Author Jennifer Haigh blends Boston and Shanghai in new novel

Boston’s Jennifer Haigh talks Shanghai traffic, adoption, divorce, and writing without plotting.

By Lauren Daly

Growing up in a small coal-mining town in Appalachia, travel “wasn’t a thing,” Jennifer Haigh tells me in a recent phone interview from her Boston home.

“But I’ve wanted to go to China my whole life. Then this chance just fell out of the sky.”

That chance was a fellowship from the Shanghai Writers Association in 2016. Haigh applied and got it.

There, her wheels began turning when she witnessed the megacity’s traffic.

“Shanghai makes New York look like a cowtown. In 2016, it was one big traffic jam. I’d never seen anything like it. And for someone who’s lived in Boston for 20-something years, that’s saying something,” she tells me. Read the full story at Boston.com