Instead of Pearl writing it, Lexie takes a story Pearl told her-about being denied entry into an honors class at Shaker because her guidance counselor assumed that she, a black student who moved often, hadn’t taken enough math classes-and tells it as her own in her essay. On the screen, Lexie does the same, but in a slightly different way. On the page, Lexie takes advantage of Pearl’s naïveté and admiration: When Pearl, hoping to impress Lexie, offers to help her write her college-application essay, Lexie accepts-and has her write the entire piece. In the book and the show, Pearl is dazzled by the older Lexie she’s enamored with her confidence, her clothes, and her social standing as the queen bee of Shaker Heights High School. Take the subplot between Elena’s daughter, Lexie (Jade Pettyjohn), and Mia’s daughter, Pearl (Lexi Underwood), for example. The show is a study of two contrasting women, Elena (Reese Witherspoon) and Mia (Kerry Washington), who are constrained by their circumstances. Throughout the first half of the season, defining the Warrens as black complicates that theme. The concept of caging others and being caged by others-based on one’s background, values, and lifestyle-is a pivotal theme in Ng’s novel. And while adaptations are never carbon copies of their source material, Little Fires Everywhere hasn’t made a change just for cosmetic reasons. Out of a feeling of authorial responsibility, she chose not to.īut a TV series doesn’t have such a choice. In retrospect, Ng was clearly tiptoeing toward defining Mia’s race. And Mia cares deeply about ownership-of her art, of Pearl, and of her identity. Elena is troubled by Mia and what she calls the “dark discomfort” that Mia inspires in her. Plus, the dynamics between their families offer plenty of chances to incorporate race: The Richardsons often ogle the Warrens and pride themselves on knowing them one of the children considers Pearl his “claim” because he befriended her first. If Ng had made Mia a woman of color, she could have delved further into that attitude through Elena. Shaker Heights residents take pride in the fact that their community was one of the first suburbs to racially integrate, for instance. Though the book works without that detail, it presents a missed opportunity to make the relationship between the families even knottier. The show focuses on race as one of the crucial contrasts between Elena (Reese Witherspoon) and Mia (Kerry Washington). The small-screen adaptation, which currently airs a new episode on Hulu every Wednesday, doesn’t just take the story from the page to the screen, but goes where Ng felt she couldn’t go on her own. “I thought of them as people of color, because I knew I wanted to talk about race and class, and those things are so intertwined in our country and in our culture … But I didn’t feel like I was the right person to try to bring a black woman’s experience to the page.” “Initially, I had wanted to write as people of color,” Ng, who’s Asian American, told me in February. Elena’s white, but the author never defined Mia’s ethnicity. Ng originally intended to make their differences even clearer. The privileged Elena will always see Mia as inferior, even if Elena refuses to admit it. To her, Mia’s lifestyle as an artist and a photographer seems exotic. Elena, who’s rich and intelligent and mannerly, understands success to mean a nuclear family. The author, Celeste Ng, posits that their conflict stems from the fact that the women are not meant to connect, because they are constrained by their circumstances. The story is not just about two women who don’t get along. Set in 1997, Little Fires is an audacious novel, hence the 48 weeks it spent on the New York Times’ hardcover-fiction best-seller list. Their relationships stir up a dangerous obsession among both families, revealing the story to be less a crime thriller and more a clever, moving examination of motherhood, female ambition, and sexual politics. But then the tale rewinds to the previous summer, and from there it becomes a study of two women-Elena Richardson, a wealthy mother of four, and Mia Warren, a nomadic single mom, who become inextricably linked. In the opening chapter, a house in a progressive neighborhood of Shaker Heights, Ohio, has burned down after someone set a series of fires inside its bedrooms-and no one knows why. A t first glance, the novel Little Fires Everywhere seems to be a suburban whodunit.
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