Cynthia Salaysay’s Healing Heart
/“And then I went for dinner with friends. Nothing too fancy.” A simple celebration for a work that took eight years to complete, as she reveals.
In Salaysay’s debut Young Adult (YA) novel Private Lessons, 17- year-old Filipino American Claire Alalay turns to the piano to cope with her father’s death and to escape her mother’s conservative ways. She soon struggles with losing herself as she yearns to gain her white piano teacher's approval and affection.
Young Adult novel Private Lessons by Cynthia Salaysay
Channeling
A native of Oceanside, California, Salaysay was also coping with events in her own life when she turned to writing to find herself.
“I had recently come out of a toxic relationship, one that had left me heartbroken, and that led me to move, change jobs, and find new friends,” she says.
“Building up a new community, a new life, and the sense of independence that this developed in me, all of this went into the book.”
However, she didn’t start out confident in her abilities to accomplish a full novel.
Filipino American author Cynthia Salaysay
Building the skills
“I took classes and slowly built up my skills as a writer, chapter by chapter, rewriting much of the book three times over,” she says.
To fine-tune the believability of her protagonist, Salasay turned to research. “I am not a very competent piano player, so I spent a lot of time reading about the lives of pianists and composers, watching master classes on YouTube, and visiting piano forums online to ensure I had an accurate rendering of what Claire could play at her level, and what the technical and emotional challenges she would encounter in these pieces.”
And then there was wrestling with how “to figure out how best to tell some of the darkest parts of the story.”
“I spent a great deal of time avoiding the nature of the relationship between Claire and her piano teacher, but as I grew to understand and accept the hazards of power in my own past relationships, I was able to bring those aspects into the story.”
Honesty, healing
“I wrote many explorations of the healing heart … those went into the book as well,” she says. “Claire's healing from the abuse of her teacher, Paul, is very much an internal process, one that requires self-honesty, courage, and strength, but it can't be done without support — the love and care of her friends and family.
“Her challenges come up every day. Every day she plays the piano, she faces herself and has an opportunity to look at her problems with compassion.”
Fostering compassion and a yearning for connection are partly what inspired Salaysay to write her book. “Around the time that I started writing Private Lessons, I read The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I cried so hard over it, and I knew that I wanted to write a book that could connect to people like that,” she says.
Also, her own fondness for the Young Adult genre. She recalls loving Jesse Maguire's Nowhere High series when she was in high school. “I recognized in her characters a sense of loneliness and isolation that I also felt when I was growing up.”
“In Salaysay’s debut Young Adult (YA) novel Private Lessons, 17- year-old Filipino American Claire Alalay turns to the piano to cope with her father’s death and to escape her mother’s conservative ways.”
Voices
Salaysay says that she has always thought about wanting to “write a novel, in particular, a coming-of-age novel” because “I love the wistfulness, the wonder and the openness of young adults as they discover the wider world.”
“It is so important to see yourself reflected in the outside world in an uplifting way.” she says. It helped that, as an adult, she has had access to publications by Filipino Americans.
“I've read Gina Apostol, Elaine Castillo, Jason Bayani, Randy Ribay and Barbara Jane Reyes. All of them have spoken very directly to me. I love Filipino voices! They all have nourished me and helped support my own identity as a Filipino American.”
However, when she was growing up, the books she read as a child did not feature any Filipino American characters, much less protagonists. “I did not have such an example growing up, and I wish I did.
“I truly hope that this book will make Filipino American teens feel seen and supported!
Walter Ang
Walter Ang is the author of Barangay to Broadway: Filipino American Theater History. When he is not writing about Fil-Am theater, he delves into astrology and yoga. Visit http://amazon.com/author/walterang
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