Author M Lin joins us to discuss her fantastic debut collection, The Memory Museum, a series of stories that move between contemporary China and imagined futures to explore memory, family, censorship, loss, and—perhaps unexpectedly—joy.

The passage M reads for us, from the collection’s title story, comes from a scene she added only after nearly a year of revisions—a late breakthrough that ended up recontextualizing the emotional core of the story itself. It's a fascinating conversation about the unreliability of memory, and the satisfaction of “uncovering” elements of a story you didn’t realize were there. 

M also talks to Cory and Jon about why writing is sometimes less an act of creation than one of patient discovery, how the process of writing itself gradually narrows a blank page’s infinite possibilities, the challenge of writing a hopeful story using the conventions of dystopian fiction, the influence of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and classical music, why she abandoned the rigid outlining habits she’d developed as a screenwriter, and how learning to trust her instinct became one of the most important parts of her creative process.

M’s passage, from The Memory Museum:

It took me years to uncover what I owed Lu Tian—my own memory of the afternoon when my father was first taken away. As the first step, I paused my visits to the library, shelving Laolao’s reconstruction into the subconscious. Several years later, I requested its audial and olfactory profiles and experienced them strictly on their own. Initially only to the point I used to stop at, then all the way to the end, to the huge fight between my mother and Laolao, which started with Laolao telling my mother to give up what she and my father were doing and ended in my mother packing up and leaving. Once I synced the profiles again, my brain cells went giddy, as if they were cooking up a big surprise but did not know the recipe. The fluster lasted a long time, straining my excitement into frustration. Often I thought about admitting defeat, but Lu Tian always managed to send me back to the memory tank, hopeful again.

One day, I left the two profiles playing on repeat and resigned myself to keeping my eyes closed. Very soon, time lost its grip on me. I couldn’t count how many times they ended and started over again. At some point, toward the end of a cycle, the audio glitched, but I didn’t open my eyes. The profiles continued playing but the sound became faint, as if everything were happening far away. It was then that an unfamiliar image flickered. In Laolao’s memory, after my mother left, we sat together in the living room, mindlessly watching a children’s patriotic education program on TV. Now that the show’s voiceover sounded more remote, I realized that my memory of those few minutes differed: I had not been with Laolao but by myself in the adjacent room, looking out from five floors above, the TV’s sound reaching me at a subdued volume. The unfamiliar image was familiar after all: It was of my mother in the courtyard, standing below our window with her suitcase. She bent her arms overhead, making the shape of a heart, and waved goodbye to me. In my memory, I could not hear her, but somehow she convinced me to move away from the window first, to return to Laolao in the living room, to resume the life of a child, with the show on TV, dinner on the table, and family by her side, so that, I understood now, her daughter did not have to imprint on her mind the image of her mother walking away, leaving her behind.