What We Kept to Ourselves is our November Book Club Pick

WHY IT'S PERFECT FOR BOOK CLUB

Join Book Club Favorite and New York Times bestselling author Nancy Jooyoun Kim to discuss her timely and surprising new novel, What We Kept to Ourselves! It's a blisteringly paced read about the tabloid fascination with evil and the dynamic and brilliant women who have the real stories to tell. What We Kept to Ourselves is an absolutely exhilarating story about a seemingly average family and what you might find if you look a little closer. Your book club will love debating about parent-child relationships and the secrets we keep from family. It’s a novel you won’t want to put down and once you finish will be dying to discuss!

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What We Kept to Ourselves by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

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This timely and surprising novel about a family’s search for answers following the disappearance of their mother from the New York Times bestselling author Nancy Jooyoun Kim explores “immigration, identity, love, and loss. A gorgeous, thrilling read” (Jean Kwok, New York Times bestselling author).

Simon & Schuster provides an amazing list of discussion questions for your book club or for personal reflection. 

1. What We Kept to Ourselves is told in alternating timelines, one set in 1977 and the other in 1999. Sunhee (later Sunny) and John change significantly between these two periods of their lives. What were your first impressions of them in 1977 in comparison to them in 1999? Did these impressions change throughout the novel?

2. John and Sunny are both Korean refugees, but they did not experience the war and its effects the same way. How were they different? How do you think their pasts dictate the people they become and ultimately the choices they make in the novel?

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Wine pairing: Dr. Heidemanns Riesling QbA

Bernkastel, Mosel, Germany- Apple and peach flavors infuse this crisp and refreshing Riesling from Dr. Heidemanns, world-renowned as one of the finest estates in the Mosel. With flavors that are light and lingering, enjoy as an aperitif paired with spicy shrimp stir-fry.

Shroomy Veggie-Heavy Japchae

Japchae is a savory and versatile noodle dish perfect for gatherings and parties. Although japchae is best after being warmed up in a pan, it can also be served at room temperature, which makes it easily transportable and great for potlucks. My version below is meatless but can be tweaked by substituting the dried shitake mushrooms with a bit of bulgogi that can be purchased at a Korean supermarket or made separately.

A Conversation with the Author, Nancy Jooyoun Kim

Q: Stories focused on family dynamics are evergreen in literature—why did you choose to explore the different relationships within the Kim family? 

A: On the surface, the Kims appear to be an average immigrant and working-class family in Los Angeles. There are security bars over their windows, concrete instead of plants and dirt, neighbors who are too busy or suspicious to get to know each other. They are a very American family—yet in mainstream culture, we rarely see nuanced representations of people like them. But as I’ve thought about this book off and on for almost twenty years (!!), the Kim family, upon closer inspection, is also a microcosm of a divided America, seemingly at war with itself, sometimes so much that it reminds me of the Korea from which the Kims fled, first internally as refugees in the 1950s, and then externally in the ’60s and ’70s as immigrants to the United States. There’s a father who can’t move on and refuses to admit that he had given his life to a dream that might just be that only, or even the opposite—someone else’s nightmare. A progressive daughter who can’t figure out a way to live her values and not die from boredom or a lack of pay. A mother who is a woman who has gone missing long before she actually disappears. The silences, the secrets, and the shames of this family aren’t too different from the ones we might experience more broadly in a country that hasn’t seemed to quite yet figure out how to live and move forward with the weight of its past. 

Q: What was your inspiration for writing the novel? 

A: I started writing a version of this novel almost twenty years ago, and my first inspiration was the sudden death of my father, whom I had been estranged from and hadn’t spoken to in months. My parents divorced when I was young, and our relationship had always been difficult. When he died in a car accident, I had suddenly become responsible for not only his body but the many artifacts, the evidence of who he was that he had unknowingly left behind. So the tragedies and the failures and the ways that he found to cope and endure despite them inspired the character of John, and the novel’s opening—a man in his sixties driving a large, dilapidated car that he doesn’t even quite need into a sunset before the apocalypse. The plot of the novel was partially inspired by encounters I have had with the unhoused in California, which has the largest relative proportion of unhoused people in the country. This crisis is very much a part of everyday life here in the Bay Area, and I wonder often about the stories behind what are at times the most abject cases. I don’t understand how we can continue to accept such extreme poverty in a country that is seen as the “land of opportunity” abroad. Thus, this novel explores what it means to own a home, for immigrants and working- and middle-class Americans, when the basics of community and shelter have been readily denied to so many through policies and practices that don’t protect people equally. 

Q: What novels were you drawn to growing up? Have these changed as you evolved as an adult? 

A: I was a “very serious young reader.” Growing up, I was mostly drawn to what I would consider to be “difficult books.” I adored the modernists, and I had a thing for writers of the American South, like Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. College, interestingly, exposed me to genre and what people often deem to be “less academic” reading, which I completely disagree with now. I took a course in African American detective fiction that changed my life. Now I’m open to reading the best of everything—nonfiction, science fiction, detective, romance, etc. Genre to me is an expression of authorial intent and theme, and certainly worthy of study for a variety of reasons. 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from your novel?

A: That there are many ways to create and share your own story right now. That generations before us, even if we might not have had a common language, attempt to speak to us all the time—through food and culture and music. That if we ever question why people kept us in the dark or didn’t share enough, we must equally question ourselves and what we leave behind for others to help make sense of and create meaning in this life. 

Q: Why did you choose to set the novel in the 1970s and 1999? 

A: The year 1999 was a pivotal moment for the internet in what felt like a very close encounter with a potentially human-made and completely stupid-seeming apocalypse. The internet and the personal computer changed how people, in their homes communicated, silently, sometimes anonymously, across a vast span of distance, and occasionally reversed the roles of parents and children. Adults could now learn something very valuable from their kids. This shift reminds me a lot of a dynamic that has been eternally present within immigrant families—the child as translator, sometimes chaperone of parents through a foreign country. I chose the 1970s primarily because my own mother immigrated to this country in that decade and that meant less research for me! But as I thought more about the decade and what it meant to us a country, I came upon this realization through a Nathaniel Rich article in the New York Time Magazine—that despite its great hair, glitz, and glamour, the ’70 was also the beginning of the decade when scientists fully understood the danger of climate change (1979–89) and, depressingly, it could’ve been stopped. This reminded me of the everyday role of gasoline in people’s lives during that time period, how my father, like John himself, owned a gas station in south LA, and why in the ’80s, gasoline had become cheap enough to “guzzle.” There’s so much combustion in my novel, right? 

Q: If you had to pick a favorite landmark in Los Angeles, what would it be? 

A: I have so many, including the Griffith Obsveratory, the location of such emotional scenes in this book, but if I have to choose one, it’ll always be the Santa Monica Pier, which I featured in my first book, The Last Story of Mina Lee. Both locals and tourists from all over the world visit the pier, and walking down it is an adventure and immersion in so many languages, cultures, and ways of life. It’s also a poignant reminder that no matter where you come from, most people simply want to be outside and to keep falling in love with being alive.

Post sponsored by Simon & Schuster Publishers.