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Thao Thai received her MFA in creative writing from Ohio State, but afterward she took off nearly a decade from the craft. “It was actually when I became a mother that I reengaged with books in a meaningful way and started writing again. Motherhood really unlocked my creativity,” she tells Bustle.

It also led her to the premise of Banyan Moon, her highly evocative debut which follows the lives of the three Tran women. Set in a Gothic, dilapidated house in the Florida swamplands, Thai explores both the fraught and thorny corners of mother-daughter relationships. “A lot of people think of motherhood as this monolithic experience where it’s either all sacrifice, all drudgery, or the super Pollyanna version,” she says. “For me, the reality was somewhere in between, and I really wanted that to be a part of that conversation.”