Until Even the Angels

Friend and first time author Suzanne Scott Tomita joins the podcast to discuss her debut novel Until Even the Angels. Her book is the story of Mei Mei Goh, a domestic servant to the wealthy Hamilton family, and her unlikely friendship with her young mistress, Honour Hamilton, and the teenage gardner, Pashunath Roy. Set in 1950s Singapore and contemporary London, Until Even the Angels is part mystery, historical fiction, social commentary. 

Suzanne has a PhD in Education from the University of British Columbia and completed The Writer's Studio Creative WRiting Certificate at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. She was born in Tunisia and raised in Venezuela, Germany, Indonesia, Canada and Australia. Her writing inclues personal essays on the topics of motherhood, mid-life and marriage, home and belonging.

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Amy, hello, welcome back to the Red Fern book review. I am your host. Amy Tyler, and today I'm here with my friend Suzanne, Scott Tomita, and she's going to talk about her very first novel. It's called until even the angels, and it's set in Singapore, where she currently lives with her husband, and it almost defies genres. We're going to talk about this during the podcast. It's a bit of a thriller, it's a bit of historical fiction, and it's really it's literary. I think you'll enjoy our discussion. But in the meantime, I also want to apologize for being absent from the podcast for a bit, I've been a bit distracted with life. I'm going to have to admit, but I'm here today and I have a couple of updates for you. One thing I wanted to let you know is that I have been tapped by the Canadian book club Awards, which is a new it's just a few years old, and it is a Canada's largest Reader's Choice book club awards. And what it is, it's voted on by Canadian book clubs and readers, and the idea behind it is to showcase more popular or commercial authors that might get missed in some of the regular you know, like a booker prize award, a more more literary award. So I'm really excited about that. And what I'm going to be doing is, over the summer months, I'm going to be interviewing all the winners, and I'll be doing it over three separate podcasts. So it'll be kind of a group setting, which I have not really done before. I've done three people in a podcast before, but in some I might be doing five, including myself. So that'll be that'll be a challenge. And the other thing I wanted to mention is, since I haven't been here for a little while, what I'm currently reading, and I am reading something called the Long Island compromise by taffy brodesser ackner. I don't even know if I'm pronouncing her name right, but a lot of you will know her from the book Fleishman is in trouble, and it also was an excellent streaming show. Can't remember what channel was streaming on HBO. I think maybe you can, you can let me know. But very good. And it's, I've just started it, but it's pretty promising, and it's a family saga, which I always love. And the story is there is a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher, and he's kidnapped from his driveway, and he's attacked and held for ransom, and then he's returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, and it's how the family recovers from that and the impact of that moment in time. So she's a really good writer, and I'm excited, so I'll report back more on that. But with that said, let's move over and talk with Suzanne. Hello, Suzanne, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks so much, Amy, it's so great to be back with you. A lot has happened. You were on my podcast a couple of years ago and you were about to embark on a journey to Singapore, and you're there now. And so can you fill people in what brought you to Singapore? And what are you doing there? Sure, we moved back to Singapore in December of 2021, and back, meaning we lived here 15 years ago for a couple years. So sometimes, when you have these opportunities overseas and you come back again, it's you refer your to yourself as a boomerang, right? So we're back again and pulled for two reasons, my husband's role and my role. My contract ended. In March of last year, and in that year, I've been able to finally bring a dream of mine to fruition, which is to publish a book. So it's been actually an amazing experience to be here a second time as an older person with different life, stage children being, you know, less, less involved in everyday things. So I had a chance to really knuckle down and finish my manuscript and get it off to a publisher, and they accepted it. So really excited about that. So today I want to talk about, I'm excited to talk about your book, and then also as a first time author and a friend, it's fun to I think people would really like to hear about your writing process and the publishing process. I think a lot of people, I think there are a number of people that would love to write a book, but they just don't think they can do it. And so I'd love for you to share a bit about your journey, but the first thing I wanted to ask you was in the acknowledgements. And I love reading the acknowledgements. Sometimes I read them first you talk about going on a walk with a friend in Singapore, and you said, during this walk, the seeds of this book were planted. Can you tell us more about that? Yes, yes. Okay, so for me, when I write, I have to be viscerally affected by an emotion. So whether that's adoration, fear, you know, feelings of all kind, you know, really, really visceral feelings. I have to have that feeling first. So I would go and walk around this very beautiful part of Singapore where there are these old colonial estates. There are very few left now, and there are these very unique architectural buildings called black and whites, and so they have kind of influence of British colonial architecture in the tropics, mixed with sort of Indian Malay Chinese influences of architecture. And they're just very beautiful. And I would walk up there, and there was this one house, and there was something about that house that felt like there was a mystery in there. And I was led by my own curiosity to think who lived there, who loved there, who worked there. And I heard a voice, and I heard a voice of a character who is a young domestic servant demanding me to tell her story. I was really busy. I had three kids, I was finishing up my PhD, and I was like, What is this voice? And go away. I'm kind of busy. And that voice didn't leave me for 15 years. Wow. I think part of it is I'm just a natural, curious person. I want when I go somewhere, I want to imagine what it's like. You know, back when people might have originally lived in places, imagine the characters and the people who were there. So I just went with it. So I had to have a visceral feeling and curiosity. And the visceral feeling was, a curiosity around a woman who had passed away in Vancouver before we had left for Singapore, the first time, in a really terrible situation, and I was really curious about her backstory. So again, it's like it had touched the corners of my life, and then I fictionalized this world of a woman back in the 50s who was a domestic servant in a big colonial house during a time in Singapore in history where they were coming out of the war and they're just, I don't think there's been enough time for the world to heal itself, really. And yet, there was all this movement around independence. There was rising factions of communism, and so that time as well, and the real brush of history with Maria Hertog and her story, I just cobbled it together. Well, okay, so tell first, can you give everyone a little Cole's Notes version? Tell us, give us a summary of the book. Okay, it starts with the PROLOG of my main character. May may go and she is very close to death, so she's experienced a near assassination, and she recalls her first formative friendship, and that friendship was a very unlikely one, because it was with the young girl who was the mistress of. Of the family that she was serving. So she tells her childhood story through the detective who's investigating. You know why, why this near murder happened? And through that, you hear, you learn that she was a girl like all girls, looking for love, looking for belonging. Also someone who had heard about this notion of heaven and was looking for it in places like the lipstick palms, the frangipani trees, things that she would eat and she then is dragged into having to keep secrets for the Mistress of the home, and so she's forever going to be in servitude to this pressure, and she breaks out of it, and she's able to find a sense of freedom, but really she's only ever serving a different kind of master. There is love, there is deep friendship, there is betrayal, there is sadness, and I think in the end, there is a resolution to finding a type of home that that gives you, gives you peace. So I don't want to give it all away, but it's like you said in your questions to me. Publisher has has placed it in the liter crime fiction genre. But I didn't set up to write a crime fiction story like it's not a procedural. It's not, you know, who done it? It's a why done it? Well, I know, yeah, I said to you, because I was trying to think about the genre to explain to people, and I came up with literary, historical fiction, crime, political, romance novel, yeah, I think it's a lot of things tell us about the title of the book. What does, where did that come from? Tell people, okay, so I truly feel that art influences art. So that was me being curious about the architecture, right? That was kind of the initial pull. I'm always open to letting art influence me, wash over me, not everything is going to impress me in in the in the sense of, you know, Oh, does this mean something to me? But I remember listening to the CBC, driving across Lions Gate Bridge and listening to some beautiful choral music, and I had to pull over to the side of the road. The music was so beautiful. Well, I crossed the bridge and then pulled over, and it was music. And the title of the choral music was called until even the angels and I wrote down, I found the piece of music and went down the rabbit hole and found out that it was originally a poem by Dorothy Walters, and that the composer had put together this music. And the poem I posted in front of wherever I was working, because somehow I there was a puzzle in there that I was like, Okay, it's got to mean something. It's got to mean that we're always, we're always seeking for what our heart is longing for. But for some reason, the world keeps preventing us from getting that. And it's almost like until even the angels wake up and take notice, meaning our greater angels, or the greater good were, we're never going to achieve that. The original working title was 24 mount Rosie Road, which is the actual address of the home. And for years, for 10 years, that was the title. And then I thought, well, that's someone's house. Like, that would be like, Oh, whenever you the name of your address of your condo, you know, like, it would be sort of strange title, although I loved it, because it was like, who was Rosie, which is another character that we get to know in the story. And just yesterday, craziest thing, Amy, I met a woman who lived in 24 mount Rosie road. She had me over for coffee. No way, told me the whole story. I've never been inside the house. And she shared shared photographs with me. She shared me, shared with me the the a copy of the diary of. A man who originally lived there during the Second World War. Like, I've still got lots of research that I could have done, but then at some point you're like, you need to relinquish all of that and just follow your own version of what you want to create. So that's kind of the story. So another question I have is there's a very strong sense of place in this book, The landscaping, the flowers and the historical buildings you've mentioned both already. How do you feel the book unfolded because you were actually living in the place that you were writing about, as opposed to, like, if you'd written it from Vancouver or somewhere else, like, how did your surroundings serve as a catalyst for your writing? So here I have to do a shout out to the SFU Writers Studio. So I started writing the first few chapters of the book. While I was taking the Writers Studio through SFU and my mentor, Kevin Chong, who's just the most amazing guy, he asked me the same question, what was it about Singapore that got all of your juices flowing so much and you were immersed in this environment that clearly was giving you a lot of creative energy. I can't explain it. I mean, I grew up in southeast as a child, so that could be part of it is that you know these, these, you register in your body and in your memory, and your memory bank all those feelings and smells and clues about what life is about when you're when we're very young. And so maybe they were kind of reactivated when I first came back as a young mother and and so there was that. But then, you know, I was back in Vancouver for the 10 years writing it as well. But somehow it stayed with me wherever I was. And the beauty of technology is, you know, you can look up old, old photographs. You can listen to oral histories on the National Archives, which I did. In fact, I had a whole chapter that didn't end up going in about the editor of The Straits Times who made the choice of the photograph of the Maria heritage of Maria Hertog that triggered the riots. And anyway, like you can, there's so much access that you can have. You need to be right? You need to keep that sense of of knowing a place with you when you're writing. But, I mean, I'm, I'm writing now a piece about Vancouver here, right? So, so I think it doesn't really matter. It helps when you're here, but then sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you're like, Oh, I'm so done with this. I want to be in a cold environment or a, you know, a landscape that's very different from here. Let's, let's move over and talk a bit about the writing process. And I'm curious, especially because you wrote a mystery of sorts. Did you know the ending from the start, or, you know, there's different methods, or did the characters reveal themselves over time? Like, what's your process? I did know the ending, and that's really what helped me get there. The writing process for me has to begin, like I mentioned, with a visceral feeling, but then I have to be very still, very quiet. So for a long time, I couldn't write with any noise. I can't go to coffee shops. And still find that hard, because I have to, I guess I'm very voice driven. I have to hear the voice. So I guess I'm a Panther who has to, who has to lead with voice. So explain that there's so for people who don't know, there's Pantsers and there's plotters, yeah, industries, so the Panthers fly by the seat of their pants, so to speak. And the plotters know everything that's going to happen, right? There's two different Yeah, yeah. I don't think it applies just for mystery writers. I think it's sort of all kinds of writers, yeah, but yeah, I definitely for this. I was a cancer and, you know, it took me a long time to finish it, but it was also because life was going on and I had lots of other commitments, but I would always find time to list be still and listen to that dialog. So I had that voice in my head, and then I might pick up snippets of i. Uh, not just, not just dialog, but also action and structure and plot. And I just my analogies to sewing. Are you a sewer? Do you know anything about sewing? No, I'm a knitter. I do have to do sewing in my knitting, but it's, there we go. It's not exactly like off, but I don't work off a machine or anything. Yeah, I don't sew, but my mother did. So I grew up listening to her the sewing machine, wearing and going into her area where she'd sew. And there'd always be those patterns where you'd, you know, you'd have a collar, you'd have a sleeve, you might be working on a pocket. And so that's my analogy with writing like I'd get a snippet of dialog, I get a little bit of a like character paint, like a painting of a character in my mind, and then slowly try and sew it together. And so when the publisher came to me and said, we've got 14 weeks. Can you give us the full manuscript. I was like, Of course I can, but I had to literally sew the thing together because I had so many different parts, and it was the most it was such a gift. Because I was like, okay, when am I ever going to get this opportunity again? Penguin, Random House Southeast Asia is part of this amazing global brand to be recognized with writing something for them. What an incredible opportunity. So my process, hear the voice. I'm a pantser, not a plotter. I have to be still and then the best situation, and you hear this often with writers, is to have an un interrupted time of like three hours. Say if you can have that every day, every other day, and whether you're editing what you've just done, or whether you're following again that character and putting obstacles in her past every time you just got to make it trickier and trickier for her or him or your character to reach their goal, because that's what's going to keep the reader engaged. I guess that's how it works. And the second project I'm working on, I'm working on a bunch of things, but my second book, I'm plotting it out. It is like, completely plotted. I can't hear a voice, right? So it's almost like I've talked to other people about this. Is it the female brain versus the male brain? I don't think that's true, but is it? Is it one way of thinking versus another, and you're just forcing your way of thinking into being a plotter? I should be a plotter. It's much more organized and all that, I can't tell it's helping me, but I'm not feeling the voice. So I guess framework, framework is there. I'm grateful for trying it this way. But the best thing for me think, because I put myself right inside the character, I think that's, that's the, my preferred way of going. We'll see what happens now you talk about kind of knitting or sewing the project together under a timeline when you approached a publisher for the first time, what stage was your manuscript in? And I'm just kind of comparing this because I've worked in the magazine world or newspapers where sometimes, as an editor, I did not, or often I did not want a full I didn't like it when people pitch me a full story like all written, because then you can't shape it in any way. But I'm wondering if that's the same with publisher or what. What's that like for you? Oh, there's so much to talk about in that, because I think writers, have a lot of conflicting information out there. Some places will say we won't accept anything but a full manuscript, and then thinks, because you think, Okay, well, I'm almost there, or I'm I'm actually too far. I've got too much, and I need someone to kind of help me, guide me. So in my case, I had too much, and it wasn't knitted together. The publisher here is very I mean, they're a business, so they need to know, and especially for a first time writer, who the heck are you? How are we going to market you as you know, a Canadian living in Singapore. How is it that you know about this place? And yet, my publisher? Her, Nora, who's just amazing, believed in the story, and that was, that was the thing she said, your characters are believable. I want to know what happens. I'm intrigued by Amy. And you know what has made her, you know, turned her into this, this woman who's had all these challenges in her life. So I submitted online the first three chapters, which is often what you do, yeah, that's Yeah, right. And then a couple of a couple of weeks later, they asked me for my bio, so I shared that. And then two months later, they they said, Okay, we want to go forward, and we want your your manuscript in 14 weeks. Oh, my God. So I had too much. And so essentially, I had to reduce, and, I mean, you can use all kinds of analogies, whether it's cooking, you know, I had to, like, literally, reduce the sauce down to a more. Something that was more delicious to be able to serve. So, yeah, it took but it was a great exercise, and it was my first time. So a lot of things, I was like, I don't know what I'm doing. And the editorial process was great. So penguin Southeast Asia. Penguin Random has Southeast Asia has, as you can imagine, different offices across the region. So the editorial team are in India, marketing and sales are in the Philippines, and then the publisher is here. And then the I did two sets of edits. I don't know if this is interesting, but we did structural edits first. So Amy came into the room. She turned on the podcast machine. It was, you know, a painting behind her. She talked about how she had picked up her sons. But, like, what, where are the sons like? And so it's like, it's almost like moving furniture around. Did she come in through the basement, and like stage, like a stage direction exactly, and then the set interesting. That's interesting they they did was copy edit. So it's like the fine detail of like, everything we moved. We merged some chapters together, we separated others. We moved a little bit around, but most of it was making sure that words were understandable in terms of, you know, like a universal word, if we were, if we were, if I was using a regionalized word. And can you give an example of how, through working with the publisher like you came in, obviously, with all your strong ideas, and as the author, and give an example, maybe of something they had you change because they structurally, because it didn't work, or maybe it'd be more marketable a different way. Like, can you give an example of how that kind of the partnership? Um, I really didn't have any strong ideas. I was just so, so grateful that it was landing somewhere and someone was giving it a chance. The editorial team, so there was one copy editor, and then, sorry, one structural editor and then two copy editors. So they saw, so I guess the thing was, they saw a few different things, which was really interesting, and mainly it was point of view, because what I've got going on here is First Person with May May, when it's her telling her story, and then with the detective, it's third person. So we really needed to make that something that was not going to be onerous for the reader. And so they really, really helped with that. Is I was so in it. It was hard for me to as much as I could. I always read everything out loud. So if I start from yesterday's work, today, I've got to read what I wrote yesterday out loud. I've got to hear it. Maybe it's just because I've just someone who has to hear things I did a lot of, like voice singing when I was a kid. So maybe, like, I have to hear the sound of it. And so the point of view switches was where we where I worked, well with the team of editors. But in terms of changing a lot, I didn't have any ish, there wasn't anything like really of note to talk about where we disagreed or anything like that. No, it was. It was a really good relationship. Do you have a something you most hope people will take away from this book? Or you? And is that not really your business or your your goal? Like, what is there? Do you have any objectives for the reader? I hope that people find that the pace of it is a bit of a page turner that people want to know. You know what happens to the main characters, but also be exposed to that, that slice of history in Singapore about Maria Hertog and all of the different struggles that Singapore was trying to build itself into a nation state. So it was like a really interesting, challenging time. I hope people find that it's intriguing. They like the plot twist. Lots of different people are asked are sharing different facets of why they enjoy it. I'm just delighted. It's in the hands of the readers. Well, what are you working on? Now, it sounds like it's a departure. So what? What can I I'm working on something contemporary, and I'm exploring identities of young women, young girls, uh, living and working, living in the international private school scene in Asia. So you've read a book called River West River East, or River East River West. I'm sure how it's called. I met the author there, and she blew me away with with that. I think she won the women's Fiction Prize this last year for it. I was like, wow, you can you can do this. You can write about we there are so many boarding school stories. There are so many school stories, but I haven't read one that's set in this very rarefied air of the international schools in Asia and how girls feel about who they are, what what their you know, what their hopes are, their future looks like. So it's that's what I'm exploring right now. Um, so tell me before I can't let you go without asking what you're reading right now, because last time you gave some you had some really good suggestions. In fact, when you came on before the book, one of the books we discussed, the friend was has since been made into a movie with no, have you seen it? I haven't have you. No, I can't wait with night with Naomi Watts, so you're on the pulse of something I was a book I'd never heard of. And what? What are you reading now? Okay, I'm reading orbital. Oh, okay. She's holding up the cover here. That looks like a cool cover. Looks very celestial. Uh, Samantha Harvey, I think she won the Booker Prize last year for it. And it's, it's a novella, so it's only 180 pages. Sounds even good book club pick, I often find we can 29 pages. We can't get book club. It's hard for all of us often to read when I'm writing it. Yeah, yeah. So that's what I'm reading for my book club on Wednesday, and I gotta quickly finish it. It's beautiful, and she's just so it's about astronauts flying through space. And basically, they orbit, they orbit the Earth, I don't know, something like six or seven times a day. And so can you imagine, like seeing the beauty of the world and all the tides and the stars and the like, the structure of like, looking at the world from so far away, but seeing it like seven or eight times a day. Yeah, that's cool, and it's really beautiful. What I'm not finding a action like, there's, there's more of a descriptive, beautiful. Here we are in space looking at the world. Isn't it beautiful, which I love, but I'm also someone who, like, needs a quick like, Hey, where are we going? Because that's what I've been through with this book that I've written. I've been reading a lot of, um, Lisa C, do you know her? Yes, yeah. Propelling read, and it's a lot about the history of historical fiction based in China, but you always learn something about it, like the tea girl of hummingbird lane. You just learned so much about the tea industry, which to. Find really fascinating. And also about the Adopt div children from, I think in the 80s, there was that big push in 70s and 80s for young girls, Chinese girls, to be adopted into western families. And so she talks a lot about what that looks like for these girls as they grow up. So really, like, really, quite good. But my favorite book last year was shark heart. Emily habeck, oh yes. Now, did I share that with you like it did? It's something that you'd never think of as being something that would be so propelling, but it's a beautiful, beautiful love story. So that's out there. Those are good. Those are unique. Those aren't, you know, the typical I like that off piece, just choice which I like. I think I tried the middle stuff, everyone's, you know, the Miranda, July book, all fours and stuff like that. I really it wasn't my thing, so I'm just a little bit more on the less less crisis driven and more story driven. Well, thanks so much for joining. I know you're you're in a coffee shop in Singapore, so I don't think it's loud, but I know that with things going on there so early, good luck with the rest of your publishing tour and all that. And I'm excited ready I spoke. I hope to have a small launch in Vancouver in the fall, so I'd love to see you there. I will be there. Others. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you. Okay, bye. Thanks so much to Suzanne for coming on the podcast again. Her book is called until even the angels, and it's out now, and it's really rewarding to interview Suzanne for a few reasons. I've had her on before, before she took off on her journey, and I knew she was working on a manuscript, but I talked to her about that book a few years ago, and then she was in Vancouver, oh, like, six months ago or more, and we went for a walk. It was kind of late summer, and she started to talk to me about where she was in the publishing process. And, you know, she was at the very end, and there was just final edits being done. But we, you know, we talked and walked for like an hour and a half, and it was really fun to then hold the book in my hands and read it after kind of hearing, kind of first hand. And you heard a lot of that today about the journey to being a published author. So anyway, thanks so much for tuning in, And I will talk with you soon you