(typewriter clacking) (upbeat music) - [Jessamine] Hi, I'm Jessamine Chan, and this is "The School For Good Mothers."

My debut novel is about a Chinese American single mom who loses custody of her toddler daughter after having one very bad day.

(upbeat music) - What exactly does Frida do on this bad day?

- She leaves her daughter home alone for several hours, and the neighbors call the police.

I wrote it as her being overwhelmed, exhausted, sleep deprived, thinking that she was going to leave the house for 10 minutes and losing track of time.

(upbeat music) She gets sent to an imaginary government run reform school.

So in the world of the book, the transgressions of parents are punished by being reeducated by the government.

It's taking an idea that actually exists in the real world, which is parenting classes and monitoring and having court ordered intervention and taking that to a wild extreme.

(upbeat music) She has a very universal story at the core, which is a mother who has lost her child and a woman trying to hang on to her integrity.

I think in my book, there is the universal threat of a mom trying to get back to her child.

(upbeat music) I also wanted to write the Chinese American heroine that I've always wanted to see on the page.

Someone who's really flawed and vulnerable and desirous and selfish and full of contradictions.

And I wanted to have a character of color, specifically, an Asian American woman who gets to be a mess.

(upbeat music) - Thanks so much Jessamine for being with us.

- Thanks so much for this opportunity.

- [Alka] And thank you for watching A Word on Words.

For more of our conversation, go to awordonwords.org.

I'm Alka Joshi, keep reading.

(upbeat music) - [Jessamine] The joke I like to tell.

And my daughter will forgive me for this one day, is that, I was so nervous about becoming a mom that I ended up starting a dystopian novel about motherhood.

(upbeat music)