Inspiration image for Meng Jin’s novel, Mothers and Girls. Photo: Meng Jin.
Inspiration image for Meng Jin’s novel, Mothers and Girls. Photo: Meng Jin.
The cover of Meng Jin’s novel, Little Gods. Design credit: Mumtaz Mustafa.
Mothers and Girls: A Fake Memoir
Meng Jin is a novelist whose stories explore the ways in which the self fractures and attempts to cohere in times of hallucinatory social, political, economic, environmental, and technological change.
Artist BioMothers and Girls is a novel or “fake memoir” narrated by the daughter of a Chinese poet and a white American translator/scholar of Chinese literature. The narrator tells the story of the discovery of a fictional text, also titled Mothers and Girls, which interrogates the reliability of text, and conceives of and enacts authorship as performance. By playing with narrative expectations of autofiction—questioning a form that has itself arisen out of a questioning of form—Meng Jin complicates narratives of motherhood and girlhood, expands imaginaries of mental illness in non-Western contexts, and illuminates the lives of minority-written texts.
2021 Artist Retreat Presentation
Meng Jin
San Francisco, CA
Meng Jin is a novelist whose stories explore the ways in which the self fractures and attempts to cohere in times of hallucinatory social, political, economic, environmental, and technological change. Jin is obsessed with form and how the novel can bend, break, and expand to realize the stories writers need to tell today. Her first novel Little Gods was published by Custom House. The New York Times wrote that it “expands the future of the immigrant novel” and NPR’s Gabino Iglesias called it “one of the most complex character studies I’ve ever read.” Jin is a Kundiman fellow, a David TK Wong Fellow, Elizabeth George Foundation Grantee, and Steinbeck Fellow. Her short prose appears in Best American Short Stories 2020, Pushcart Prize XLV, The Threepenny Review, Guernica, Ploughshares, Vogue, and elsewhere.
Photo: Andria Lo
From the Journal
- Ten Summer Books for the Radical Reader August 17, 2022