What happens when one day, one impulsive decision, one declined call is what defines the rest of your life? Alicia Upano‘s debut is a love story, it’s a natural disaster novel, and most of all, it’s a haunting reckoning with the many ways that the people and places we come from stay with us, even as, in the case ofย Everything to the Sea, they have been swept out to sea.
Following Jane and Kenji from the summer fling of their early twenties, unable to withstand the destruction of their hometown, the novel takes us from the Island of Hawai’i, to O’ahu, to San Francisco, where, years later, the two reconnect as Jane works as an architect and Kenji curates an art exhibit on the tsunami that upended their lives. Upano captures the messiness of first love, the comfort and claustrophobia found in the social ecosystem of island life, and, in spite of how her characters misunderstand each other, finds a way to bring them back to each other, and to the land that made them.
There is a specific comfort in reading a book written to and from the places and people you love most, of seeing the language found in the mouths of your childhood, the smells of the places that raised you, on the page. Everything to the Sea reminds us that even in our worst moments, in the times we are most lost, there are people who are willing, who want, to love us. It took me home. I hope it does the same for you.
Mariah Rigg: Everything to the Sea is such a gorgeous novel. You say, in a recent letter to readers, that this book was a 17-year journey. What did this journey entail? What were some of its highs and lows?
Alicia Upano: From the point I began writing fiction until I signed the book deal was 17 years. If I had been told at the beginning how long it would take, I probably would not have kept going, but Iโm glad I did. In those years, I drafted a few failed books, lost people I loved, moved from California back home to Hawaiสปi, hadย children, and, from afar, witnessed numerous calamities. Those 17 years allowed me to build my skill and live a full life, all of which informed the book.
MR: Were there writers or books that informed the writing of this novel? That inform your writing as a whole?
AU:I love this question! So many. I had a rotating stack of books that I consulted like teachers while drafting Everything to the Sea, including The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin, Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho, Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong, If You Leave Me by Crystal Hana Kim, The Other Americans by Laila Lalami, The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, Memorial by Bryan Washington and more.
Overall, writing about Hawaiสปi from Hawaiสปi informs my fiction in myriad ways that I could not have predicted before I returned home. Thus Hawaiสปiโs writersโhow they grapple with the complexity of our home, their perspective, their humorโinspire me daily.
MR: Everything to the Sea is a love story on so many levels. Of course, there is the star crossed love at the forefront between Kenji and Jane, but there is also the love present in how the people of Hilo show up for each other, the love found between people and the land that they live on and care for. What drew you to the form of the love story? What difficulties did you find in literary romance as a form? You say in your author’s note: “This is a love story as much as it is a story of grief.” How did you balance the story of love with the grief of this novel?
AU: I canโt resist a love story in any genre, and Iโve been calling Everything to the Sea a literary love story because it doesnโt follow many of the romance genreโs conventions. That said, writing a love story proved harder than it looks! Namely because the lover is also the villain, and so the writer must depict both their communion and their collapse. In this book, that disconnect is griefโthe lover canโt fix it or cross it.
What a love story allows is for a complex world to be funneled through the intimacy of two people. Even as I write new work, Iโm most thrilled when I can get two characters skirting the edges of intimacy. All that risk and potential.
And thank you for noticing that this novelโs love extends beyond Jane and Kenjiโs union. They also love their families, neighbors, and the land where they were raised.
MR: Lies and misunderstandings are such a huge part of the plot of Everything to the Sea. As an author, how do you balance the empathy and love you have for your characters with the necessity for them to make mistakes? With the necessity to put your characters in situations that will cause them pain?
AU: As a love story, the conflict needed to be intimate, not external. A lie betrays trust, and in storytelling, can function much like Chekhovโs gun. Often I recall David Mametโs assertion that all drama is about lies, and at the end of the play, the lie is revealed.
So for me, itโs fruitful to consider: why does this character lie? How do they justify the lie to themselves? How can the lie create reader irony and seed revelation?
MR: The plot of Everything to the Sea is also driven by who stays and who leaves. Under colonization, there is the violent history of who is allowed and encouraged to occupy land and who is forced off of it. How did you balance the tension of this staying and leaving when plotting your novel, especially knowing there would come a time when Jane would return to Hilo?
AU: I appreciate the many layers of this question, and what I might offer is this: Any story set in Hawaiสปi contends with its history in one way or another. As you know, that history is not past here, but visible in a way that I did not experience while living on the continent.
We both descend from settlers not native to Hawaiสปi. While we have European ancestry, our families also arrived from other outposts of the American enterpriseโnamely, the Philippines and Samoa. We are products of empire.
And while there remain many issues I did not explore head-on in this book, it was important for me that these characters were aware of where their families came from and the loaded legacy of settlement. Nevertheless, Hawaiสปi is the only home theyโve ever known.
MR: Everything to the Sea alternates between Jane and Kenji’s POV, but it breaks its rules halfway through when it comes to how this shared POV works. What was behind the decision to move from alternating sections to alternating chapters for the lovers?
AU: Those initial long sections allow us to see the world through the individual charactersโJane falling in love with Kenji, and likewise, Kenjiโs experience in the shelter post-tsunami. Yet when they reconnect, their lives entwine, and so it made sense for their POVs to alternate by chapter as well. This also allowed me to narrate the revelations in real time.
I was nervous about this choice; I knew it was risky. But I received support every step of the wayโfrom early readers, my agent, and my editors. One metaphor Iโve mentally returned to is the making of a lei hilo, a simple lei I learned to make as a child and teach my children now. Our lovers are twisting around each other, much like two strands of leaves in the lei, in the latter half of the book.
MR: I grew up on O’ahu, and like your characters, grew desensitized to the constant threat of obliteration–by tsunami, hurricane, earthquake, bomb, or starvation due to forced destruction of food sovereignty on the Islands. You mention the 2023 fires on Maui in your author’s letter, and in the time since your book was sold, the Kona Low devastated much of O’ahu and Maui many times over. How did this very present climate collapse inform your book? Do you think that the times that we live in necessitate a certain responsibility from us as writers?
AU: Thus far, Iโve had the privilege and luck to not suffer these impacts directly, but each disaster keeps our vulnerability top of mind. Hawaiสปiโs isolation and dependence render us fragile to such tragedies, and so what was fruitful for my imagination is also a very real anxiety. And itโs not just Hawaiสปiโthe world abounds with disasterโso any story written in contemporary times could potentially engage with our present climate collapse.
I donโt think this necessitates a certain responsibility among writers, but rather, a responsibility among us all. How can we care for the people and places we call home? People will have different solutions, and access and capacity will vary wildly, but itโs important to hold the question.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alicia Upano was born and raised in Hawaiโi. She is the recipient of the Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award Hawaiโi, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and a Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholarship. Her short fiction has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Southern Review, The Best Peace Fiction: A Social Justice Anthology, and more. After years in Asia and both U.S. continental coasts, she now resides on Oโahu with her family. Everything to the Sea is her debut novel.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: Mariah Rigg is a Samoan-Haole writer who was born and raised on the island of Oโahu. She is the author of Extinction Capital of the World, Winner of the Asian Pacific American Award in Literature, Winner of the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award from Publishing Triangle, a Gold Medalist in Fiction for the Nautilus Book Awards, and named a best book of 2025 by Esquire, Electric Lit, Debutiful, and Chicago Review of Books. Mariah is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Mount, Oregon Literary Arts, Carolyn Moore Writersโ House, and Lambda Literary. Her poetry and prose has been featured in The Sewanee Review, Oxford American, Electric Lit, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Currently, she teaches creative writing in Kwinitekw Valley at Mount Holyoke College.