In an intimate session to introduce her debut novel, Jemimah Wei sprints through her words and throws out hyperboles energetically. She’s got the gift of the gab and speaks with a depth of the English language that makes me blush. It’s hard to fathom that this Master of Fine Arts graduate from Columbia University and former fellow in Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship (one of the most prestigious writing fellowships out there) took 10 years to publish her first book—a fact that aspiring writers must find heartening; to know that craft doesn’t come easy, even for sesquipedalians like her.
The Original Daughter, according to Wei, is a labour of love filled with 84 chapters of diary‑like entries that took a decade to gestate. The most challenging part of the process was keeping the faith and believing that she could do it. “Before you finish [the book], you actually don’t know that you can, and at any moment, a large part of the work is sustaining your belief in a book that has yet to exist. It’s an incredibly vulnerable space to be in for an extended period, and I owe an immense debt to those whose beliefs carried me when my own confidence faltered,” shares the 32‑year‑old.
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At one point in 2022, Wei found herself in a shoebox of a room in New York, surrounded by Post‑its and sketches that made up her “murder map”. When she ran out of surfaces to stick notes on, she stuffed everything into a giant binder and carried it around with her. “At the library, a poet saw me scowling at my arrangement of papers and, gesturing at the murder map, said, ‘You’re crazy, but this is awesome.’ We became friends after that.”
That obsessive, all‑consuming relationship with a story isn’t unusual for Wei. “You start seeing the book everywhere—in conversations, in the way the light falls, in random things people say on the train,” she says. “At some point, it stops feeling like something you’re writing and more like something you’re trying to wrestle into the shape it was meant to be. After I finished the first draft, there was this relief of knowing that I had done it, so chances were that I could do it again. Even though its revision took another three years, nothing could change the fact that I had finished writing a book, which gives its own kind of quiet manic assurance.”
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Set between 1996 and 2015, The Original Daughter is a coming‑of‑age book that dives into sisterhood, identity, and the suffocating weight of expectations. At its core, this book is about longing—for love, for belonging, for the version of yourself you could have been if things had been different. Genevieve and Arin, the protagonists, are caught in the push and pull of familial duty, personal ambition, and the complex emotional terrain of growing up in Singapore. Their relationship develops out of a fierce desire to matter to themselves and each other, and the ways these warring desires clash and coincide. “I’m most fascinated with the frictions of love and what it can endure,” Wei expresses. “I suppose betrayals large and small, of the other and the self, are a natural part of life—as is the endlessly prismatic experience of looking at one emotion through a different perspective.”
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One of the novel’s most striking themes is the brutal reality of Singapore’s education system. “How could I have written a realistic novel about two teenage girls in Singapore without touching on academic terror?” Wei asks. “At that age, you spend half your time in school, tuition [classes], or CCA (co‑curricular activities), another chunk studying, and you’re left with five seconds to take a shit and cry about how stressed you are.”
The Original Daughter also gives readers a nostalgic glimpse into a rapidly modernising Singapore—from a time of pagers to one of fancy touchscreen devices—all from the vantage point of the sleepy Bedok Reservoir area the sisters call home. Even before its upcoming release on 6 May, The Original Daughter is earning the kind of praise most debut authors only dream of. One of Wei’s literary idols, Roxane Gay, called it “brilliant”. “I’ve been a fan of Roxane since her Tumblr days,” Wei shares. “It feels unreal that she has read and loved the book. It’s as if I’ve given birth to this daughter who is going off and meeting all these people and doing cool things, and I’m just sitting here watching fondly from the sidelines with my camcorder like a mildly disassociated mum.”
As for what’s next, Wei is allowing herself a moment to breathe for now. “I’m a really intense writer. I keep strict desk hours, and now that my debut is out of my hands, I’m learning to enjoy slowing down,” she says. But, of course, she’s already working on something new. “It’s still in its gestational stage, but I’m really enjoying it. It feels like meeting an old friend.”
Before we wrap up, I ask Wei what advice she’d give to aspiring writers. “The book takes the time it takes. It can sometimes feel like you’re labouring without an end in sight, but even if you need to temporarily step away, writing will always be there when you’re ready to come back to it,” she replies thoughtfully. And then she drops this gem: “In the meantime, lift weights. It’s a long journey, and your back is gonna hurt from all that sitting.”