How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Learn more about the book and author at Su Chang's website.
Ah, titles! It’s the bane of my existence as a writer. My book title was the last thing I decided on, long after the book was written and self-edited multiple rounds. I had quite a few contenders. At one point, it was called “Erasure”. Later, it became “The Trouble with Leaving.” I was very serious about the latter title, and it almost made it to the end, if my editor hadn’t put a stop to it. I still think it was a decent one as it illuminated the main theme of the book, but I can also see some issues with it, the most important one being that it suggests the book is all about the daughter character, while in reality the mother character is equally important (with large sections of the book devoted to her). Another issue may be that the old title doesn’t have any “cultural marker.” A reader wouldn’t know from the title that half of the book is set in China and it’s a book about Chinese modern history and Chinese immigrants.
The current title, The Immortal Woman, is a good one and certainly solves the cultural marker problem. At the most literal level, the Immortal Woman is the patron saint of the mother and daughter’s ancestral village. She embodies tradition and hence a threat the Maoist China desperately sought to eradicate, as well as something the heartbroken Lemei, during her early motherhood, resolved to expunge from her daughter’s life. At the same time, the Immortal Woman also serves as a symbolic stand-in for both mother and daughter, who, despite decades of trauma, ultimately...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: The Immortal Woman.
The Page 69 Test: The Immortal Woman.
Q&A with Su Chang.
--Marshal Zeringue