"Writing is very much a form of fighting."

New York Times bestselling author Nancy Jooyoun Kim on turning pain into prose, treating first drafts like toddlers, and her propulsive novel, WHAT WE KEPT TO OURSELVES

Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Nancy’s poignant mystery now!

---

Me: Big congrats on the paperback release of WWKTO! How are you feeling?

Nancy: I love paperbacks and I'm thrilled to get this new cover in people's hands.

It is a REALLY cool cover

Paperbacks are such a fresh and fun way to really rethink and reimagine the life of a book. I love the new very moody cover too!

I love that paperbacks are the ~forever ~ version, too. Hardcovers are fleeting, but this'll be the one people pick up for years to come.

I never thought about it that way. You're 100% right. It's interesting to think how sometimes a hardcover can be big and splashy, but the true life of a book emerges through the paperback.

I personally love the way we interact with books when the covers are soft. We bend them in interesting ways. They're closer to bodies and they feel like they really belong to us.

It's an honor to publish in any format but TBH paperback is my favorite.

Yeah, they're somehow less...formal? Stuffy? You can get sand in the spine and stains on the pages and it's all good. They're meant to be tossed in a bag and kept close to you!

Yes, they truly feel like best friends or lovers. Hahah.

They live with us in a less formal way.

Yes!! Okay, we could wax poetic about softcovers all day lol, but I want to talk about WHAT WE KEPT TO OURSELVES! For the uninitiated, can you share a little about the book?

Yes, of course! WWKTO is about a Korean American family in working-class Los Angeles, a family that unravels when the mother disappears and a dead stranger appears in the backyard. It's a love letter to where I grow up and the people and communities that raised me. It's also an examination of the stories we tell (or don't tell) to survive and the costs and rewards of sharing who we really are.

Where did the idea for this novel come from?

This novel was inspired by two very formative events: 1) the death of my estranged father in a car accident when I was in my early 20s which made me really rethink both my relationship to him...and the patriarchy! And 2) the birth of my daughter, my first and only child, in the pandemic. The disappearance of the mother in my book is a metaphor for the many ways that women feel like they disappear in motherhood especially during the early stages.

That's so beautiful—several of my friends became mothers during the pandemic, and I heard a lot of, "No one told me it would be like this." Was it tough or cathartic to dig into such big, emotional events?