At first glance, it doesn’t seem like Homegoing–a sweeping historical novel covering 300 years in Ghana and America, about enslavement, colonialism, and ethnic conflict–and Severance–speculative fiction about the survivors of a deadly pandemic, the crushing boredom of work, and a cult–would have any connection to each other. Or that Yaa Gyasi and Ling Ma, both POC millenial writers, would have anything to do with me, a little old white lady writer.

But that would be wrong.

We are all children of immigrants. Yaa Gyasi came to America with her family from Ghana when she was a baby, and Ling Ma was a young child when her family moved from China to America. A generation earlier, my parents moved to Canada, having been liberated from concentration camps and marrying when they were teenagers.

Their fiction would suggest that their families were fucked up by history, racism, and the trauma of being cut off from your home–but that’s fiction, and they’re both pretty close-mouthed in interviews about their families of origin. For myself, I can say quite openly, that, yes, my family was fucked up by all of that–just substitute antisemitism for racism (in today’s terms; in my parents’ youth, being a Jew in Europe was a racial construct).

Both Yaa Gyasi and Ling Ma went to prestigious universities and began working on their first novels during MFA programs. Both of them resisted pressures to write a typical immigration story though their resistance took different forms. And both of them explored their preoccupations in the forms they chose, through historical fiction and speculative fiction.

Like Yaa Gyasi, I dealt with intergenerational trauma by writing a historical novel–The River Midnight. I needed to re-create a bond to the past that was severed (yes, referencing the title of Ling Ma’s first novel) in the only way I could. It was lost to me, the family stories lost, the culture lost.

One difference between us is that their families didn’t anglicize their names. My parents, emigrating a generation earlier, felt they had to. Diversity just wasn’t a thing. Even when I was in my thirties, I heard people, including friends, use the word “Canadian” to mean someone of British ancestry and “ethnic” for everyone else. (I could be ethnic as a Jew or a Pole, they weren’t picky about which, but I couldn’t be “Canadian” even though I was born here.)

Yaa Gyasi could visit Ghana and has, and meeting her extended family was a balm for the alienation she felt as the only Black family in her white church in–of all places–Alabama. There is no balm for me. When I went back to Poland, Jews exist only in museums and plaques. It’s true that I can blend, here at least,–with my white face–but the ability to hide doesn’t erase anxiety about needing to hide, though it does carry privilege. I can fade into the default that is whiteness in our society.

(The same issue exists as a person with DID. As someone multiple, I am always pretending to be singular, when in truth I am “we” and my “they” is a literal one, not the singular “they” that ungenders English pronouns.)

Both Yaa Gyasi and Ling Ma received tremendous acclaim for their first novels, written when they were quite young. The River Midnight was also critically acclaimed and a success beyond anything I’d imagined. What to do after that? Repeat and rinse or not?

Not. I’m really glad not. Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, Transcendent Kingdom is completely different and beautifully written. It’s a first person, contemporary narrative about a woman in her late 20s who immigrated from Ghana as a child with her family. It deals with the immigrant experience, classism, racism, addiction, poverty, mental health, and faith.

Ling Ma’s second book is a collection of stories, many of them speculative fiction, others realism grappling with being in the world as the adult child of Chinese immigrants. It’s wonderfully imaginative, exciting writing, and I relate to so much of it, remembering what life was like for me at thirty, and the difficult relationships I’d had.

I also turned away from the first genre I wrote when I was ready to deal more directly with my own history. Plus I was sick and tired of the misrepresentations of DID. I still, to this day, think Web of Angels–besides being a rip-roaring story–is still the most accurate portrayal of DID.

It buoys me to think that there is so much connecting these very different writers to each other and to me, that we share something through our work and that making art out of human experience, wrestling with it, trying to understand and love it, is a kind of transcendent kingdom.