Hien Nguyen: On Writing Through Grief
In this interview, author Hien Nguyen discusses the teen hijinks and supernatural mystery at the heart of her new speculative YA thriller, Twin Tides.
Hien Nguyen is a speculative fiction writer who hails from the Midwest. By day she is a social science researcher and by night she writes about Vietnamese ghosts, monsters, and mythology. She is interested in the uplifting and haunting forms of human connection, and how SFF writing can lay those bare. Follow her on X (Twitter), Instagram, and Bluesky.
In this interview, Hien discusses the teen hijinks and supernatural mystery at the heart of her new speculative YA thriller, Twin Tides, her advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Hien Nguyen
Literary agent: Katelyn Detweiler at Jill Grinberg Literary Management
Book title: Twin Tides
Publisher: Delacorte Press, Random House Children’s Books
Release date: December 9, 2025
Genre/category: Speculative thriller/Young Adult
Elevator pitch: A haunted Vietnamese Parent Trap following two long-lost twins investigating their mother’s murder in a small town haunted by a vengeful ghost.
What prompted you to write this book?
Back in 2022, I remember reading articles about climate change-fueled drought causing rivers and lakes to dry to historic lows and sometimes revealing long-dead bodies of missing people. This was shortly after I lost my own mother in 2021, and I was struck by the immense grief those communities must have felt, especially grief suspended for years before the bodies of their loved ones were discovered.
After jotting down an idea of these discoveries leading to the survivors unraveling a decades-long mystery, a story about Vietnamese American twins and a vengeful water ghost started to form. I enjoy engaging with Vietnamese mythology when I write, and the ghost stories of Ma Da, or drowned ghosts stuck with me. Ma Da are drowned victims, often experiencing violent deaths that trap them as ghosts. Part of writing Twin Tides was exploring that idea of violence, and what type of violence might cause a soul to become vengeful in the first place.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I drafted the first act of this project shortly after conceiving the idea in 2022, but it was on the back burner as I focused on revising my adult dystopian project for submission that year (this project unfortunately died on submission).
I listed this project on my author website with a short pitch and mood board and did not think much of it until my now-editor, Bria Ragin, reached out to my agent inquiring about the project in late 2023. Originally conceived of as an adult manuscript, I worked with my agent, Katelyn Detweiler, to create a YA proposal. My first act was revamped, and I wrote a detailed synopsis for the submission package. There was some back and forth with my editor before the project sold in early 2024.
I ended up submitting my first draft in May of 2024 with my final draft due that fall. In addition to the manuscript getting aged down to YA, the plot was simplified during my writing process. I’d originally conceived the twins getting separated at birth, which entailed a much more complex plot that was streamlined with them becoming separated as children.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Twin Tides is my debut and was also sold on proposal. This meant the process of writing an entire book on deadline was a brand-new experience for me and it certainly was trial by fire. My editor has such a confident vision, and I really learned to trust both my instincts and her insight. I found myself much less precious about decisions, and I was much more willing during this process to cut or heavily revise versus when I was left to my own devices. There simply wasn’t time for me to obsess or hem and haw about my manuscript, and I do think I’m a better writer for it.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
In Twin Tides, Aria and Caliste discover they are identical twins because their long-missing mother’s dead body is discovered. Inevitably, their grief takes center stage, and I also found myself writing through grief during the writing process. I was initially a little apprehensive about it and thought a lot about the possibility of accidentally opening unhealed wounds.
While the writing process wasn’t easy, it also was less fraught than I anticipated. Writing Aria and Caliste’s story allowed me the space to engage with memories of my own mother in ways that were energizing and restorative. As I wove parts of her memory and quirks into the narrative, it was as if I was rediscovering parts of her the grief had buried.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
As a genre blend writer, speculative, horror, and thriller end up being amazing lenses to magnify what makes us afraid. I do hope readers enjoy the ride of teen hijinks, untangling the supernatural mystery at hand in Twin Tides, and feel as haunted in the small town of Les Eaux as the twins do.
I also hope that as the story progresses through the three POVs (including a ghost POV) and epistolary elements, readers interrogate what we consider to be monstrous in the first place and what legacies we inherit through our families and history.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Write weirdly, write wildly, and write what excites you. Of course, the market and its expectations will always be a consideration, but the writing process is joyful because your creativity is boundless. In the same vein of “don’t self-reject,” please don’t “self-limit.” Everything else is already trying to do that to you.
