“The main obstacle to my simple, happy life,” muses Eleanor, the narrator of Elysha Chang’s debut novel, A Quitter’s Paradise, “was that I was prone to secret-keeping.” According to her new husband, Ellis, at least—her marriage to whom Eleanor hasn’t yet shared with her mother, Rita. When Rita finds out, she sends Eleanor an email: “Why hide yourself from me? Why why?”
When the book begins, Eleanor is a PhD candidate at Mount Sinai studying mouse cortices, though soon after marrying Ellis, she quits the program and becomes a technician in her husband’s lab, a source of consternation for her mother and colleagues. That decision, coupled with a family tragedy, sends Eleanor into a spiral of erratic decision-making: She kicks off an affair and also jeopardizes the work and safety of her labmates. Punctuating Eleanor’s sections are dips into her family members’ lives, from both earlier years and long before she was born.
“Eleanor’s voice came to me first,” Chang says. “But she’s very evasive; she’s a slippery character. And at some point I understood, I’m not getting more information out of her—that’s part of her charm, right? And so I did, initially, just start looking for other sources of information—from her sister, her parents.” Soon, those characters bloomed to play a larger role than simply being in service of Eleanor’s narrative: A pair of brothers, decades earlier, became estranged during the Chinese Civil War, with one growing up in China and the other Taiwan; the origin story of the relationship between Eleanor’s parents, Rita and Jing, comes to light. “I became interested in that family dynamic—that there’s so much of our family history that we don’t know, we don’t have access to. That’s not a new tradition. James Baldwin does that. Toni Morrison does that. I think this is, maybe, my immigrant spin.”
The book also calls to mind recent explorations of science and relationships, including Weike Wang’s Chemistry and Brandon Taylor’s Real Life—it’s no surprise when Chang says they’re two of her favorites. And, as if in keeping with the scientific method, the characters’ narratives are peppered with questions: “What was its purpose?” Eleanor thinks, frustrated by her research. “Was this the life she wanted?” her mother worries when Eleanor is a child. “What in his life had ever made him think that money would come easily?” wonders Jing, newly in America.
The novel is the first from Sarah Jessica Parker’s SJP Lit, a new imprint from the independent publisher Zando, launched in 2020 by Molly Stern. “What struck me about this book was that it was exactly what I was looking for, which was a brand-new voice who was telling a story unfamiliar to me,” Parker says, “but also a story that would connect with readers who were looking for stories of their lives, who had yet to experience them in a book.” The story “is so smart and funny and heartbreaking,” she says. “And then we just had to fight for it. We just had to hope that she would trust us with this gift.”
Chang calls the decision to work with Zando editor Erin Wicks “a no-brainer” because of “the enthusiasm that I felt from Sarah Jessica and also from Erin. They had clearly read and read the book.” (And it’s true that Parker’s palpably enthusiastic about books she loves, whether on Instagram or during this interview. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” she repeats each time I mention that I haven’t read one of her favorites.)
Parker and Zando publisher Stern connected at a lunch hosted by Joanna Coles; Stern had seen Parker photographed with a copy of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which Stern had published. (Flynn has her own eponymous imprint with Zando; its first book, Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy, launched in February, and Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi’s The Centre will be out in July.) After the lunch, Stern sent Parker a stack of books, including A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra; over time, after the two started a book club together, Stern convinced Parker to launch a literary fiction imprint with Crown called SJP for Hogarth: “That book,” Parker says of Constellation, “became the standard-bearer.”
Keziah Weir
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