In Tiffany Tsao’s new novel But Won’t I Miss Me, we’re invited into a world slightly off-kilter from our own. At first, our protagonist Vivi’s life seems relatively normal, though tough — she’s a new, single mother to a son named Cloud; she has a day job refurbishing old equipment. Motherhood, to Vivi, is not a walk in the park. But slowly we realise the way this world differs from our own: it’s one in which motherhood involves a process called “rebirth,” where new mothers are replaced — eaten — by an identical but superhuman self, one perfectly equipped to deal with the tough work of early parenting. Vivi lives in fear of this replacement — and when her rebirth goes wrong, she must navigate a new, scary world.
A sharp, compelling speculative horror novel, But Won’t I Miss Me reimagines motherhood in surprising metaphor. Much like Tsao’s previous novel, The Majesties (which we talked to her about in 2020, here!), But Won’t I Miss Me explores the depth of what society asks from a mother, the extent to which we truly know ourselves, and the darkness thrumming beneath the most everyday banalities.
I spoke with Tiffany Tsao about her love for unreliable narrators, weaving the themes of the novel through both character and world-building, and her favourite books about the good and bad of motherhood.
Get your copy of But Won’t I Miss Me here.
You mention in the acknowledgement section of But Won’t I Miss Me that you felt a disconnect between your outer and inner self post having a child. Can you tell us about your impulse to write this book?
During my second pregnancy, I got really depressed, and afterwards, with two small kids, [I kept] going up and down — but the dips would get lower and lower each time. The base concept for this book came to me when I was pushing my kids in the double pram. Oh my gosh, the thing was huge! It’s so heavy, and it feels so ridiculous, because there’s these two little tiny beings in this enormous contraption, and everyone’s getting out of your way as you’re pushing it along. And I remember I felt really dazed at that time. I felt disconnected from myself.
There were two images that came to my mind in quick succession. One of them was thinking of my body as a big, cavernous house, and I felt like I had shrunk and was swimming inside my body. The other thing I thought of was that I felt like I’m not me. Wouldn’t it be funny if somehow there was a new version of me that had killed and eaten and replaced the old me — and that me was walking around? Those two images really were the seed of the book.
Of course, at that time, it was not a good time to write — I was quite busy with the kids. I told [my agent], “I have a great idea for the next novel, but I’m not sure if I’d have time to write it yet. I already have a title for it: But Won’t I Miss Me.” Flash-forward a few years later, and I remember saying, “I think I finally have recovered enough from being hit by the truck that is motherhood to write the book.”
How did you approach this idea of motherhood — how did the horror aspect of it come to you?
It was interesting thinking about the readership for this novel — as much as I want this to be a book for everyone, realistically, women probably will connect with this book the most. I find that a bit sad. Actually, the book ends on that note, because the protagonist has a son, and the son is left to carry on a legacy in a way. I remember thinking about that, because I have two sons.
I think the struggles that early mothers can have, or new mothers can have, are ignored partly because [that happens] for a lot of things with women. We’re actually all aware that it’s a problem — it’s just that 50% of the world is not on board, or is actually causing the problem. So even though I hoped that both men and women would read the book, I wanted women who read the book to feel seen, and to know that it’s not abnormal to be frightened like the protagonist is about this big change.
It’s not abnormal to feel angry or upset about the situation. I wanted to normalise it, and the best way to normalise, in some way, is through speculative fiction. In the novel, it’s a reality where women eat themselves and then replace themselves. That’s supposed to be normal to them, in the same way that a lot of the things that are supposed to be normal about our lives — we accept it, but actually, when you think about it, it’s very horrific. Birth is, I think, inherently horrific. It’s kind of gross, there’s a lot of blood, and before modern medicine, the mortality rate was very high. There are all these bad things around it, but it’s considered a natural part of life that we have to accept. I wanted to make that connection with this world. They have a reality which to us is horrifying, but I think our reality is actually pretty horrifying as well.
Something I thought of when reading your book is this rise in the 2020s of a kind of “mommy blogging” and the idea of the “trad wife.” One of the early things that happens in your book is Vivi watches a video by a sort of mommy blogger that’s actually demystifying this thing that everyone else considers normal.
For that particular scene, it’s funny, because Vivi finds the blog by accident. [In the book’s world, people don’t post about this aspect of birth, but] as the blogger is talking, you realise they don’t post it not because they think it’s too horrifying, but almost because it’s mundane. Why post the credits when the big event is having the baby? What comes afterwards — who wants to bother with that? So it’s kind of funny — she’s opened Vivi’s eyes unintentionally, because no one else is actually interested in this stage of the birthing process.
The world-building in But Won’t I Miss Me is super interesting — what technology and climate looks like in your book. I think specifically what was interesting to me is you don’t foreground it so much — it’s just how these people live, and we just see it in the context of how they go through their lives. Why did you choose to do that?
It was interesting to think about, because there has to be world-building, but it’s taking a backseat to the particular predicament I want to foreground. There’s the theme of renewal — not throwing things away, versus just replacing something and getting a new thing. As I was mapping out the narrative, it became clear to me that this was a really important theme, and I was trying to think about how to work those themes into the environment as well. I ended up coming up with this idea of this society where efficiency has become the watchword — replacing old products with new things.
We kind of do that now, actually — like with hybrid cars. But you’re still throwing away the old thing. That’s something you have to take into account. And then you need the materials to build the new thing, and maybe those are harder to source, or they don’t break down as easily. It’s the same thing with digital stuff — a lot of people aren’t thinking necessarily about the footprint of data centers, which take enormous energy usage. With smartphones, you have to mine rare earth minerals. Because the efficiency becomes foregrounded, we make a call, like a value judgment — this thing is better than this other thing.
I was thinking, what if I made it so that [the climate crisis] does get somewhat reversed, but it comes at a certain cost? So there are individuals who can afford a very nice life at that cost, and then there are others who just have to keep repairing their old appliances. They can’t afford the new top-of-the-line models.
I was thinking about that as a side metaphor that enhanced thinking about the same thing going on with humans in the novel, and with mothers. Why not just replace the mother? Because if you can get a really efficient, strong, practically superhuman mother as a matter of course — that’s what your body just does naturally — then that’s just the natural way to go. But then you’re not thinking about the human cost, because you haven’t clocked that the person being replaced is human.
With doppelgängers, there’s always this threat of one consuming the other, or killing the other — being a threat to each other’s existence. And you play with that idea on so many levels in this novel. What draws you to doppelgängers? What do you find exciting about the possibilities of that trope?
In my previous novel The Majesties, there’s also a doppelgänger theme. It’s funny, because I’m not sure I realized that that was a theme that I unconsciously go back to until I started writing this book. And now I’m writing my next book in which there’s also a doppelgänger!
I think I’m very drawn to the idea of thinking about the different selves, and the compartmentalization of the selves. For The Majesties, one of the most major literary influences was Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. In that book, and in Ishiguro’s work generally, there’s an unreliable narrator. Sometimes you realise what the narrator is not saying, or that the narrator themselves are not in touch [with reality] until they figure it out. And that’s also something that I really like in Charlotte Brontë’s lesser-known novel, Villette. She’s suppressed her emotions and feelings so much that there’s a moment where there’s a revelation, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh. How did you not know? You've been narrating to us this whole time! How were you not aware of that at all?” It’s kind of shocking, and I’ve always been very fascinated by that — the suppression of emotion, and then thinking of the self as divided and split. It’s a very fascinating theme — self-deception, delusion; wanting to do something but you can’t do it, so there’s someone else you create to do it.
I thought of Never Let Me Go a lot while reading this book, too, especially in the context of the withholding of information. But Won’t I Miss Me has a number of reveals and layers, a lot of different information that you parcel out through the novel. Even just the main idea — the fact of “rebirth” — is something that we discover slowly; it’s hinted at before it’s finally explained. What's going on in your head when you approach pacing?
For this one, I knew it would be a challenge from the start. When you have a premise that is startling or revelatory or shocking, the question is, in a book, where do you put it?
You can put it at the end, and have it be the moment to which all of the narrative is leading up to. I think that’s a big risk. I used to teach literature, and I used to teach students how to write essays. I would always say, “You’ve been leading up all the way to your conclusion, and the essay has been very boring because you’re waiting to get to the conclusion. But your conclusion is your thesis, and you should front-load it. Don’t save the coolest thing for the end — you want to start with the cool thing. And trust me, it will get cooler as you keep going.” I don’t know how it works, but it just does. I found myself giving myself the same advice when I was writing this book.
For the pacing of this one, I had Wuthering Heights on my mind — the way that structure works, with the frame narrative and spanning different generations. We almost go back in time, in that narrative. I knew my book was always supposed to move [to the next generation]. As I was trying to figure that out, I was watching a movie on a plane, the Korean adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith — the film The Handmaiden. I thought the structure was amazing. It happens in three parts, and the second part reveals all of this stuff you didn’t realise about the first part, and then the third part blends the two narratives together. I remember thinking, I like the three part structure but I want the third part to be a continuation — I want it to continue on with the next generation.
Can you talk about the epigraph to the book?
The epigraph is from the Christian Bible — it’s from Hebrews, and it goes, “since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses.” It basically comes after a catalog, a list of all of the faithful who have followed God. It starts out with these people who are heroes, and who were obviously very blessed, and received good things. And you’re like, “Wow, cool to have a life of faith!”
But then the catalog ends with the prophets who were stoned and beaten and sawn in half, and who wandered the wilderness because no one would listen to them — it includes them as well. I think that’s good, because [there’s the] people who are materially triumphant in this world, and then people who actually sacrificed a great deal and were not triumphant by the world’s standards. And then it says, “since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses” — the idea that all of those people are still with us and watching us and have come before us. The verses go on to say, “Let us cling to the faith, fix our eyes upon Jesus, and run the course marked out for us.”
This idea of running a race — you’ll notice in the book, there’s always an image of a road and a journey, and how you keep traveling down the road. That [idea] is actually quite terrifying for Vivi, because of what awaits her [down the road] as a woman, biologically — pregnancy, motherhood, self-consumption. But by the end of the book, it’s the idea of the journey as something that you have to keep doing in order to make the world better.
There are a lot of books that talk about motherhood very differently. Do you have any favourite depictions of motherhood, in all its glory (or terror)?
I didn’t actually do a huge amount of reading [while writing] because I was worried I would get discouraged that everything would have already been written!
A kind of unexpected one is I Ate The Whole World to Find You. It’s a graphic novel by a comic artist based in Melbourne, Rachel Ang. It deals with body issues, relationship issues, and then it ends with this joyous [scene where] the protagonist gives birth. That was a book where I was like, oh, sometimes it’s easy for me to forget that people find it affirming — people actually do like having children [laughs].
Imminence by Mariana Dimópulos is so good. It’s translated by Alice Whitmore. I read that and I said, “that is how I’m feeling” — the prose is how I feel, it’s kind of heavy and muted. That was a revelation. And I read Adrienne Rich for the first time — Of Woman Born. Both of those books made me feel, why wasn’t I reading these earlier? I wouldn’t have felt like such a lonely weirdo [laughs]. [I wouldn’t have been] feeling guilty about not liking my children and not being a good mom because I’m not completely patient all the time.
I should have read those books first. So I do hope people read this book and I hope they’re not mothers yet, because I think they need to be warned. Everyone needs to be warned what’s coming!
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