This year, at 46, I finally published a book. People who don’t know me often ask, “How did you find the time to write it?” — as if I might confess that I had help from either amphetamines or private access to an additional dimension. But I like to point out that, for most of my life, what I really made a career out of was being a non-writer.
As a result, it’s quite plausible that my real expertise lies in how not to write a book, and for prospective writers, there are lessons lurking in that failure that are just as telling as whatever I later managed to get right.
Even as late as the eighteenth century, ice cream was often reserved for those patient enough to wait for snowstorms or wealthy and patient enough to harvest ice from mountains or frozen rivers and keep it from melting in underground pits insulated with layers of sawdust, straw, or animal fur.
So part of the reason ice cream was so coveted is that, like vanilla, it was scarce and impracticable. And yet, even as its availability and practicality increased, so, too, did its associations with comfort.
While Korean barbecue restaurants may have sparked the initial appeal of Santa Clara’s Koreatown in the 1980s, today’s restaurants run the gamut, cooking foods that reflect what’s served at feasts in Korea — tofu stews, blood sausages, spicy rice cakes, braised short ribs, and black bean noodles. Korean Spring BBQ, one of the older guards and the first wooden charcoal grill Korean barbecue restaurant to open in the Bay Area, lists more than 60 dishes, while Jang Su Jang, another highly trafficked spot focused on meats and soups, boasts over 75 menu items.
This expansiveness was likely born out of the competitiveness that has long existed here. As the number of Koreatown restaurants has grown steadily over the past decades, restaurateurs have remained hesitant to stick to specialty items, instead presenting an expansive selection of dishes so customers won’t need to search elsewhere for what they want.
“More Than I Love My Life,” Grossman’s new novel, shows the writer at work in this characteristically expansive style, racing to stuff as much of life as possible into a single framework. This time around, as he explains in the acknowledgments, his book germinated from the real-life story of a Yugoslavian partisan fighter with whom Grossman developed a deep friendship over 20 years and who asked him to write her tale and that of her daughter. The novelist notes that he was granted “the freedom to tell the story but also to imagine and invent it in ways it never existed.”
Hamya’s novel follows a young, unnamed woman of color armed with multiple degrees and bitter experience of the job market. It follows in the tradition of recent novels explicitly concerned with the precarity of academia and publishing.
For people from the part of the world where he grew up, Aw reflects, “the normality of separation” is ingrained but produces pain “so deep that it can’t be spoken of in any way other than perfunctorily”. His memoir is affecting because, as well as reaching a better understanding of his own family history, he sees his ancestors in today’s migrants and reminds us that their stories are complex and remarkable, wherever they are from.