Peng Shepherd was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, and has lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, New York, and Mexico City. Her second novel, The Cartographers, became a national bestseller, was named a Best Book of 2022 by The Washington Post, and received a 2020 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her debut, The Book of M, won the 2019 Neukom Institute for Literary Arts Award for Debut Speculative Fiction and was chosen as a best book of the year by Amazon, Elle, Refinery29, and The Verge, as well as a best book of the summer by the Today show and NPR’s On Point. Her latest novel, is All This and More and she recently talked about it with Daryl Maxwell for the LAPL Blog.
What was your inspiration for All This & More?
I wrote All This & More because I wanted to explore the relationship between happiness and truth in this world of nearly infinite options we live in. Options are wonderful up to a certain point—but none of us were prepared to be online 24/7, consuming a never-ending stream of advertisements and social media. It’s becoming harder and harder to tell what’s real anymore, and I think that’s corrupting our ability to understand ourselves and what matters to us.
Even if we don’t have the ability to tweak every single aspect of our lives until everything is perfect, we all still struggle with the same timeless questions at the heart of All This & More: when there’s more than one path ahead, how do you decide which is the right one? And more importantly, how you learn to live with those choices?
Are Marsh, Dylan, Talia, Ren, Harper, or any of the other characters in the novel inspired by or based on specific individuals?
Not at all! They all arrived fully formed in my mind—it was almost more like meeting them than creating them.
Did allowing readers to make choices to follow different paths through the novel provide special challenges for you while writing the novel? How did you keep track of all of the different possibilities and how they related to each other? Did your final draft look like Talia’s show bible?
It definitely was a challenge! Writing a novel is already hard enough—but to write one in which there are multiple versions of the main character’s story, all of which make sense and, more importantly, all of which feel just as true, was a whole new beast entirely.
But believe it or not, I actually wrote the whole first draft without a "map" of all the paths and how they linked up. I know! It was daunting to do it this way, but I was worried that if I needed to rely on an outside chart in the early phases, I could end up over-engineering some of the possible storylines, and then they wouldn’t feel authentic to Marsh’s personality and desires. Whereas, if I could hold all of it in my head, then that would have to mean that all of it was making sense and working together, right? It was only once I had the full draft and really knew who Marsh was and all of her possible fates that I finally built the map for my editor to prove that everything did, in fact, connect.
Were you a fan of "choose your own adventure" books while you were growing up?
I did read and enjoy that series as a kid—although I was the kind of reader who tried to cheat at every choice by reading ahead until I had all ten of my fingers and then twenty more pieces of scrap paper stuffed into the book, and no longer had any idea where in the adventure I was. Probably most of us were! There’s definitely a life lesson in there somewhere.
Is there a decision in your life that you would want to change if you had the chance? Is it something you can talk about?
I’d probably say that I wish I’d had the courage to try writing seriously earlier instead of pretending it was just a hobby because I was afraid to fail, but at the same time, those extra years of experience probably made me the writer I am now, right? Who knows how different my books would be if I’d tried to write them years earlier than I did.
Your bio says that you’ve lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, Mexico City, and New York. Do you have any favorite places there?
Definitely! I’m hesitant to name specific shops or restaurants because it’s been a few years since I’ve been to some of these cities, but in general, I love the energy (and dumplings, of course) of Beijing, the Kopitiams of Kuala Lumpur, the architecture of Mexico City, the parks and streets of London, and the literary community in New York. My favorite thing to do on a trip is to walk as many different neighborhoods as I can to really get a feel for the place.
What’s currently on your nightstand?
Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas, and The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson.
Can you name your top five favorite or most influential authors?
My list right now might be:
Ursula K Le Guin
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
George Saunders
Kazuo Ishiguro
Ted Chiang
Was there a book you felt you needed to hide from your parents?
No—although I do remember trying to read The Hot Zone by Richard Preston as a young child because I saw my mom engrossed in it. She was worried it would traumatize me at that age, but that only made it more mysterious. I tried to grab it from her nightstand stack so many times that eventually, she had to put it up on such a high shelf that I couldn’t reach it until I was old enough to work a ladder!
Is there a book you've faked reading?
I don’t think I have! I’d be too terrified that someone would ask me a follow-up question and discover I lied.
Can you name a book you've bought for the cover?
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer!
Is there a book that changed your life?
Yes! As a kid, I found a random English-language novel in an airport bookstore in Puerto Rico called Perchance by Michael Kurland. It was my first exposure to science fiction, and it made me realize that I didn’t just have to love reading but could become a writer, too. (There’s a blog post or article floating around out there somewhere about how my copy of that book has disappeared and reappeared on me multiple times over the decades, which is funny because it’s a book about parallel universes.) As a young adult, probably Haruki Murakami’s works, especially Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I discovered him in my early 20s, which I think is the best time to read him. I’d drifted away from fiction in college and grad school, but I was unhappy in my career, and Murakami’s books reminded me of what I’d always wanted to, and gave me the courage to come back to fiction.
Can you name a book for which you are an evangelist (and you think everyone should read)?
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders—and really, everything else he’s written!
Is there a book you would most want to read again for the first time?
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.
What is the last piece of art (music, movies, TV, more traditional art forms) that you've experienced or that has impacted you?
I was recently in Türkiye, and I was astounded by the tile patterns and motifs that were on so many of the walls, floors, and buildings. They were so bold and colorful and detailed, and somehow, nothing and everything matched at the same time. It was absolutely beautiful!
What is your idea of THE perfect day (where you could go anywhere/meet with anyone)?
Easy! Travel, food, writing. I’d be on a trip somewhere new, with lots of green and walkable areas. I’d spend the morning writing a chapter of my book (which would also go perfectly) after stepping out to grab a quick coffee at a café down the street, and then I’d explore the city in the afternoon with my partner, and then end up at some great restaurant for dinner where we can try the local cuisine, and maybe a wine bar after. Have I mentioned I like food?
What are you working on now?
I’m halfway through the first draft of my next novel! It’s going to be a dark psychological suspense about a body double who’s secretly recruited to impersonate a very famous, powerful person—but as their lives become more and more entwined with each other’s, they start to lose their grasp on their own identities, the safety their uncanny resemblance first promised threatens to become their greatest danger.
