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Susan Choi is known for writing novels that mine enormous richness from highly specific settings, whether a high school-level theater program in 2019’s Trust Exercise, a sexually charged campus environment in 2013’s My Education, or a life on the run from the FBI in 2003’s American Woman. But her latest book, Flashlight—out now from Macmillan Publishers—is perhaps her most ambitious effort yet.
In Flashlight, a Korean national named Serk (formerly Seok) leaves the Japan of his youth to build a new life in the United States. What follows is a chronicle of four generations’ worth of his family life—the precision and emotional resonance of Choi’s sentences proving endlessly dazzling.
This week, Vogue spoke to Choi about how winning the National Book Award in 2019 affected (or didn’t affect, as the case may be) the process of writing Flashlight, digging into historical research about Korean-Japanese relations, and her preoccupation with abduction stories. The conversation has been edited and condensed.
Vogue: What did the craft process of writing this book look like for you?
Susan Choi: Oh, gosh, the process was so…I don’t want to say chaotic, because I think that that gives an impression of a lot of energy and movement and this was much more slow, meandering, confused, you know, like a blindfolded person trying to navigate a very complicated obstacle course. I mean, I really struggled with this book. I feel like it evolved in a lot of disconnected bursts of writing that then required me to go back and go in circles. It was a composition process kind of like no other. Honestly, it was more like the first book I ever wrote than my sixth book. I just felt like I’d never written a book before.
How did it feel to embark on a new project after winning the 2019 National Book Award in Fiction for Trust Exercise?
I have to say, it wasn’t really on my mind, and I’m so grateful for that. I definitely am someone who I would have thought would be really prone to finding that really stressful, but it was very hard to even connect those two facts in my mind. It feels so strange to say this, but it was partly thanks to COVID; like, COVID was such a huge rupture in our shared reality and in my individual reality, and this book really kind of grew out of COVID. I published the short story that now forms the very opening pages of the book during COVID—that was something that I had been working on during quarantine in 2020—and then started growing the rest of the book out of that. I just wasn’t really thinking much about 2019, or the National Book Award, or the fact that this book, if it even ever came to exist, would follow the previous book. There was a big gap that separated those two realities, and I think it wasn’t until this book was really close to being finished that I was like, Oh, this is the follow-up to that, and in the experience of any outsider to my life, this will be the next thing that comes after that other thing. I’m really glad I didn’t think about that much before, because it feels very strange. I don’t want to preoccupy myself about: Is this a good follow-up? Is it a weird follow-up? Is it a bad follow-up? It just is, and I can’t change it now.
How did you decide to focus so much of Flashlight on a parent-child bond?
I mean, the parent-child relationship is really interesting to me, as it probably is to a lot of people, since we all have parents and and then some of us also end up having children. The past decade of my life has been very parent-child-intensive, because I’ve been in that area of life that is sadly called the “sandwich generation” by certain magazine writers. When I first heard that term, I sort of wilted inside. It’s not that great to imagine yourself as a sandwich! But, you know, I have aging parents. I have growing children. The past handful of years have featured a lot of moments where I have had very intense periods of caring for both generations, in one direction and then the other. I also just finished a nonfiction book that is so astonishingly about parent-child relationships; Barbara Demick’s Daughters of the Bamboo Grove, which is about adoption and child trafficking. It’s a work of reportage, and it’s one of the most remarkable books I’ve ever read. I’m a huge fan of hers. I bought it for the plane, because I’m flying to the West Coast on Thursday for my book tour, and I devoured it in a day and a half. Now I have to go find something else for the plane. [Laughs.]
So much of the world is contained in this novel; what did the process of historical research look like for you?
That was another aspect of the process of this book that was so disorderly and maybe inefficient or maybe super-generative, I don’t know. But there was research happening in every possible way, and none of it was planned. The book came out of research that I was just doing because I was really obsessed by this string of disappearances that had taken place in Japan that had later been revealed to be abductions. I’m very, very fascinated by abduction stories of all kinds. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always found abduction to be a very disturbing, compelling human behavior and dating way, way back, I’ve always found these phenomena really interesting; like, my second book was about the Patty Hearst kidnapping, because I was really interested in that abduction. These abductions that have taken place in Japan were just one of those things that I was really interested by, and I’ve been kind of reading up on that and following that for a long time.
The relationship between Korea and Japan is another one of those topics that just has abiding interest for me, and it’s entered into a bunch of my work. I began reading about the Zainichi, who are the ethnic Koreans who ended up living in communities in Japan after the end of World War II, sort of marooned by changing geopolitical conditions, and that became another source of fascination for me. There were a couple of threads that just were spinning themselves along without having any book to weave themselves into, and when this book started to take shape, I pulled both those things in. Then the book that started taking shape spawned all of these really terrifying new research requirements, and once I’d sort of committed to this story that came out of research that I’d been doing in this leisurely fashion, suddenly there were all these serious research questions that I had to do in a more focused, serious fashion, and that was very, very intimidating. Then there were new, more focused, panic-driven bouts of research, which, I’ve got to say, extended right up to the final revision of the book. I had a research assistant for a semester—without his help, I probably never would have finished.
