Jemimah Wei’s Portrait of a Family Unraveling

The Original Daughter begins with a question: what can be done when the stories people tell themselves begin to suffocate them? Jemimah Wei’s debut novel is shaped by artistic obsession and ambition set in a post-pandemic world.

At the center of the novel are two sisters, Genevieve and Arin, navigating family expectations and their own diverging identities in contemporary Singapore. Wei writes with clarity and control, drawing on her background in advertising and media to expose how performance and perception shape everything.

In this conversation, Wei speaks about the decade-long evolution of the book, the emotional precision required to write complex relationships and how her previous career in media shaped her understanding of identity. 

Your novel began as a story of a woman unmoored, whose sense of direction emerges in the aftermath of crisis. How did that idea grow into such a layered portrait of two sisters?

JW One of the ways this novel began was as a story of a woman adrift, yet another was of a child given away, and yet another was of two intimately competitive and codependent female friends… Fortunately or unfortunately, when you work on a novel for close to a decade, there isn’t just one seed, but an accumulation of branches that I eventually gathered and pruned into the novel we have today. 

You’ve mentioned writing character diaries and tracking psychological development across decades. How did this process shape your decisions around narrative structure?

JW Actually it was the other way around – as I developed the novel, whenever new characters or story elements showed up, I would branch off and write deeply into their psychologies or histories in a different notebook. At some point, it started to feel as if the novel were simply flashing a spotlight on specific moments and threads – and that off-stage, the other characters were still going about their lives and chaos, existing beyond the gaze of any particular scene. This helped me stay on top of how each character was reacting to or perceiving the same narrative event, even when the book was filtered through Genevieve’s first-person point of view. It meant that the reader could see around Genevieve’s blind spots and intuit the depths of their individual struggles even when she could not. 

How did your own experience growing up with sisters influence the writing of Genevieve and Arin’s relationship?

JW One of my initial models for Arin and Genevieve’s relationship was that of very co-dependent, very intimately competitive female friends. In the novel, they’re only a year apart, which creates the sense of them almost walking through life in tandem. I’m close to my sisters too, but as the eldest of three, our age gap immediately creates a pretty different dynamic from what Arin and Genevieve experience. Yet as with all long-term relationships, I think my sisters and I have had to work intentionally to see each other as we are, and not just vis-a-vis our familial relationship to each other. We had to consciously allow our vision of each other to evolve instead of being married to a version that’s outdated, that’s no longer true. I fed that not just into Genevieve and Arin’s relationship, but into all the relationships in the book. The way versions of a loved one can accumulate and obscure the person standing right in front of you, in ways that are both shocking and inevitable. 

You’ve spoken about “suffocation” as a thematic interest, particularly in familial and societal structures. What drew you to that?

JW I’ve always been fascinated by the way we operate under immense pressure, which truths or narratives we tell ourselves can hold and why. Probably because I’ve felt this immense sense of suffocation many times in my life, both originating from interior and external pressures; the form survival takes in these periods preoccupies me.

How did you aim to express it in a uniquely Singaporean context?

JW Only insofar as all experiences are unique to any characters’ specific circumstances, but I can’t imagine that the feeling of desperate paddling for survival is uncommon for anyone living in a modern, capitalistic society. Art is one way we can step outside our lives to interrogate it, and I found it extremely attractive [that] I could test out different questions under the umbrella of my interest and take them to their extremes.

Genevieve is torn between love and resentment, success and failure, self and sister. How did you balance that inner conflict without making her seem good or bad and still keep the story moving?

JW I often think of narratorial tension as analogous to narratorial interest. As a reader, I’ve been absolutely riveted by a description of snails moving just because the author is keenly fascinated by the same. Genevieve’s ambivalence is the product of feeling both extremes and trying to calibrate herself for the sake of protecting the people in her life. That’s interesting to me as the author — even more so than Arin, who tends to see situations and people as puzzles to be solved. It’s also more interesting than Su, their mother, who sometimes places too much trust in the blanket of good intentions. Genevieve, by contrast, is only human, and a young one at that. Her restraint, despite her efforts, often ends up backfiring.

I don’t see it as my place to judge my characters, only to walk with them to the brink of their experiences. What I don’t enjoy is when the characters become the butt of the story’s joke, when a story mocks her characters. I feel that deeply as a betrayal of the characters that didn’t ask to exist until the writer invented them. So, I try to avoid that in my own writing, I try to give the characters the space to be shitty without the narrative turning on them too. 

You’ve said you wanted to write “a very specific version of the Singapore [you] know,” full of public housing, gossip and family rituals. What were some specific choices you made to resist a simplified or exoticized depiction of Singapore for international audiences?

JW I read once that the hardest thing for a writer to do is just describe a light beam falling on a glass of water. Without narrativizing, without drama. It was so long ago that I don’t remember who said it now, but the sentiment stayed with me. So much of fiction is working to render something simply as it is, learning restraint in order to allow a thing’s essence – be it an object, a setting or interaction – to shine through. 

Exoticizing or simplifying Singapore wasn’t a huge concern for me, because I don’t think I actually have the capacity for that, I simply don’t possess that touristic lens of my home. The concern for me when it came to international audiences was around the matter of clarity. Would it stumble a reader in her understanding of the story if she didn’t know what a void deck was? If something specific about the way the education system worked wasn’t clear early on? If it was crucial to literally comprehending the narrative, I would go back and figure out how to contextualize the story information. But otherwise, I trusted that the reader would make the leaps we all do when entering the narrative contract that we undertake whenever we sit down with a book. 

There’s a powerful thread in the novel about ambition within capitalist structures, especially in the context of in working-class families. How do you think your characters’ emotional struggles are shaped or intensified by this?

JW In my mind the characters are shaped by the tension between material constraints and the narratives of alternative lives they could have, that always seem just barely out of reach. That is the fundamental experience of living within ultra capitalist structures. I feel, this idea that life is a series of obtainable outcomes, that things are comprised of inherent and accomplishable values, and crucially, that they operate per some meritocratic system scalable by individual effort. And so, the characters feel greatly the painful distance between the cards they’re dealt and the possibilities they’re led to believe are available to them. It’s the possibility that fuels their struggles, because if there were not the narrative of hope, they might not inhabit their failures so personally. 

You began this novel in 2014 and returned to it after the pandemic. What changed in you during that long arc? How did this manifest in the final draft? 

JW It’s interesting to look back at old material and see that the bones of the story, her [Genevieve] vision and ambitions, were largely the same as they are in the novel’s final form today. The questions of independence and intimacy, of choices and chains, were the same questions that’d preoccupied me for years – but I had to develop as a writer to meet The Original Daughter on her terms. I had to literally teach myself how to write a novel, how to manage time passing on the page [and] how to refract perspectives within a story. 

It’s a long process, especially if you’re a debut, and you keep evolving as a reader of your own work faster than your craft develops – or at least that was my experience. Right before the pandemic I decided that it was finally time to take the leap and commit to writing full time, I applied for my MFA and moved to the States in August 2019 at great financial and personal cost. What comes next, I don’t even want to think about. But readers keep telling me how much desperation and bleakness they felt in certain parts of the novel, and right there I see the fingerprints of the pandemic that suffocated us all. 

How did your previous media career influence your depiction of Arin’s rise to fame and Genevieve’s reaction to it?

JW Earlier drafts of this novel didn’t have the thread of fame winding through it, but when I was working on this book while in grad school in Singapore, a professor told me that I should put new media in there because I had such an unusual (at that time) career. He thought that my personal history would become a unique selling point for the book, because it’d be an experience no one else would have access to. Joke’s on me, actually, since the novel took so long to write that it’s no longer unusual to have a digital identity that accompanies you through and occasionally intersects with your real life. And in the end what is digital performance but an amplification of the tensions and possibilities that already play out in interpersonal dynamics? It’s like introducing a third character into a room, but having character be both portal and microscope all at once. And the initial two characters have to shuffle around with the uncomfortable knowledge that this third character has the potential to either catapult one or both of you to success, leave one behind or betray you by suddenly turning into a mirror that reveals the hidden self you’ve been avoiding.