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Angie Kim On Family Dynamics, Writing A Second Novel, and Her Own Immigration Story
Tuesday, September 05, 2023“It feels amazing and terrifying at the same time.”
Angie Kim moved as a preteen from Seoul, South Korea to Baltimore. Fast forward to the present, and Kim is an award-winning author with two novels under her belt—and lots of buzz to boot. Her latest novel Happiness Falls was published August 29.
A Good Morning America Book Club Pick as well as a finalist for the New American Voices Award, Happiness Falls chronicles the story of a family’s desperate search for their missing father and the family secrets they uncover along the way.
Zibby Mag talked with Kim about her highly anticipated novel Happiness Falls as well as the reoccurring themes throughout her work, including the complexities of familial relationships and our culture’s incorrect assumptions about intelligence.
Get your copy of Happiness Falls here, and read the full interview below.
Zibby Mag: Happiness Falls is a highly anticipated family drama. Can you tell us a little bit about where the idea for this story originated?
Angie Kim: “We didn’t call the police right away.”
When this sentence first came to me over three years ago, I knew immediately who the “we” was. For ten years, the Parkson family had been with me. A biracial family living in northern Virginia like mine, with a Korean immigrant working mom; a white stay-at-home dad; college-aged twins (Mia and John) with very different looks and personalities; and 14-year-old Eugene, who has a rare genetic condition and cannot speak. I’d written stories about them and fallen in love with them over time, and I saw what happened to them in my mind: the father and Eugene go for a walk in the nearby woods one morning, and only Eugene returns home, frantic, upset, and bloody, throwing the family into crisis. Over the course of the rest of the novel, this tight-knit, quirky family comes together to try to find their beloved father—and in the process learns to truly connect and communicate with one another.
So many of the storylines in the book are rooted in the most formative experience of my life: immigrating to the U.S. when I was 11. I didn’t speak any English, and I went from feeling like a smart, talkative, and happy (albeit very poor) girl in Korea to being bullied and feeling stupid and ashamed. It was the first time I realized that there’s a deep-seated assumption I think most of us have, including me: we equate verbal fluency, especially oral fluency, with intelligence. So much of that experience has informed my ideas, studies, and passions throughout my life—for philosophy, racial and gender dynamics, happiness theories, and language—which form the heart of this novel.
How does it feel to be publishing your second novel? Does it feel just as exciting and nerve-wracking as your first experience?
It feels amazing and terrifying at the same time! I think it’s actually more anxiety-provoking than the publication of Miracle Creek because with my debut, I had no idea what to expect, which was somewhat freeing. (When I was writing my first novel, I didn’t even think that it was going to be published into an actual book; I thought it would be something I used to learn how to write a novel and then put away in a drawer.)
Early in the pre-publication process of Happiness Falls, so many people who were key to the success of Miracle Creek—booksellers, librarians, bookstagrammers, reviewers, book clubs, and readers—reached out to say how excited they were. That sense of community and support is so energizing and exciting, and it heightens the sense of anticipation approaching the pub date for me. At the same time, because of that support, I feel this palpable desire of not wanting to let anyone down. Every book is different, of course, and I know that comparison of this book to my first one is inevitable.
We absolutely love the Happiness Falls cover! Can you share more about your cover design process and the significance of the layered images?
Thank you so much! I love it, too! Cassie Gonzales, senior designer at Random House, who designed this innovative, beautiful cover, explains, “The manuscript of Happiness Falls immediately captivated me and I was so excited to get to design the cover. The design was inspired by a pivotal line in the book ‘I can’t because he doesn’t believe, and he doesn’t believe because I can’t,’ which I put in my notes as I was reading. I was thinking about vicious circles, the anxiety spirals that the characters go through, and the winding paths that the investigation takes over the course of the book. However, my partner jokes that the true inspiration for the shape comes from my favorite snack, Trader Joe’s Crunchy Curls! I eat so many of them that they have invaded my subconscious. I’m still thinking about this story and the characters, and I can’t wait for everyone to get to read it!”
I remember when I saw Cassie’s design for the first time. We had gone through many designs by many designers by then, and as soon as I opened the file sent by my editor, I got chills and realized immediately what the other designs had been missing. I loved that it was multifaceted, that the spiral design showed the presence of two sides of the story. The spiral shape itself does so much work: it resembles the double helix structure of the DNA (genetics are a component of the story), and it shows the presence of two different sides of the story and of the characters (the family is biracial, Eugene has a dual diagnosis, Mia and John are twins, and on and on). I also love the full moon in the dawning light, which is featured prominently at the end of the book.
Why did you decide to focus the story around the secrets and bonds of family?
I consider Happiness Falls to be a companion novel to my first novel. My debut focused on the parenting angle, the extreme parenting sacrifices involved in medical care and immigration. Happiness Falls focuses on sibling dynamics and the experience of the non-speaking child himself.
I think family dynamics can be the most complex, with the most rich mix of memories and histories that shape the way we see the world. Communication breakdowns are common and even expected in the workplace, among neighbors—but I think we think of our families to be the place where you can be most open and vulnerable, so when there are communication breakdowns and/or discovery of secrets, we feel an acute sense of betrayal and disappointment.
What does your ideal writing routine look like? How do you best hone your creativity while writing?
My ideal routine would be to get up early in the morning and write for maybe four hours, then be done for the day, free to read and go to the movies, and spend time with my family. I think I’ve managed to stick to this routine for maybe three days in the last four years, but here’s to hoping it sticks one of these days!
One thing I have managed to do is to stick to what I call “method writing” (adapted from method acting; I was a theater major at an arts high school). I try to become the point-of-view character who’s narrating the scene or chapter I’m working on that day even when I’m not actively writing. Happiness Falls has one narrator, so I was in 20-year-old Mia’s head for a long, long time.
What books do you recommend readers pick up after reading Happiness Falls?
My touchstones in writing Happiness Falls, all of which I highly recommend, were Naoki Higashida’s The Reason I Jump (a phenomenal nonfiction written by a then-13-year-old Japanese boy about what it’s like to be a nonspeaking autistic); Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods (a missing-person story that uses the crisis to examine the complex history of a marriage); Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (the beloved modern classic that uses a haunting, retrospective, confessional first-person voice to great effect); John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (another beloved modern classic with a voice-driven, sarcastic, cerebral young woman telling a heartbreaking story); and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! (another voice-driven girl telling her family’s story in the aftermath of her mother’s death).
A few recent novels I think readers who enjoyed Happiness Falls might love, both because I loved them and because of some commonalities, are Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You (literary mystery/thriller that interrogates our true-crime-obsessed culture); Celeste Ng’s debut Everything I Never Told You (missing-person mystery that’s really a family drama involving a biracial family); Belinda Huijuan Tang’s A Map for the Missing (a debut about a Chinese-American immigrant who returns to a rural Chinese village to investigate his elderly father’s disappearance); and Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (my favorite book of the last year or two).
Angie Kim attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Kim Lives in northern Virginia with her family.
Posted September 1, 2023
