“Don’t let anyone tell you that what makes you different is a weakness–instead make it your strength.” –Grace Loh Prasad
Grace Loh Prasad is the author of The Translator’s Daughter (Mad Creek Books/The Ohio State University Press, 2024), a debut memoir about living between languages, navigating loss, and the search for belonging. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, Longreads, Guernica, Brevity, The Offing, Oldster Magazine, KHÔRA, and elsewhere. A member of the Writers Grotto and the AAPI writers collective Seventeen Syllables, Prasad lives in the Bay Area. www.translatorsdaughter.com
On Saturday, November 23rd, Grace Loh Prasad is teaching a class for the WLT called “Unlock Your Memoir with Hybrid Structure.” In this class, you’ll look at your material in a new way that will help you keep your project moving forward.
Here’s what Grace had to share with us:
Scribe: Tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you write? How did you come to writing?
Grace Loh Prasad: I’m an essayist and nonfiction writer based in the Bay Area. My memoir The Translator’s Daughter came out in March of this year–it’s about living between languages, navigating loss, and the search for belonging as a Taiwanese American living in the diaspora. My writing journey started 20+ years ago. I first started writing about reconnecting to my Taiwanese family and heritage in the late 1990s after I’d been living on my own in California for a few years. I got an MFA from Mills College in 2003, but after that I was going through a lot of life transitions–I got married, had a kid, and began my corporate career–so my writing took a backseat. During those years my parents’ health declined and I traveled to Taiwan a lot. I started to lose my family members one by one, and that changed what I was writing about–it went from identity and self-exploration to grief. These experiences deepened and brought more meaning to my writing. Although I didn’t intend to take this long to write a book, I think all of my growth and reflection made it a much better book in the end.
Scribe: In your own work, how do you approach overcoming the challenges that come with writing, be it writer’s block or craft or business-related challenges?
GLP: My biggest challenge as a memoir writer has always been structure. When you’re writing about your life, there isn’t always an obvious “container” for it–your life goes on, but you have to figure out how to shape the book and give it a satisfying narrative arc. The other thing was that my writing has always explored the same themes in a lot of different styles and approaches. I found it very difficult to write a linear narrative in a singular voice. My manuscript has always been a collection of these pieces side by side–some more conventional in form while others are more hybrid and experimental. What ended up working for me was simply realizing that there isn’t one way to tell my story; there are many ways. My experience is fragmented and my writing reflects that.
Scribe: Has there been a moment of epiphany in terms of your work, when you thought, “This is it! Now I know what I’m doing!” How long did that feeling last?
GLP: When I was querying agents, I got some feedback saying, “You just need to rewrite this as a traditional memoir. This is too disjointed.” I felt stuck for a long time because I didn’t know how to do that, and over time I realized I also didn’t want to do that. What finally clicked for me was acknowledging that I don’t have a singular identity that is fixed or that is easily defined–my book is literally about being in-between and not fitting into prevailing notions of what it means to be an immigrant or a Taiwanese daughter. When I finally embraced that my work was all about “not belonging,” it made sense that this was the only way I could write it.
I was at a book festival in 2023 and a friend of mine was moderating a talk that I attended. In the course of that conversation she said, “Hybrid lives need hybrid structures,” and I thought, that’s it! This happened after I’d already submitted my book to my publisher, but I was so relieved that my instincts were validated. That phrase summed up what I was trying to do–my life doesn’t fit into a conventional structure, and neither does my book.
Scribe: What piece of advice do you find yourself giving to writers again and again?
GLP: For writers like me who wonder if there is room for stories like ours, I say: Don’t worry so much about fitting in. Don’t try to appeal to everyone. Be skeptical when people try to persuade you that there’s only one right way to write your book. It takes a lot of courage to believe in your own vision and instincts. Figure out what makes you unique and lean into that. Don’t let anyone tell you that what makes you different is a weakness–instead make it your strength.
Scribe: What is one thing that people will take away from this class?
GLP: There are many different ways to write your memoir, and sometimes it pays to experiment with other approaches–especially when working with material that is difficult or traumatic. Even if your memoir isn’t explicitly hybrid or a memoir in essays, I’ll share some techniques to break through common obstacles that prevent memoirists from telling their urgent and necessary stories.
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Thanks, Grace!
Click here to learn more about Grace Loh Prasad’s upcoming class.
