Your first book choice dates to 1868. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. For anyone who doesn’t remember it from girlhood, please give a précis, and for the rest of us, please explain what the March family teaches about mothering.

Mrs March has four daughters and they all call her Marmee. Her husband is away serving in the Civil War. So, for most of the book, she’s the rock of the family.

In so many of the books I read as a girl, it was the dad that was the strong figure. I’m thinking of Caddie Woodlawn, Johnny Tremain and even a lot of the Jane Austen novels. The mother in Little Women was the strongest mother I came across.

Marmee is a character that really resonates for me. She’s obviously not Chinese, but she believes that integrity and hard work are the most important things in life. She holds her daughters to very high standards. She doesn’t sugarcoat much. She also reveals to her rebellious daughter Jo, the star of the book and a character loosely modeled on Louisa May Alcott herself, that she had a bad temper too when she was younger. That’s exactly what I did with my own daughter Louisa.

Marmee March’s mothering style is very different from the Tiger Mother archetype. She encourages play and creative expression, and allows the girls to make their own mistakes. What does this have to do with getting into Harvard?

She encourages her daughters to play, but it’s often within the home. A lot of the play takes place within the family, which is very much the way I was raised. My husband and I spend a lot of time with our kids — playing charades, jumping in bed, watching movies and most of all, reading together. So the picture of family life in Little Women looks a lot like my household.

The kinds of mistakes that Marmee allows her daughters to make are very similar to the kinds of mistakes that I allow my daughters to make. Marmee provides a lot of guidance, she allows them to experiment within a moral framework. So it’s actually not as different as you might think. 

Alcott’s parents famously studied their four daughters, taking notes since their birth. Did you do so too?

I didn’t even know that. I didn’t take notes with a book in mind, but I kept a long computer file of things that the kids said which I found adorable. Even when Sophia, my older daughter, was three years old I recorded all the funny things she said; and with my second daughter, I set down all the smart alecky things that she said. So when I started writing this, I did have a file of contemporaneously recorded stuff. Most of what I wrote down was them putting me in my place. If you read the book, you’ll see that my daughters are the heroines and they have all the best lines.

Let’s move to the Mainland of Chinese mothering. You’ve chosen The Good Earth by Pearl Buck, a Pulitzer Prize winning 1931 novel about a rural Chinese couple who pull themselves out of poverty while raising a family. Tell us about it.

I read this book when I was about nine years old. It just made such an impact on me. O-Lan, the mother in this book, gives birth to two sons and two daughters, one of whom she strangles in infancy because there is not enough food to sustain the family. She’s born a slave. She’s plain and coarse. She toils silently and stoically all her life to provide for her family and is basically never rewarded. When her husband gets a little wealthier, virtually the first thing he does is take in a concubine. O-Lan has stuck with me for all these years.

Until you came along, O-Lan was certainly the most famous Chinese mother in Western literature. But not the sort of mother immortalised on greeting cards, at least in the West. She committed theft and, as you mentioned, infanticide. Was she a role model?

The story is about such a different time and different context. It’s not that I aspire to be an unrewarded, self-sacrificing, silenced woman. But O-Lan has some impressive qualities: stoicism, and a deeply internalised sense of commitment to her family. She is definitely not a role model, but there are aspects of her character that I do admire.