First Writes: Alicia Upano
In this Q&A, we throw some questions about ‘firsts’ at debut novelists. This month we feature Alicia Upano, author of Everything To The Sea, the Hawaii-set love story of Jane and Kenji, and the devastating tsunami that upends their lives
What’s the first book you remember reading as a child? Hard to pinpoint a title, but my family claims I was walking into traffic while reading by the first grade. My childhood reading comprised standard American fare: boy detectives, babysitters, Malibu twins, Salem witches and vampire brothers. Delightful, but I don’t recall any early books with families who looked like mine or my home in the Pacific.
What was the book you read that made you decide to be a writer? By the early aughts, my reading expanded, thanks to writers like Chang-Rae Lee, Zadie Smith, Lois-Ann Yamanaka and Susan Choi. By the time I got to Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, I understood that publishing was changing, now filling with these beautiful and nuanced novels of a multicultural world I recognised. It also struck me then that, despite working in a newsroom, I loved no form of writing more than the novel.
What’s your favourite first line in a book? ‘By nightfall, the headlines would be reporting devastation,’ from Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit Of Venus. When the big revelation comes decades and hundreds of pages later, I immediately had to flip breathlessly back to this sentence on page one. A marvel.
Which debut publication had the most profound effect on you? Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón remains one of my favorite books: love, grief and community in war and its aftermath. I read it 15 years ago and still talk about it all the time.
What’s the first thing you do when you wake up on a writing day? Seek solitude and caffeinate.
What’s the first thing you do when you’ve stopped writing for the day? Triage the daily demands of everything that’s not writing.
In a parallel universe where you’re the tyrant leader of a dystopian civilisation, what’s the first book you’d burn? As an imagined tyrant, I’m burning The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare. Too many fallen kings.
What’s the first piece of advice you’d offer to an aspiring novelist? Learn to love the process because most days that’s all there is.
Everything To The Sea is published by Bloomsbury on Tuesday 14 July; Picture: Ashley Torres-Horiuchi.