Susan Choi Quotes

Susan Choi Quotes

Susan Choi is an American novelist. Choi was born in South Bend, Indiana to a Korean father and a Jewish mother. When she was nine years old, her parents divorced. She and her mother moved to Houston, Texas. Choi earned a B.A. in Literature from Yale University and an M.F.A. from Cornell University. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.

After receiving her graduate degree, she worked for The New Yorker as a fact checker; at this job she met her husband, the New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells.

Choi won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction and was a finalist of the Discover Great New Writers Award at Barnes & Noble for her first novel, The Foreign Student. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her historical fiction novel, American Woman. In 2010, she won the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award.

With David Remnick, she edited an anthology of short fiction entitled Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. Choi's second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her novel A Person of Interest was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2009. Her latest novel is My Education.

✵ 28. January 1969

Susan Choi: 2 quotes 1 like

“The voice tends to come first and then everything else follows. It’s never worked for me to think, here’s a character and they should have this kind of voice, let me try to force that. If I can’t tap into a character’s voice, I can’t really write the character…”

Susan Choi

On feeling the voice of a character in “Trust, Serendipity, and Consent: An Interview with Trust Exercise Author Susan Choi” https://www.bookish.com/articles/interview-susan-choi-trust-exercise/ in Bookish (2019 Apr 16)

Thinking

“I was also interested in what it’s like to experience in a really vivid and authentic-seeming way agency and choice in a circumstance that you might later in your life view completely differently, because as much as you were experiencing agency and choice, you were actually in a radically disempowered situation you weren’t even experienced enough to recognize. That’s why I think consent is such a complicated issue.”

Susan Choi

On consent being a theme in her book Trust Exercise in “Trust, Serendipity, and Consent: An Interview with Trust Exercise Author Susan Choi” https://www.bookish.com/articles/interview-susan-choi-trust-exercise/ in Bookish (2019 Apr 16)

Way , Life , Thinking