Writing Into the Darkness w. SUSAN CHOI

Susan Choi

Susan Choi’s new novel, Trust Exercise, is out now from Henry Holt. (Buy on IndieBound.) Susan is the author of the novels My Education, A Person of Interest, American Woman, and The Foreign Student. Her work has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award and the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. With David Remnick, she co-edited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. She’s received NEA and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. She lives in Brooklyn.

Discussed In This Episode

The affair novel. “It never works for me to try to do something a certain way.” Eating lunch without guilt. Writing into the darkness. What the work wants to tell you about itself. False endings. Questioning and listening. “Often the missing ingredient is time.” Novels as geologic formations. Forget your work. Re-vision. Keep going, fix it later. Self-righteous procrastination. Scientology. “Who says?” Sudden changes of direction (that probably aren’t that sudden). Where you shine the spotlight and where you cast the shadow. The advice Susan would give her younger self.

Bonus Segment: The Reader-Writer Relationship

Susan discusses how she thinks about this crucial dynamic.

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Writing Into the Darkness w. SUSAN CHOI

Susan Choi

Discussed In This Episode

Bonus Segment: The Reader-Writer Relationship

Further Reading