Alison Stewart: 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 Serk, a Korean man who grew up in Japan before moving to America. Serk is brilliant, cold, and secretive. He doesn't really feel he belongs anywhere except with his daughter, Louisa. He had that daughter with a white woman named Anne, who he met in Massachusetts.

Anne 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. It turns out Louisa has an older half-brother she knows nothing about, Tobias, who Anne 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 Serk has landed a teaching job.

One night, Louisa and Serk are going for a walk on the shore. They don't come back. Louisa is found in the morning, nearly drowned. Serk has disappeared and is presumed dead. Flashlight follows Anne, Louisa, and Tobias as they cope with the aftermath of that loss and tells the story of what actually happened to Serk. Susan Choi joined me earlier this month for a sold-out Get-Llit event. Here's that conversation.

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Your book is so complex, it travels time, it travels the world, it travels perspectives between the characters, but then it's also really simple. It's a case of people learning how to deal with their emotions. When people come to you and say, so what's Flashlight about, what do you say?

Susan Choi: Ooh, that's like the hardest uestion 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. 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. I think it's a family story at its heart for me.

Alison Stewart: 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?

Susan Choi: I think it was a quality that if I hadn't also found like some ploty stuff, would not have been that interesting to read about. It was a quality or an experience for me of just total unfamiliarity. 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, [laughter] 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 medium small town. To be dropped into Japan in the late '70s, and also like dropped into-- 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 like an instant cultural immersion. It was life-changing in a modest way. I always wanted to write about it, but I needed more oomph to make it a book.

Alison Stewart: When did you first learn about how ethnic Koreans living in Japan were treated after World War II?

Susan Choi: Such a good question. I remember how I really got deep into it, which is an amazing scholar named Sonia Ryang, who grew up as Zainichi and has done amazing work writing about that community. 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. 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.

Alison Stewart: This book switches between perspectives each chapter. Was that always the case when you were writing?

Susan Choi: It 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 was happening. It wasn't really an intention, but I would write about things from Louisa'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.." I kept accumulating these perspectives, but for a long time, I didn't realize the book would alternate between them. You work with what you have. Then I had like a bunch of alternate perspectives, and I was like, "I'm going to use them all."

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Whose voice came to you first?

Susan Choi: Louisa's came first. Anne, 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 more disturbing events that take place. I had written that scene from Louisa's point of view, but what's going on with her mother is really important. I wanted to go into her mother's point of view, and ultimately, that's where we get it in the book. We get it from Anne, not from Louisa. Louisa got cut for time.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about each character. Serk. He has three names in his life. There's this Japanese name, Hiroshi. First, I read your book when it first came out and then I listened to the audiobook the past two weeks.

Susan Choi: Oh, nice.

Alison Stewart: It's so great because the little kids yell, "Hiroshi, Hiroshi," for him. Then he discovers his Korean name, Seok, and then he goes by Serk as an adult. Which of these names feels the most real for him?

Susan Choi: For him? Oh, gosh, I don't know. We'd have to ask him. [laughter] That's a really hard question for me to answer. I'm going to have to take a wild guess and say that I feel like his third and final name, Serk, 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. 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 way ahead of my coming along that that name would be said in a way that is easier for English speakers to handle. I think there's something about that self-erasure and accommodation that Serk does that to himself and wills himself into this different form.

Alison Stewart: How does Serk's otherness affect him as an adult?

Susan Choi: I think it is the reason that he's so secretive. For one thing, 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. I think it's that sort of, I don't know, mirroring or reversal. He's always this strange quantity to everyone. He makes them the same. There's always this distance or separation.

I think I saw that a lot. My father has a totally different biography than Serk does, but he always had this sense of the one and only in a way that 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 solitary quality that still kind of lingered like an aura.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about Anne. What characteristics did you want Anne to have?

Susan Choi: I think one of the main things that I wanted Anne to be was somebody who was so interested in being different that she would go headlong into something without stopping to think about it. She goes headlong into this marriage with someone that she really doesn't know very well or understand. There is this true connection, this spark between them.

It turns out to be the spark between people who want to escape themselves and maybe want to escape into somebody else. Then once they get there, it's hard because the movement's over. They're now together. I think I wanted her to be somebody who would act first, think later. Then the later comes in her marriage, where she's kind of lost.

Alison Stewart: Anne and Serk have a difficult, at times, marriage. Does she ever consider leaving him?

Susan Choi: I don't think she does. There's a separate question, which is if I had thought she did what I have chosen to write about it, or leave it off the page, because that's a weird thing in books. There are things that I think you know about the characters, but then you're like, "Well, I don't think I'm going to represent this for the audience, the readers."

Then there's other things that you maybe never discover fully. 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 in the struggle to really imagine, like, could I totally change my life and just walk away.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting you mentioned that Serk was so secretive. He never tells Anne 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?

Susan Choi: 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, 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. 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. 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. That happened to my father in like the late 1950s. I think I was thinking all the time about Serk's fear that this situation where his family go off to North Korea, now suddenly they've 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.

Alison Stewart: The family moves to Japan. Anne has ailments. She sometimes thinks that it's in her head that she's had these ailments, but we ultimately find out that she has MS. Why doesn't Anne do anything about her illness initially?

Susan Choi: 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. One of the things that I really like about Anne is she's capable. She doesn't really care what people think. She's very independent-minded.

She goes off and marries this Asian guy that she's not even sure what country he comes from. 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 actually paralyzed her emotionally, she thinks she's experiencing a bodily version of that paralysis. I don't know.

Alison Stewart: I wanted her to tell someone.

Susan Choi: I know.

Alison Stewart: I really did.

Susan Choi: I know. She does, eventually, but not before her life is upended anyway.

Alison Stewart: She has a very happy relationship in the middle of the book with this fellow named Walt.

Susan Choi: Not Walt.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: He seems a little bit awkward. He seems like such a nice guy. He's quite loving towards her. What does Walt do for Anne?

Susan Choi: Walt just likes her at first sight, and I loved that about him. 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. She's fiercely independent, and she is 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.

When they first meet, you get the sense that-- you don't get a sense, you're told, because Walt responds to her. He's been watching her for a little while. They share an apartment complex, and he's been watching this woman going, "What's happening here?" Whatever it is, he 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.

Alison Stewart: 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. I believe this was the story that you wrote for the New Yorker. Yes?

Susan Choi: Yes.

Alison Stewart: 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.

Susan Choi: You're giving me more credit for advance planning than I really deserve. When that story ran in the New Yorker, and then it becomes essentially the prologue of this book, I was already struggling with this book. I was trying to write these characters, this story. I could not. 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 Walt's with all the bookcases.

I had a lot of material already, but I could not organize it or find a path. That story in the New Yorker took form as almost a carve out of stuff that I was trying to make sense. Even after it existed, I still wasn't sure that's where the book would start. 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.

I think I always envisioned this book as somehow being a book that you would enter through her. I've already mentioned this childhood experience of cultural dislocation and immersion in a dream world of Japan. 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. Then once I got there, I was like, "Okay, what else is here that matters?"

Alison Stewart: People have very strong feelings about Louisa.

Susan Choi: I know. [laughter] I know they do.

Alison Stewart: What have you heard from readers about Louisa?

Susan Choi: When I first published that story, I did a reading at American University. Afterwards, in the Q&A, it emerged that I was working on a novel. One of the students said, "So you mean a whole novel about Louisa?" I said, "Well, there will be other things." Then the student went on to say, "Do we stay with her a long time? Does she grow up?" I said, "Yes," and the student goes, "What a nightmare." [laughter] I was like, "It might be," but I was sort of tickled, I guess. Then my own mother said, "Is this bragging?" My mom said, "You weren't obnoxious like that." [laughter] Maybe that is bragging a little bit, but I was relieved.

Alison Stewart: What did you want to explore through a character like Louisa?

Susan Choi: 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. 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. Then the child really seems to take after the father, have lots of loyalty to him, and a lot of prickly push away toward her mom. Then you drop a bomb in the middle of this little group.

It was also about how does this child, who really is already not very-- lovey-dovey, is the technical term I'm going to use, how is this child going to recover from this monstrously traumatic event? Is she going to draw herself closer to other people and open up, or is she going to hunker down further away and close up? I was like, "Well, of course she's going to do the second thing. She's not going to know how to heal herself."

Alison Stewart: 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.

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You were 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 Blub 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.

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Tobias, let's talk about Tobias. Anne gets pregnant young. She has a son who's raised by his father and his family. He comes back into Anne'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.

Susan Choi: Here comes the son. [laughter] That's a good pun, Alison, but literally, because he's sort of a sunny presence, which I didn't initially realize he would be. Then, as soon as that started becoming clear, I was like, "Oh, we need this guy." I have to say, characters reveal themselves in an incremental way, at least to me. 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 a little manipulative about them.

I brought him in in that strawberry picking scene because he was a secret that Louisa's mother has kept from her. That was his meaning. He wasn't really a person to me yet. In my mind, he was just this secret. Once he got into the book, he just kept, like mushrooms, he just kept popping up. His character kept being more and more important and irresistible.

I think I was writing more of him before I understood how much the book needed somebody like him, somebody who really does want connection and love and who's really forgiving. He doesn't turn up and reprimand Anne for not having been part of his life all these years. She's expecting that. He just turns up with unconditional love for her.

Alison Stewart: He looks a lot like her, which is a big part of the book. Louisa is biracial. How does this affect the story?

Susan Choi: It drops a big wedge between Louisa and this brand-new brother that she didn't know existed from the very start. 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, whoever it is, not looking like a parent, not looking like everybody else, feeling as if you're wearing this conspicuousness all the time.

My childhood is an origin for some of this stuff. I think Tobias ends up being a way, the 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 idolizes blonde actresses when she's a little girl and internalizes this sense of like, "Oh, I'm not pretty." Instead of it being all abstract and theoretical, it kind of is around this person who's now suddenly her brother.

Alison Stewart: The novel spans decades. It jumps around through time quite a bit. How did you decide how big to make the time jumps?

Susan Choi: I wickedly love big, disorienting time jumps. I just really like them.

Alison Stewart: Interesting.

Susan Choi: I really like encountering them as a reader. I'm always like, "Ooh, where are we? What happened? What? She's married/divorced/she's a movie star now." I just enjoy this. I've always admired writers who do it, and so I have this mischievous urge to do it. I think as this book was unfolding and sprawling a little bit, I started having some fun with it, where I thought, "Well, I want to bring this book into the 21st century. I'm just going to do that by leapfrogging over these big stretches of time and surprising the reader with where the characters have wound up."

Alison Stewart: There are secrets in the book. How did you think about your pacing of the novel? When to reveal certain things.

Susan Choi: The biggest secret of the book, which is the fate of Serk, 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 fate of Serk would be a secret from his daughter and his wife, his family, but I thought that the reader would know. The suspense would be you would know where he was, but she, they wouldn't know.

You'd be thinking, "Oh, my God, when are they going to find out?" The book kept this gesture that I'm making for listeners, the helpless gesture of the hands, which means it just kept getting larger and going in directions I didn't expect. Kept doing that. Internally, events that I had thought would happen early in the book kept migrating further and further toward the back of the book. That there ends up being a big secret from the reader, too.

Alison Stewart: That's so interesting.

Susan Choi: That evolved all by itself. It was noticed before the book went to press. My editor and I both noticed this had happened, and we were like, "Huh, [laughter] that's interesting. Didn't realize that was going to happen," but we thought that maybe it was a good evolution.

Alison Stewart: Let's go to the audience for questions.

Audience Member 1: Hi. It's wonderful to hear you talking about this and love the book. We shared it with our book group. I had a question, did you feel as Louisa did othered growing up in the United States?

Susan Choi: I did. Yes, I did quite often. It was-- cathartic is too big of a word. That's a big word, but 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 city. I hadn't thought about those feelings in a while. It was nice to remember the loneliness of it. It was a lonely feeling to often have people saying, "What are you? Where'd you come from?"

Audience Member 2: I thought that the way that you used chronic illnesses in the book was really well done, both the MS and then also dementia. I feel like it's quite difficult to use chronic illnesses like those as a plot point without getting icky, but I think you did it amazingly. 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?

Alison Stewart: That's a really good question.

Susan Choi: Thank you. I really appreciate that. 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 decisions I made about how to depict MS so much as I realized I really wanted to write about it. I wrote about a lot. Actually, that Anne Walt chapter in which we encounter Anne many years later hunkered down in this illness, and having figured out how to live with it, that chapter was so long originally because I got there and I found it 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. 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, 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 [chuckles] than the one you encounter. I think that then it was sort of a question of like, how will readers respond to this? Not, 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. Dementia, it was very similar.

Alison Stewart: Did you know what the ending of this book was going to be when you sat down to write it?

Susan Choi: 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 had no idea. I had no idea. I knew that I wanted to try to bring them together again. I knew that, realistically speaking, given the situation I had created, that it would take time, a lot of time. 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."

Alison Stewart: 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.

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Up next, an amazing performance from singer-songwriter Sarah Kinsley, including a special rendition of her hit song The King. Stay With Us.