt inevitable to also be thinking about the future. I realized too that something I've been bringing about at events is that 2041 where Ellen's section takes place is actually not that far away. It's 17 years away. It's the same amount of time that we are from 2007.

It just seems a little sci-fi. It seems like a future time. Part of it also came out of my own anxieties, just writing to my own anxieties about staying in New York, growing older in New York. What will the city look like? What might the city look like? Something that I often turn to is a quote from the author, Samuel Delany, where he talks about how speculative fiction is not really about the future, but it's actually just in dialogue with the present. It's a way to open up possibilities about how we might respond to and contest the current reality. That felt like a really interesting to do, especially in this moment.

Jordan Lauf: You pushed back against that word, "dystopian," but it's definitely not a pleasant version of the future that you present. How did you decide how far you wanted to push things in that section?

Lisa Ko: It just felt like taking what was going on now, whether it's surveillance, militarization, displacement, gentrification, all the things that we're seeing in New York every day outside our windows and just dialing it up a little bit and just thinking, "What might this look like if it continued for another 15 years?" Also, we have other escalating things like climate that are happening and new technologies that we might not even be dreaming of. In a way, I felt like it was turning the dial up on that. Otherwise, I feel like it doesn't quite go too far. There's possibly even more violence that I didn't necessarily want to incorporate in the narrative.

Jordan Lauf: Was this your first time writing speculative fiction?

Lisa Ko: Yes, in a novel. Absolutely.

Jordan Lauf: What was something that you read or learned or advice that you got that helped you tackle that section? Because I can imagine, it's a different creative exercise to go that far in the future.

Lisa Ko: It definitely is. It's like you have to find the balance between saying enough and not saying too much. Of course, we don't know until the future happens, how accurate it is. There's no fact-check for it. There's no resources you could turn to to figure out what the future will be. It's like you want to explain what has changed in this fictional world, but you also don't want to be that detailed because I think sometimes having too much detail can turn the reader off a little bit or give the reader reasons why they might want to prove they're right or wrong.

Jordan Lauf: Makes sense. All right, do we have any questions from our audience?

Audience Member 1: Hello. I had a quick question about your research process.

Lisa Ko: Sure.

Audience Member 1: In terms of integrating, I would imagine interviews that you did over the seven years as well as research you did on the lived experiences of certain people. I was wondering if you could talk a bit to that and highlight certain instances of where that was maybe difficult for you or was just very defining in terms of your writing of the book.

Lisa Ko: Sure. Yes, I feel like research is a tricky line, especially for me as a writer. It's something that is very seductive and necessary. It can also be a very easy way to procrastinate because we get to read about things that we're obsessed with and call that work. What could be more fun? At some point, I feel like I'm always having to strike the line where I'm not-- Research always becomes necessary in order to imagine your way into something.

I always write until I hit a roadblock and then I'm like, "Okay, it's time to fact-check this. I should read some books or some interviews. I should talk to some people who worked in tech to make sure I'm getting it right or talk to somebody who lived in a squat and make sure I get that right." I always find that there's a danger in doing too much. Then I become concerned where I'm like, "I don't want to waste all that labor and I want to put all those details in the book." Then the book becomes way down. I think with research, that might not necessarily be necessary to the narrative. I feel like that's always a challenge to me to try to figure out the right amount, but not too much and how to incorporate it and then dial it up.

Jordan Lauf: All right. I think we've got time for one more.

Audience Member 2: Hi. First, I wanted to congratulate you on your book. I found it very interesting. I wanted to ask you about the inspiration of this artist that I read at the end. I'm probably going to pronounce the name wrong, but Tehching Hsieh. Why did you decide to use him as an inspiration?

Lisa Ko: Tehching Hsieh is a Taiwanese-American performance artist, who is best known for doing a series of very year-long endurance performance artworks in the late '70s and '80s. In one of them, he decides to live in a cage for a year on purpose. Another one, he decides to live completely outdoors for a year. He's also known for one where he's tied to another artist with a rope for a year.

I think when I first heard about his work in my 20s, I was just very intrigued because the work is a little wacky and very weird. I think my first reaction was like, "How could you spend a year of your life doing this?" I realized that I was always very taken with it because he tends to use that dilemma of time and labor and art and incorporating that into the art itself.

He makes the passage of time the labor of the art itself. That felt like a very intriguing place to work with some of the characters' dilemmas about art-making and to also use Giselle's character as taking his work as inspiration but putting our own spin on it. How did differences in gender and national origin and then time and place affect the art that she can make as well?

Jordan Lauf: Before we get to our musical portion of the evening, I wanted to point out that you recently tweeted, "Oh no, created a playlist for a new novel. I guess it's really happening." First of all, can you tell us what role music plays in your writing process, and then can you give us any hints as to what we might expect with the next one?

Lisa Ko: I can't give you a hint of what to expect because I haven't figured it out yet, but I feel like the playlist part of it is it's always very interesting because I want to create a playlist that both includes songs individually and as an arc throughout the playlist that will mimic them out of the same kind of emotional response that I hope to produce in the writing. I'm creating a sort of aesthetic collage for what I hope the novel will be.

Jordan Lauf: The playlist helps you feel the emotions that the novel will hopefully make the reader feel?

Lisa Ko: Yes, exactly. Putting them together allows me to feel the emotions or map out the arc and the structure of the book.

Jordan Lauf: Any one song or artist that you can give us a hint that's on that playlist?

Lisa Ko: [laughs] I just put Here Comes Your Man by the Pixies on it, which felt nostalgic and cheery and a little depressing, so that's my vibe.

Jordan Lauf: All right. Well, that's what we can expect from the next one maybe. Lisa Ko, thank you so much for joining us.

Lisa Ko: Thank you for having me.

[applause]

Kousha Navidar: That was Get Lit producer Jordan Lauf's conversation with author Lisa Ko. We spent the month reading her new novel, Memory Piece.

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Kousha Navidar: Up next, just like the protagonists in the novel, the band Lightning Bug consists of three friends chasing a dream in New York City. We hear a live special performance and interview with the indie band's lead singer, Audrey Kang. Stay with us.

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