They’ve given me permission to tell the story the way I think the story needs to be told.Īt the same time, memoir is funny because you think you’ve revealed everything, but as anyone who’s written a memoir has said, you’ve probably kept as much back as you’ve shown. But I think both of my parents see themselves within a bigger picture, and they want Vietnamese stories to be told, so they’re put that priority in front of their own egos. I think my mom has a hard time with that because she’s used to you just putting your best self forward. We had a lot of back and forth all throughout the book, and I like to think they had veto power the whole time. They would remember more stuff or they would correct me or realize there was stuff I didn’t know how to draw. This made it really easy to show them drafts of the book as I was drawing it. The name changed from “Refugee Reflex,” which I was never totally happy with, to “The Best We Could Do.” An excerpt of "The Best We Could Do" by Thi Bui Courtesy of ABRAMS BooksĪround this time I was shifting a lot of my life around so I could fit both my aging parents into it. That sort of happened while I was working on the book and that was also around the time that I realized the book was about parents and children. That would have been really nerve-wracking for sure! But the lucky thing is that my mom lives in my backyard and my dad lives four blocks away. Suddenly I had so much empathy for my parents because I was finally a parent myself.Īfter working with your parents for so long on this story, when you finally showed them the final piece, were you nervous? I think that was the major shift that made me feel like all this material I had been sitting on for such a long time, I could actually turn into a story. Then the other thing that changed for me soon after grad school was I became a parent myself.
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