Esmé Weijun Wang


Esmé Weijun Wang is a Taiwanese-American writer. She is the author of The Border of Paradise and The Collected Schizophrenias. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award and was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta magazine.

Education

Wang initially attended Yale University but transferred to Stanford University, from which she graduated in 2006. She received her MFA degree from the University of Michigan, and her thesis became the basis for a chapter in her first novel.

Career

Wang's first book, a novel titled The Border of Paradise, was published by Unnamed Press in 2016. It is a gothic family drama about a family whose patriarch has committed suicide, leaving the mother to raise her two children alone. She “enacts her own version of tong yang xi — an old-fashioned Chinese tradition of families adopting poor girls so that they may be raised alongside their sons and eventually married to them” by encouraging her son and her step-daughter to become involved with each other. The Chicago Review of Books noted the careful handling of mental illness in each of the characters, concluding that "the novel raises interesting questions about child rearing, culture, and isolation".
In 2017 Wang was named a Best Young American Novelist by Granta, which creates the list once per decade. The following year Wang received a Whiting Award. Her short story, "What Terrible Thing It Was," published in Granta in 2017, appeared in the Best American Short Stories 2018 anthology.
In 2019 Wang's essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias was published by Graywolf Press. The essays focus on different life experiences during her struggles with schizoaffective disorder. The Collected Schizophrenias earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly before its release. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Katherine Coldiron later observed that the collection "warrants much of the hype and anticipation surrounding it" but also noted that it is "not a particularly juicy or grotesque book" and that it has "a sense of incompleteness". Ilana Masad, writing for NPR, concluded that the book was "riveting, honest, and courageously allows for complexities in the reality of what living with illness is like". In The New York Times, Rachael Combe praised the writing and questioned the veracity of Wang's narration, while noting that "images and insights Wang summons from these shards are sometimes frustrating, but often dazzling, and worth the reconstructive work". The Collected Schizophrenias made The New York Times Best Seller list for nonfiction shortly after its release.

Personal life

Wang is a second-generation Taiwanese-American and was born in the Midwest. In 2013 Wang experienced Cotard's Syndrome, an illness that makes people believe that they have already died. She lives in San Francisco.

Recognition