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- [00:09]
A
You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. As we look back in this year of books, one novel keeps appearing over and over again on best of lists. Flashlight by Susan Choi. It was named one of the best books of the year by npr, Time, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, and many more. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and it was also our November get lit with all of it book Club selection. The story follows a family who doesn't know how to communicate and who were torn apart one fateful night in Japan. There's Sirk, a Korean man who grew up in Japan before moving to America. Sir is brilliant, cold and secretive. He doesn't really feel he belongs anywhere and except with his daughter Louisa. He had that daughter with a white woman named Anne who he met in Massachusetts. Ann is unhappy in her marriage and has some secrets of her own. Plus she is struggling with a mysterious medical condition that has left her unable to walk. Their daughter Louisa is a spunky kid who is smart, perceptive and prickly. And it turns out Louisa has an older half brother. She knows nothing about Tobias, who Ann had when she was young and left to be raised by his father. Everything changes for this family after a fateful move to Japan where Cirque has landed a teaching job. One night, Louisa and Sir are going for a walk on the shore. They don't come back. Louisa is found in the morning, nearly drowned. Cirque has disappeared and is presumed dead. Flashlight follows Ann, Louisa and Tobias as they cope with the aftermath of that loss and tells the story of what actually happened to Sirc. Susan Choi joined me earlier this month for a sold out get lit event. Here's that conversation. So your book is so complex. It travels time, it travels the world, it travels perspectives between the characters. But but then it's also really simple. It's a case of people learning how to deal with their emotions. So when people come to you and say so what's Flashlight about? What do you say?
- [02:31]
B
Ooh, that's like the hardest kind of question to answer. Making a big thing small. I think I usually start by saying that it's about a family and they're a small family but larger than they realized. So the book starts out with this family of three, mom, dad and daughter, but there's actually somebody else as you've maybe learned if you've read it. And I think it's a family story at its heart for me.
- [03:02]
A
You said this book was partially inspired by a trip you took to Japan as a child. What was it about that trip that you wanted to capture.
- [03:13]
B
I think it was a quality that if I hadn't also found like some plot Y stuff, would not have been that interesting to read about. It was a quality or an experience for me of just total unfamiliarity. I'd never. I was nine when me and my mom and dad went to Japan. The things that happen in the book did not happen to us, which is good, but it was really life changing anyway in a positive way because I'd never been out of the United States. I had been growing up in Indiana in a, you know, medium small town. And so to be dropped into Japan in the late 70s and also like dropped into. I mean, my parents were like, here's school. Everybody was Japanese. Unsurprisingly, I didn't speak Japanese. I think my sensei spoke some English. But it was. It was like an instant cultural immersion. And it was kind of life changing in a modest way. So I always wanted to write about it, but I needed more oomph to make it a book.
- [04:22]
A
When did you first learn about how ethnic Koreans living in Japan were treated after World War II?
- [04:29]
B
Such a good question. I remember how I really got deep into it, which is an amazing scholar named Sonia Riang, who grew up as Zainichi and has done kind of amazing work writing about that community. And I remember encountering a book of hers. I think it was pretty straightforwardly titled Koreans in Japan. Maybe it might have been a little more elaborate, but I was already really interested in the relationship between the two countries because of the history of colonialism. Japan colonizing Korea. That was the Korea that my father grew up in. So I think having that pre existing interest and then realizing that there had been ethnic Koreans in Japan during the colonial period, not just Koreans in Korea, dealing with Japanese was really surprising to me.
- [05:24]
A
This book switches between perspectives each chapter. Was that always the case when you were writing?
- [05:31]
B
Was always the case when I was writing it because it was the only way I could figure out how to write. But I didn't have a real plan for the book, if that makes sense. I was trying to write about these people and I found that I could only write about one at a time that that was happening. It wasn't really an intention, but I would write about things from Louise's point of view that would become stultifying or frustrating. I would write about things from her mom's point of view. Eventually I was like, I guess I should get into Dad's head too. So it was. It just kind of. I kept accumulating these perspectives, but I didn't for a long time. I didn't realize the book would alternate between them. And then I just. You sort of work with what you have. Then I had like a bunch of alternate perspectives and I was like, I'm gonna use them all.
- [06:21]
A
Whose voice came to you first?
- [06:24]
B
Louisa's came first. Yeah. But Ann, her mother, was a close second. Because one of the first. I don't think this is a spoiler for people who haven't read, but for those of you who have read, one of the first scenes I remember writing was this scene where the mother and daughter go strawberry picking and things happen that they don't expect. In addition to the picking of strawberries, there are other sort of more disturbing events that take place. And I'd written that scene from Louisa's point of view, but what's going on with her mother is really important. And I wanted to go into her mother's point of view. And ultimately that's where we. Where we get it in the book. We get it from Ann, not from Louisa. Louisa got cut for time.
- [07:15]
A
Let's talk about each character. Cirque. He has three names in his life. There's this Japanese name, Hiroshima. I listened to the audio first. I read your book when it first came out, and then I listened to the audiobook the past two weeks.
- [07:27]
B
Oh, nice.
- [07:28]
A
And it's so great because the little kids yell Hiroshi, Hiroshi for him. But then he discovers his Korean name, Seok, and then he goes by Cirque as an adult. Which of these names feels the most real for him?
- [07:44]
B
For him? Oh, gosh, I don't know. We'd have to ask him. I think that's a really hard question for me to answer. I'm gonna have to take a wild guess and say that I feel like his third and final name, Cirque, which is not a Korean sounding name at all, but it's a name that is for ease of pronunciation by English speakers. I think that that's the most real name. It represents the person he wants to be. He really wants to remake himself American. And I don't know, maybe I'm projecting a little bit. My name is Susan Choi. Choi is not how my name is said in Korea at all. But a decision was made, you know, way ahead of my coming along, that that name would be said in a way that is easier for English speakers to handle. And. And so I think there's something about that self erasure and accommodation that, you know, Cirque does that to himself and sort of Wills himself into this different form.
- [08:54]
A
How does Cirque's otherness affect him as an adult?
- [09:02]
B
I think it is the reason that he's so secretive. For one thing, he does not share. He almost shares nothing with the people closest to him. There are no people closest to him, actually, because he won't let anybody get close. And so I think it's that sort of, I don't know, mirroring or reversal. He's always this strange quantity to everyone, and so he kind of makes them the same. There's always this distance or separation. And I think I saw that a lot. I mean, my father has a totally different biography than Cirque does, but he always sort of had this sense of the one and only in a way that, you know, he was very singular all his life, even though he made a home and a life for himself in this country and had many connections, many friends, students. But there was always some sort of sense solitary quality that still kind of lingered like an aura.
- [10:09]
A
Let's talk about Ann. What characteristics did you want Ann to have?
- [10:15]
B
You know, I think one of the main things that I wanted Ann to be was somebody who was so interested in being different that she would kind of go headlong into something without stopping to think about it. And she goes headlong into this marriage with someone that she really doesn't know very well or understand. She feels this. There is this, you know, true connection, this kind of spark between them, but it kind of turns out to be the spark between people who want to escape themselves and maybe want to escape into somebody else. And then once they get there, it's. It's hard because, you know, the movement's over. They're now together. And I think I wanted her to be somebody who would kind of act for first, think later. And then, you know, the later comes in her marriage where she's kind of lost.
- [11:06]
A
Yeah. Anne and Cirque have a difficult, at times marriage, but she. Does she ever consider leaving him?
- [11:16]
B
I don't think she does. You know, there's a separate question, which is if I had thought she did what I have chosen to write about it or kind of leave it off the page because that's so weird thing in books. Like, there are things that I think you know about the characters, but then you're like, well, I don't think I'm gonna represent this for the audience, the readers. And then there's other things that you maybe never discover fully. And I don't think. I don't think she had gotten that far when their marriage is ruptured by other means. I think she was still too in it and kind of in the struggle to really imagine, like, could I totally change my life and just walk away?
- [11:58]
A
It's interesting you mentioned that Sirque was so secretive. He never tells Ann or Louisa that he has a family and a sister in North Korea. Why does he keep that to himself? Why doesn't he share that with the two people he should be closest with?
- [12:16]
B
This is something I thought about a lot because the fact that his family goes to North Korea not really knowing what they're going to find, they're bamboozled, I think is our English term for what happens to them is so. I think it's so frightening and frightful because not just is North Korea even then, this kind of black box where what goes in doesn't come out, we don't know what's happening there. It turns out to be a truly shocking sort of an abusive state. But also, you have to remember, and it's something that I had to remember all the time, that the incredibly palpable aura of anti communism just pervaded so much. And I kept thinking about even stories my father would tell me about being a college student in this country and getting pulled off a Greyhound bus and dragged into a back room for questioning because he looked Chinese and Chinese people are probably communists and we'd better check this thing out. Like he was just taking a bus. You know, that happened to my father in like the late 1950s. So I think I was thinking all the time about Sirc's fear that this situation where his family go off to North Korea and now suddenly they've kind of vanished into a communist country. What's that going to look like for him as an American? He's terrified that anyone will learn. And then it's like a stain. So he keeps it a secret.
- [13:57]
A
The family moves to Japan. Ann has ailments. She sometimes thinks that it's in her head that she has these ailments. But we ultimately find out that she has Ms. Why doesn't Ann do anything about her illness initially?
- [14:16]
B
I think she really does think it's all in her head. The experience of being in a completely unfamiliar culture really paralyzes her in all these ways. And she's a pretty. You know, one of the things that I really like about Ann is she's. She's kind of capable. She doesn't really care what people think. She's very independent minded. She sort of, you know, goes off and marries this Asian guy that she's not Even sure, like what country he comes from. But when her body starts doing crazy things, haywire things, she really. Because it's happening at the same time as she's immersed in this culture that has kind of actually paralyzed her emotionally. She thinks she's experiencing kind of a bodily version of that paralysis. Like, she. I don't know.
- [15:13]
A
I wanted her to tell someone.
- [15:15]
B
I know.
- [15:15]
A
I really did.
- [15:16]
B
I know. And she does, eventually, but not before, you know, her life is upended anyway.
- [15:24]
A
She has a very sort of happy relationship in the middle of the book with this fellow named Walt.
- [15:33]
B
Walt?
- [15:34]
A
Yes. He seems a little bit awkward. He seems like such a nice guy. He's quite loving towards her. What does Walt do for Ann?
- [15:47]
B
Walt just likes her, kind of at first sight, and I loved that about him. She, at the point in her life, when she encounters him, her Ms. Has really advanced to the point that her daily life is extremely compromised. Right. And she's fiercely independent, and she is, you know, like, still driving, but she can't really walk. She's using crutches. She can't really carry. She's this kind of spectacle of stubborn independence. And when they first meet, you get the sense that. Well, you get it. You don't get a sense, you're told. Because Walt sort of responds to her. He's been watching her for a little while. They share an apartment complex, and he's sort of been watching this woman going, what's happening here? But whatever it is, he kind of likes it. He's a little afraid of it, but he's just drawn to this stubbornly independent person, I think, because he is. She realizes that she's noticed him, too. And he's always alone. They've both always been alone in each other's sort of peripheral vision.
- [16:55]
A
Let's move on to Louisa. When we first meet Louisa, it's with her father on the beach, and then she's in a psychiatrist's office. And I believe this was the story that you wrote for the New Yorker. Yeah.
- [17:09]
B
Yes.
- [17:10]
A
Okay. Why did you want to introduce that character this way? We could have met her later on in the story, but we meet her first. She's the first one.
- [17:21]
B
Yeah. And you're giving me more credit for advance planning than I really deserve. When that story ran in the New Yorker, which. And then it becomes essentially like the prologue of this book. I was already struggling with this book. I was trying to write these characters, this story. I could not. You know, it was just like I was in a room full of stuff where I was like, I Don't know. It was like I was in that room of Waltz with all the bookcases. I just. I had a lot of material already, but I could not organize it or find a path. And that story in the New Yorker took. Took form as kind of almost a carve out of stuff that I was trying to make. Make sense. Even after it existed, I still wasn't sure that's where the book would start. And I had another starting point that was when they arrive in Japan. But the thing that those two possible starts had in common were they were Louisa in both cases. And I think I always envisioned this book as somehow being a book that you would enter through her. And it may be as simple as I've already mentioned. You know, this. This childhood experience of cultural dislocation and kind of like immersion in a dream world of, you know, Japan. And that desire to get back there was so big in me that I think it just didn't occur to me to enter into that world through anybody's eyes but hers. And then once I got there, I was like, okay, what else is here that matters?
- [18:55]
A
People have very strong feelings about Louisa.
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B
I know. I know they do.
- [19:02]
A
What have you heard from readers about Louisa?
- [19:07]
B
When I first published that story, I did a reading at American University. And afterwards in the Q and A, it emerged that I was working on a novel. And one of the students said, so you mean a whole novel about Louisa? And I said, well, you know, there will be other things. And then the student went on to say, do we stay with her a long time? Does she, like, grow up? And I said, yeah. And the student goes, what a nightmare. And I was like, it might be, but I was sort of tickled, I guess. And then, you know, my own mother said, is this bragging? My mom said, you weren't obnoxious like that. Maybe that is bragging a little bit. But I was relieved.
- [19:54]
A
What did you want to explore through a character like Louisa?
- [20:00]
B
I think the key fact about her, she is independent, prickly, too smart for her own good. She's really her father's child in a lot of ways. And I was interested in this difficult, small family dynamic in which the mother and the father already aren't sure how to talk to each other anymore. And then the child really seems to take after the father, have lots of loyalty to him, and a lot of kind of prickly push away toward her mom. But then you drop a bomb in the middle of this little group. And so it was also about, how does this child, who really is already not very lovey dovey is the technical term I'm gonna use. How is this child gonna. Gonna recover from this monstrously traumatic event? Is she gonna draw herself closer to other people and open up, or is she gonna, you know, hunker down further away and close up? And I was like, well, of course she's gonna do the second thing. She's not gonna know how to heal herself.
- [21:17]
A
You are listening to my conversation with author Susan Choi. Her novel Flashlight was our November get lit with all of it book club selection. We'll have more after a quick break. This is all of It. You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue my conversation with author Susan Choi. Her novel Flashlight was our November get lit with all of it book club event. As always, our sold out audience had some great questions for our author. You'll hear some of those in a moment. But first, here's more of my conversation with Susan Choi. Tobias. Let's talk about Tobias. Anne gets pregnant young. She has a son who's raised by his father and his family.
- [22:12]
B
Family.
- [22:12]
A
He comes back into Ann's life as a teenager and then as a young adult. Why did you want to include a son into this relationship, into this story? You talked about this little family unit. And then here comes the son.
- [22:25]
B
Here comes the son. Kind of. That's a good pun, Alison, but kind of literally, because he's sort of a sunny presence, which I didn't initially realize he would be. But then as soon as that started becoming clear, I was like, oh, we need this guy. You know, initially, I have to say, characters sort of reveal themselves in an incremental way, at least to me. And so sometimes, I'll admit, you'd never admit this about a real person in your life, but sometimes with characters, you're being a little pragmatic or sort of a little manipulative about them. Like, I brought him in in that strawberry picking scene because I. He was a secret that Louisa's mother has kept from her. So that was his meaning. He wasn't really a person to me yet in my mind, he was just this secret. But once he got into the book, he just kept. Like mushrooms, he just kept popping up. And his character kept being more and more important and kind of irresistible. And I think I was writing more of him before I understood how much, much the book needed somebody like him. Somebody who really does want connection and love and who's really forgiving. You know, he doesn't turn up and kind of reprimand Anne for not having been part of his life all these years. Like, she's expecting that he just turns up with, like, unconditional love for her.
- [23:52]
A
He looks a lot like her, which is a big part of the book. And Louisa's biracial. How does this affect the story?
- [24:02]
B
Well, it drops a big wedge between Louisa and this brand new brother that she didn't know existed from the very start. And I think that it was really interesting for me as a writer to have this way through these characters of writing about these issues of not looking like, you know, whoever it is, not looking like a parent, not looking like everybody else, feeling as if you're kind of wearing this conspicuousness all the time. And these were definitely, you know, my childhood is an origin for some of this stuff. And so I think Tobias ends up being a way, this sort of concrete person, a way for me to write about Louisa's really complicated feelings about being biracial, about being a brown person who, you know, idolizes, like, blonde actresses when she's a little girl and internalizes this sense of like, oh, I'm not pretty, you know, and instead of it being all abstract and theoretical, it kind of is around this person who's now suddenly her brother.
- [25:15]
A
The novel spans decades. It jumps around through time quite a bit. How did you decide how bright big to make the time jumps?
- [25:23]
B
I wickedly love big, disorienting time jumps. I just really like them. Interesting. I really like encountering them as a reader. And I'm always like, ooh, where are we? What happened? What? You know, she's married, slash divorced, slash, you know, she's a movie star now. Like, I just enjoy this. I've always admired writers who do it, and so I have this, like, mischievous urge to do it. And I think as this book was unfolding and sprawling a little bit, I started having some fun with it, you know, where I thought, like, well, I kind of want to bring this book into the 21st century. And I'm just going to do that by, like, leapfrogging over, you know, these big stretches of time and kind of surprising the reader with where the characters have wound up.
- [26:11]
A
There are secrets in the book. How did you think about your pacing of the novel? When to reveal certain things.
- [26:21]
B
You know, the biggest secret of the book, which is the fate of Cirque. These are the things you should never admit in front of readers. I did not plan for that to be a secret from the reader at all. I thought that the. The fate of Sirk would be a secret from his daughter. And his wife, his family. But I thought that the reader would know, and so the suspense would be you would know where he was, but she. They wouldn't know. And so you'd be thinking, oh, my God, when are they going to find out? But the book kept this gesture that I'm making for listeners, that helpless gesture of the hands with, which means it just kept getting larger and going in directions I didn't expect. So it kept doing that. And internally, events that I had thought would happen kind of early in the book kept migrating further and further toward the back of the book so that there ends up being a big secret from the reader, too.
- [27:25]
A
That's so interesting.
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B
And that sort of evolved all by itself. I mean, it was noticed before the book went to press. Like, my editor and I both noticed this had happened and we were like, huh, that's interesting. Didn't realize that was going to happen. But we, you know, thought that maybe it. Maybe it was a good evolution.
- [27:47]
A
Let's go to the audience for questions.
- [27:51]
B
Hi. It's wonderful to hear you talking about this and love the book. We shared it with our book group. And I had a question. Did you feel as Louisa did other growing up in the United States? I did, yeah, I did quite often. It was a. It was cathartic is too big of a word. That's a big word. But it was. It was nice to write about that feeling because I did feel it when I was a young kid, mostly before I left the Midwest and moved to a much larger, more urbane, more diverse. And so I hadn't thought about those feelings in a while. It was nice to kind of remember the loneliness of it. It was a lonely feeling to often have people saying, you know, what are you? Where'd you come from? You know, I thought that the way that you used chronic illnesses in the book was really well done, both the Ms. And then also dementia. And I feel like it's quite difficult to use chronic, like use chronic illnesses like those as a plot point without getting icky. But I think you did it amazingly. How did you. How did you think about making them realistic and drive the plot in a way that wouldn't make people feel sad in a bad way?
- [29:26]
A
That's a really good question.
- [29:28]
B
Thank you. I really appreciate that. And I think that, like a lot of things, it was something that I tried, and then I felt like maybe it was working. There wasn't a series of sort of decisions I made about how to depict Ms. So much as I realized I really wanted to write about it. And I wrote about a lot, actually, that Ann Walt chapter in which we encounter Ann many years later as sort of like hunkered down in this illness and kind of having figured out how to live with it. That chapter was so long originally because I just, I got there and I found it.
- [30:13]
A
It.
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B
So again, I don't want to use the word cathartic. It's too big. But I found it so helpful to write that reality. My mother has Ms. And she's had it since I was very young. And so I've grown up with her, beside her, watching her, and was always really scared to write about this. I didn't want to get it wrong, but once I started doing that, it felt, writing about it, it felt so good to be seeing it through my writing, if that makes any sense. Such that the chapter in question was much longer than the one you encounter. And I think that then it was sort of a question of like, how will readers respond to this? Not, you know, I'm going to do it in a certain way and it'll work, but I'm going to do it and see how it lands. And dementia. That was, it was very similar.
- [31:08]
A
Did you know what the ending of this book was going to be when you sat down to write it?
- [31:12]
B
No, I had no idea. I didn't know if they would find each other again. I didn't know if he would be alive at the end or if he would not be alive at the end. I really, I had no idea. I had no idea. But I knew that I wanted to try to bring them together again. And I knew that, realistically speaking, given the situation I had created, that it would take time, a lot of time. I mean, that's why I think I wanted to bring the book into the 21st century. I was like, I want to win them enough time to find each other somehow.
- [31:50]
A
That was my conversation with author Susan Choi from our November get lit with all of it book club event. We spent the month reading her novel Flashlight. Up next, an amazing performance from singer songwriter Sarah Kinsley, including a special rendition of her hit song the King. Stay with us.
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