Totally Booked: LIVE! In this special episode of the podcast (in-person at the Whitby Hotel with a live audience!), Zibby chats with National Book Award-winning author Susan Choi about FLASHLIGHT, a gorgeous, ferociously smart, and impossibly heartbreaking novel that traces a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory. Susan discusses the emotional and structural complexity of the book—how it was written out of order and quilted together with research and imagination. She delves into themes of family, grief, and cultural identity, and shares why she champions complex, even unlikeable characters. Finally, she reflects on her writing journey, from childhood stories and struggling through grad school to eventually working at The New Yorker and writing her first novel.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome back to Totally Booked.

So delighted to have you here and so excited to be talking about Flashlight, the new book from Susan Joyce, welcome. Thank you for being here. 

Susan: Thank you for having me.

Zibby: Had a last minute self-doubt moment there. Um, I'm gonna read you all Susan's bio really quickly and then we will get into it. Susan is the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for fiction as well as the novels, The Foreign Student, american Woman, A Person Of Interest, and My Education, she is a recipient of the Asian American Literary Award for fiction, the Penn WG Seabold Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

She teaches in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome, Susan. So Flashlight, we were just talking, we last did an interview during COVID. Her book came out in paper in hardcover in 2019, trust exercise, and we talked about it for the paperback in 2020. And now here it after five years is Flashlight.

So what has happened in between. 

Susan: I know it's like a blink of an eye on also like a thousand years. 

Zibby: Yes. 

Susan: Like was that even this century when, when we first talked? That was 2020 when we talked. I think that at that time I was first wrestling with the idea for this book. I had been generating some material as writers say that like was shapeless and formless and confused.

But by the end of that summer of 2020, I was able to publish a short story called Flashlight, which is actually now the very first pages that you encounter in this novel? Um, it was a short story that was in the New Yorker, and it came out of, kind of in the course of that year, starting to get like a slightly clearer sense of what the story would be.

And can you share what the story is? 

Yeah. I don't wanna share too much, but, um, the book center's on a, a small. A small, sad family. It's about you're, ..

Zibby: You're not selling it. You got, you gotta start again. 

Susan: Yeah, I know, but I mean, they're kind of riveting people. Um, Louisa is at the center of the story when we first meet her.

She's a young girl, she's 10. And in those very early pages, spoiler alert, but this was in the short story, um, her, her father has undergone some serious catastrophe and has just disappeared. He is just gone when we encounter her. She's 10. She and her mother are sort of like left reeling by this disappearance.

They don't really know what happened. He's presumed to be drowned and we follow this family of now two as they kind of try to make their way forward when this catastrophe strikes. They're in Japan, but they're Americans and so they return home and try to put their lives together again. And the short story that I published in 2020.

Was a real like writer's hack. I have to say, I knew the larger world of this story, but I could not quite bring myself to write the eerie and mysterious things, and so I, I skipped two afterwards. So in the story, you meet her after this bad thing has happened in the book, you see all the things, all the things that happen.

Zibby: Do you mind if I just like read a paragraph to give them a sense of your, 

Susan: I do not mind all,.. 

Zibby: Give everybody a sense of your writing. Style, which is absolutely gorgeous. 

Susan: Thank you. And it's a treat for me to hear someone else read my work. 

Zibby: So I'll just read this first section to wet people's appetites.

Okay. Louisa and her father are making their way down the breakwater. Each careful step on the heaved granite blocks. One step farther from shore. Her mother is not even on the shore, for example, seated smiling on the sand. Her mother is shut inside the small, almost waterfront house they're renting most likely in bed.

All summer Luisa has played in the waves by herself because her mother isn't well, and her father is unknowingly dressed in a jacket and slacks. But tonight he has finally agreed to walk the breakwater with her. She has asked every day since they first arrived, spray from the waves, sometimes lands on the rocks, and so he has carefully rolled up the cuffs of his lacks.

He still wears his hard polished shoes. In one hand, he holds a flashlight, which is not necessary. In the other hand, he hold, he holds Louise's hand, which is also not necessary. She tolerates this out of kindness. One thing I will always owe your mother is that she taught you to swim because swimming is important to know how to do for your safety.

But when she gave you lessons, I thought it was too dangerous. I was very unfair. I hate swimming. They both know the opposite is true. Perhaps her father recognizes her comment for what it partly is. A declaration of loyalty to him as well as for what It mostly is a declaration by a 10-year-old child who is contentious by reflex, far over the water, far beyond where the breakwater joins with a thin spit of sand, the sunset has lost all its warmth and is only a paleness against the horizon.

They'll turn back soon. See, look at that. 

Susan: Can I add something? 

Zibby: And the crowd goes wild. Yes. Go ahead. 

Susan: A few paragraphs afterwards, Zibby stopped. Louise's father says something and then the narrative says these are the last words he ever said to her, or something to that effect. 

Zibby: Oh, should I have kept going? Do you want me to keep going?

Susan: No, I think it's not, I think it's, it's sufficient, but they are the last words. He speaks to her. 

Zibby: Well, the way that you weave everything together, the traject trajectory that you take them on and the readers on, and how everything loops throughout their lives, and the significance of the flashlight itself and how everybody changes and learns and has to adapt and grow and rebel and grieve and be angry, like all the things are woven throughout the book.

There is not an emotion that you do not touch on pretty much. Was that. Intentional. 

Susan: It's so good to hear. I think that, um, the word weave that you used is actually incredibly appropriate because writing this book was so, it was a, it was a journey. I'll tell you. It was really a process and I did have to like do a lot of weaving, so to speak, because I wrote, I would just sort of find my way forward with these different characters that these different things had happened to, and then I would find myself at a point where I would think.

We don't really know enough about them in this part of their life, or we haven't really seen them being this way, or we don't really understand like how these two people are now in a relationship with each other. And so I'd kind of go back and I'd add more and I'd like actually weave it in. The book that you're holding is.

You know, the, the pages are obviously ordered from like number one to whatever the last page is, but they weren't written in that order at all. And this is one of those books where if I thought that I could write it in page order, which I've done with books, I was, I've never been more wrong. This book was written completely out of page order because I kept realizing I needed more of something and then I would.

Weave it in. So thank you for giving me like that image. So, but that's really how it happened. 

Zibby: So it wasn't ever longer and you had to cut it back. This was like the more expanding 

Susan: Oh, both. 

Zibby: Both. 

Susan: If you can imagine a situation in which I both had to expand and contract, like yes, lots was cut out, lots was added, more cut, more added.

It was very. 

Zibby: Well, it wasn't also only about a family. This is about cultures and history and there's so much more here. How about the research? When did that come into it? Was there research? Did you know a lot of the stuff? Talk about that. 

Susan: Yeah, I mean, again, with the weaving, I'm gonna stick with your image.

Zibby: You take it's you take it and run with it. 

Susan: Lots of weaving happened or, or maybe like also patchwork. We can have like weaving. 

Zibby: Patchwork is nice. 

Susan: We can have quilting. I like textile arts. Like, I'm gonna use all those metaphors. 

Zibby: I, I feel the launch party is changing. 

Susan: You know, there's gonna be yarn. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Susan: Um, no, it's, the research was also very, very quilted.

I have to say. Like I, I started out with a certain amount of research. I would run with the story. I would end up in a place where I'd go, oh my God, I have no idea what this was. Like. I'd go do more research. I'd kind of patch it in. Um. I really wanted to, first of all set this story in Japan, so I kept setting myself challenges that I wasn't totally prepared to deal with.

I wanted to set this story in Japan because I spent time in Japan as a little girl, and it made a huge, huge impression on me, but I just did not know that much about the history of the country, so I had to go fill that in. I then wanted my. Father character Louise's dad, I don't know if people could hear this.

I hope you can hear this a little in the dialogue, but he's not a native English speaker. He's not American born, he is. Ethnic Korean, but he was born and raised in Japan. So his Korean parents immigrated to Japan in search of a better life, in search of economic opportunity, in search of basically like a way to put a roof over their heads.

And that's all happening early in the 20th century. So their son is born in Japan, but he's an ethnic Korean. And that was a very specific. Situation, which I also really wanted to write about, but again, did not know enough. So I would, I would write and then write myself into a corner where I had just no idea what the, what the facts were, and I would have to kind of put on the breaks and do research, and then often go back and rewrite big sections because I would learn things that would make what I had written seem totally.

Off. Oh my gosh. 

Zibby: And what about how you wrote about it? It's not always so easy for people to put themselves in the shoes of younger characters and how exactly it feels when you're rebelling and your home life is a mess and this is happening and that's happening, and how therapy itself can fail you and all of that.

And that level of anger, like what did you tap into to write that? 

Susan: Well, that's a great question because I, I think I must have tapped into aspects of myself, although I can't happily, I mean, I'm so happy that these things did not happen to me. You know? Um, my father lived a great long life. These, these catastrophes are totally fictional, but.

There must be some source of like childhood grief and anger that we all have regardless of whether our childhood was ideal or really challenging. And I think I must have found that, you know, the character of Louisa, I'm really fond of her, but she's difficult. My own mother has just finished reading this book for the second time, um, which I'm very moved by, but also my mother after the second read was like, uh, that Louisa, she's obnoxious.

And I was like, ow. Um, but I think that, I don't know, I think that I was able to kind of tap into like, you know, those ordinary woes that we all have, but then try to use my imagination to get a little further in terms of like, what would it be like if, if your life was like this, if you lost your dad when you were only 10.

Zibby: Well, there's this whole debate of likable characters versus not likable characters. Obviously Louisa is also charming and delightful to read, but in, in crafting her, is that something, how do you feel about likable versus likable characters when you read them and when you decide how to make a character seem?

Susan: Oh, I'm so glad you asked. I'm really on team unlikable character. Okay. I, I think, I mean, I don't want all characters to be unlikable, and I don't want my characters to be unlikable. I, I just don't want them to be. Like saintly or perfect. Why would, why would we wanna read about someone who's just completely flawless or at least personally as a reader?

I love when characters are really flawed because hopefully in the story, they grow and change and, and, and often become better people. And that's so much more meaningful if you can see them in their imperfection, first of all. So that's my hope for Louisa. You'll all get to judge and decide, but I really wanted Louise in the course of this book to grow and get outside of herself, and for that to be meaningful, she has to be kind of a tough one at the outset.

Zibby: Wow. And there's so much in the book that if I were to discuss would be a reveal because things keep twisting and turning. So I'll leave some of the plot heavy stuff out, but wanna talk to you more about how you even got to the point where you could write a big sort of master piece, like novel at this stage of your life.

Like, did you like to write as a kid? What were you like when you were Luis's age and when you were 10 and all of that, and how did you get to hear. 

Susan: That's such an interesting question, especially bringing Louisa into it, because I did draw on myself for Louise. I was surprised when my mother pronounced her obnoxious.

I, I, I was like, you know, I'm thinking of certain ways that I was, and of course being my mom, she was like, you weren't like that at all. Um, which is sweet, but I, you know, that's, that's what moms are, are for. Um, I feel like I had a little bit of ness. When I was a kid, I was one of those kids who did not wanna ever go outside.

Um, I had my nose in a book all the time. I was definitely chosen last for dodgeball, always. I was not athletic. I finally joined a soccer team when I was probably in my. Like early adolescences and was like one of the many, many, many, many defenders because like you just, you just sort of run around in the back of everybody else.

It's like, you're never gonna, I played events and thought that 

Zibby: was such 

Susan: a important decision. Some of the defenders were really important. It's fine. You were probably an important defender. I was not. I, did you ever notice that there were a lot of extra defenders though, just kind of running up and down?

I was one of the extras. 

Zibby: Um, I, I'm, I'm now going down like a, a very dark path on my whole childhood athletic career, but that's okay. Go ahead. 

Susan: Oh my gosh. People will be like, how did the interview go? And I'll say, well, I just had caused Zibby to totally question everything about her childhood. 

Zibby: When we left. She was out there with cleats on and, you know, look cleats, us strapping on shin guards and, and getting back into it. 

Susan: You know, pretty butch.

Like, I, I felt good as a soccer player, but, but having perspective, I was not. You know, I was, I was not the most graceful child and I think that, um, I definitely went through like a big ugly duckling to, I wouldn't say swan exactly, but like, at least to getting the braces off and getting contact lenses.

Like I went through that. So I think that I spent a lot of time as a kid, um reading and writing little stories and sort of in my own world and, and banding together with other awesome nerd girls, um, where we would, you know, play Charlie's Angels and, and, and, you know, um, leave reality behind. And I think that.

You know, it's funny, I loved writing really early and I wrote really early. Like, I wrote weird stories. I didn't even know what I was doing, but I, I, 'cause I liked books so much, I would like make little books. Um, and then I lost that in high school and college. I think I became very self-conscious about like, what do we do with our lives?

What's my, what's my path? And it didn't occur to me that this could be a path, like lucky me, but at that time I thought, oh, I have to, you know, I don't know, like do something professional, like it didn't occur to me that I could do this professionally. So there was a big gap and it wasn't until I left college kind of in a state of total confusion that I went back to writing and really started thinking about whether it could be the thing, you know, not just a thing I'd always enjoyed or a thing I could do on the side, but like, could it actually be the thing that I would do.

Zibby: And then what happened? 

Susan: I then I, I, I, I did what everyone with a dream does. I went to graduate school. Um, I went to graduate school and realized that it was gonna take a lot to really make it as a writer, and I did not really show much evidence of having that in graduate school. I wrote a lot of things that never got finished.

I wrote many, many more things that thankfully never got published. Um, and it wasn't, it wasn't, again, until I left grad school that it was like an, it was like getting serious part two where I realized that I didn't just have to go to grad school, but I had to actually figure out how to do it on my own.

Like, how do you get a job in New York and actually earn enough money to pay your rent and go home every night and try to like write. So that was, that was hard, but it was also a great time of life. I'm really nostalgic for it. 

Zibby: And how did you achieve your first, biggest or professional success? 

Susan: With a lot of help, honestly, I was working as a fact checker at the New Yorker magazine, which is like the just the best job ever. I'm so lucky to have gotten that job. I had gone to the New Yorker, wanted to, wanting to work in the fiction department because I wanted to be a fiction writer, and that seemed logical. I was like, I've, I obviously, like that's a first step. This was, you know, grad school was in the past and I got a, got an interview and I went in to meet the fiction editor and you know, was wearing like whatever.

Um, my impressive outfit was, I think, does anybody remember Country Road? Sure, yes. Does some, some people remember it Okay. That that really dates us. So Country Row was like my first like office wear or like nice clothing. So I was wearing my country road out country road outfit. They've gone out of business sadly.

But, um, I didn't get hired and I was like devastated. I sort of thought, well, that's it for me as a fiction writer. If I can't get a job in the fiction department of the New Yorker, I guess I can't be a fiction writer. I was not connecting the dots accurately. Like that was the way to become a fiction editor.

I was trying to become a fiction writer and a friend of mine said, you know, why don't you try for a different department? If you were a fact checker, like that wouldn't interfere as much with your fiction writing, which had not occurred to me, um, that, that working in the fiction department would interfere because you're putting all of your effort into sort of editorial support for other writers. So I went and got a job in the fact checking department and started working on my book nights and weekends. And by the time I had a manuscript, I also had like amazing people at the New Yorker who. I mean, how many times did they hear this? Every day down the halls of the New Yorker.

So I just wrote my first novel, you know, um, I'm sure like every day five people said that, but no one ever lost patience. And when it was my turn to say it, there were people there who said, you know, I think you should try sending it here. Try sending it there. Try sending it to this person. And eventually, after doing a lot of that, I found an agent, you know, and that person helped me get published.

It is amazing actually. I was really lucky. I was lucky to be here in New York. 

Zibby: I worked, I, I wanted to be a writer and so I got a summer internship at Vanity Fair, thinking the same thing. Like I'll start at a magazine and work my way up. And after like a day I was like, oh, no, no, no. There was like literally no path here.

Like I was filing the, the contracts of all the big deal authors. 

Susan: Yes. 

Zibby: And all the slot. And I was like, alone in this room, like pushing the file cabinets in and thinking I'm not gonna get a contract by working here. Like by shuffling contracts, like here, filing other people's contracts. 

Susan: Yeah. Yeah. But it's, I completely relate to, obviously we made the same misjudgment because it's hard to figure out how publishing works, although 

Zibby: I have yet to get a contract with Vanity Fair.

So maybe. Maybe Plan B was also bad. But anyway, I think Plan B is. Well, if there is no great path to being a writer is really the thing. There is no, I think. 

Susan: I think the truth is there is no. Yeah. I mean that was a great path that I ended up stumbling down, but it was so much like luck really. I was really, really lucky.

I didn't really come to New York thinking I have to be here to become a writer. I came because I dropped outta grad school and New York was like. You know, at the other end of the bus ride that I'd already been taking every weekend, 'cause I was so miserable in grad school that I was constantly leaving to go to New York.

So I ended up here not understanding, I mean, great writers can become great writers from anywhere, but there really is, it has to be acknowledged. Uh. A complicated, powerful thing to like being in this city full of people who are really interested in writing and publishing, who are constantly like frothing around, you know, talking to each other.

It definitely helped me. 

Zibby: So a flashlight obviously is something that sheds light on something that was there all along, but that you couldn't see without it. What do you think this book does in the same way? What does it shed light on? 

Susan: I mean, it shed light on what it was about for me to be totally honest, like that flashlight that appears in the very early pages that Louisa's dad is carrying it because he's very, very cautious and Louisa's, sort of scornful.

Like you read that, she's like, Ugh, we don't need a flashlight. Like how, you know, how baby-ish? I think often I end up writing scenes that I don't fully understand. I mean, there's some, there's definitely some mysterious quality here where. And I, and I write a lot of stuff that you never see, that never works.

It's just bad. Um, the stuff that I write that for some reason it does work often has these qualities that I didn't plan. And like the flashlight was definitely one of those things. I didn't premeditate that and think like, oh, it'll be symbolic, or, oh, it's going to tell readers about these two characters, about this man who loves his daughter more than anything on earth, but has had to keep a bunch of secrets.

Hm. And so that idea of like concealing things, revealing things, being cautious, like all of the layers of that character, I didn't even know them yet when I wrote that scene. But I think the flashlight was something that, I don't know, I often with my students refer to like our writing brain. Um, my writing brain knew something about that flashlight before I did, and later, as I was muddling my way through this book.

Like I would experience flashes of understanding, you know, where like I would look back at a scene and go, oh, this is about this. That's why this scene works and should stay in the book. And this other scene isn't telling me anything and doesn't need to be here. 

Zibby: Well, I, I do feel there is a message to this book too, that in a way love, not love conquers all that sounds so like cliche, but that you can never, the things that matter most to you, you just never give up.

And usually that is someone or something you love and no matter what gets in the way, you can find a way back. 

Susan: Yeah. I mean, I, you know, said earlier that. Lucky me. The catastrophe that befalls Louisa did not befall me, but one of the ways that I feel like I was able to write about it is this book, like does have a lot of my feeling for my own dad in it.

You know, like I, I, I'm so lucky I lost my dad finally a few years ago. He lived to be 91. He was the most amazing person and. I think that, you know, it was an act of imagination and also kind of like staving off fears to like think about, well, what would it have been like if he and I had been torn apart by these forces?

And so I think that helped me write it even though, you know, it was all imagination. Thankfully, sometimes we write into our fear, right? 

Zibby: Yeah. What's the worst thing that can happen? 

Susan: What's the worst thing that can happen? I'm like, how would I respond? 

Zibby: Mm-hmm. 

Susan: Not gracefully, no. 

Zibby: Um, do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Susan: Oh, so much advice. Um, boy, I have so much advice that I never take, but I always, I always dole it out 'cause it's so good. My greatest advice, which I, I have been given multiple times is if you really want to be a writer, write every day, write every day. It does not matter what it is. It can be in entry in a journal, it can just be disconnected.

Observations, you know, you don't have to be sitting down working on your novel or even working on a story, an essay, anything like that. Just write, like sit down and put your thoughts into sentences and see. See where that leads. I tell my students this every single semester when I get a new batch of students, and every once in a while a student will say, do you write every day?

And then the excuses start. 

Zibby: No, 'cause I'm teaching this class. 

Susan: No. Yeah. Because I'm giving all my time to you, young people. But um, it really does make such a difference when I manage to do that in my own writing life. That's when it happens. 

Zibby: Amazing. Susan, thank you so much. I'm so excited for you. 

Susan: Thank you.