My next book is a memoir titled Something Inside Me Knows
If my books have anything in common, it's that they're all quite different from each other. I do love to change genres. At the same time, I've come to realize that all my books have one thing in common: They're all about leaving home in one way or another. This theme is so deeply buried in my books that it wasn't even visible to me, the person who wrote them, until years into my career as a writer.
Ash is about a girl forced to leave her home. Huntress is about two girls forced to leave their homes. Adaptatation and Inheritance are about two teens trying to get back to their home, only to realize that everything has changed. A Line in the Dark is about a girl who feels trapped and yearns to leave home. Last Night at the Telegraph Club is about a girl forced to leave her home. A Scatter of Light is about what happens after a girl is forced to leave her home.
A theme this consistent can only be rooted in personal experience. In the last two years, I've been excavating this experience from my memories, and I have transformed it into my next book.
It's called Something Inside Me Knows, and it's a memoir. It will be published by Dutton in March 2027.
The official deal reports from PW Children’s Bookshelf (top) and Publishers Marketplace.
Officially:
Andrew Karre at Dutton has acquired Something Inside Me Knows by National Book Award winner Malinda Lo (Last Night at the Telegraph Club). Incorporating free verse, found poetry, and lyric essay, this debut memoir weaves a nonlinear story of immigration and identity, connecting the author's childhood in small-town Colorado in the 1980s to her grandmother's experiences in wartime China. Publication is scheduled for March 2027; Michael Bourret at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret negotiated the deal for world English rights.
Unofficially, Something Inside Me Knows is about me, my family, and my ancestors. It's about how I was forced to leave my home in China when I was a child. It's about immigrating to America and growing up in Colorado. It's about America itself. It's about how I became a writer. It's about learning how to listen to myself.
This is a book that came to me out of seemingly nowhere and pushed aside another book I was in the process of writing. (That book will still happen, but the order of operations has changed.) This is a book that seriously challenged me as a writer because it wanted to be expressed as poetry, and I am not a poet. However, this book insisted that I learn how to write poems, so I worked very hard to do it.
The book that emerged is, I admit, kind of weird. There is poetry in it. There are lyric essays. There are timelines and photos and collages. It's not your typical memoir, but it is exactly the book it was meant to be.
Over the next year, I will tell you more about the process of writing this book. It's still not complete — we have only just begun the production process of designing and making the actual book, and I'll tell you about that as it happens. But the hardest work (for me, anyway) is over now. The words have been written, and they're already being read by other people, which means I'm already starting to let go of them.
This is by far the most emotionally difficult book I've ever written. I have no idea how I will feel when it's out there in finished form in the real world. I hope you will join me on this journey to find out.