I’m a late bloomer. So I can’t help but admire the blue flame of prodigy.
It took me eleven years to publish my first novel. A debut at age thirty-eight. A decade later, I published my second. I’m fifty-two years old and working on my third. I know.
Growing up, I never thought I’d be a writer. My family emigrated from South Korea when I was seven, and I grew up in Elmhurst, Queens. In our first year, my dad had a newspaper stand in a Manhattan office building. Then my folks ran a two-hundred-square-foot wholesale jewelry store in Koreatown until they retired. My sisters and I were latchkey kids. When we enrolled at P.S. 102, we received free lunch for a term, and then, at my mother’s insistence, we paid in full for all the years following. It was public school for me straight through until Yale, where I studied history, and then Georgetown for law school. I practiced law for two years. When I was twenty-six, I quit to write fiction.
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