Flashlight, the new novel by Susan Choi, revolves around an absence: the disappearance of Serk Kang, who vanishes on a late-night walk with his daughter Louisa on the west coast of Japan. Japanese-born, yet ethnically Korean, Serk has built his life as a professor of mathematics in America. Neither Louisa nor his wife Anne, a white woman and an American, knows almost anything about his early life growing up in Japan during World War II. Anne has her own secret: a previous child, born when she was only eighteen, who lives with his father. After Serk’s disappearance—presumed to be death by drowning—Louisa and Anne return to America, and Serk’s cloudy history becomes a thing of the past. Yet as Louisa grows older, shards of Serk’s life and of her own childhood drift to the surface, raising questions no one can answer—until the family realizes that Serk may not have drowned but instead been kidnapped by agents of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
This sweeping family saga spans lifetimes and continents, but as Choi explains, the composition process was anything but organized. “The book was written very elliptically, moving back and forth through time,” she says. “I’ve tried really hard to write at least the first draft in a linear manner, after having written very elliptically in my first two books.” Yet, she ruefully admits, Flashlight was a return to her earlier process. This oblique and exploratory writing process had its benefits: she describes feeling delight at discovering characters as she went, and at finding plot solutions through those characters along the way. The end result is a masterful novel that feels anything but haphazard to the reader.
Choi’s most recent novel, the National Book Award-winning Trust Exercise, experimented with narrative form and asked questions about consent, power, and memory that were also being raised by the #MeToo movement. Flashlight is more narratively conventional, yet it, too, interrogates power dynamics between people and power structures—in this case, nation-states. It also returns to another strand of Choi’s fiction, which has often drawn on real-world events. In American Woman, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, she fictionalized the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, while A Person of Interest drew on the investigations of Ted Kaczynski and Wen Ho Lee, a physics professor who was wrongly prosecuted by the government for espionage, an egregious case of racial profiling. Here, she invokes real-life disappearances along the Japanese coast in the 1970s, for which North Korea admitted responsibility in 2002.
In writing about the experiences of these abductees, Choi has once again written a novel that feels unsettlingly relevant to America’s current moment. Totalitarianism doesn’t seem so far away as I write this in the spring of 2025. As she told me, “So many aspects of conditions [in North Korea] are now structuring our everyday reality. Just imagine how crazy it is to be publishing the book into a moment now where suddenly, these incremental but very steady and rapidly escalating attacks on our rights as Americans are going on right now as you and I are talking. This is at the center of our dialogue every day about our own society.”
Over Zoom, Choi and I discussed her writing process, drawing from her own life for her fiction, the challenges of writing about a closed society, and more.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Morgan Leigh Davies: The prologue of this novel first appeared as a short story in the New Yorker, but the scope of the book goes far beyond that of the original story. What was the process of developing the material like?
Susan Choi: I was trying to solve this storytelling problem for a while. I was really interested in the elements that make up Flashlight: this experience that I had of my own of visiting Japan in my childhood with my family, which did not have catastrophic outcomes, thankfully, but had a lasting impression because I’d never been out of the country. My family had an opportunity to live in Japan for about six months in the late 1970s, when I was a kid of around Louisa’s age, and I harbored these really vivid, dreamlike, beautiful memories of what the country was like. They were very atmospheric memories, quite eerie-feeling, even though the events were not particularly eerie. Much later in life, I learned about this series of disappearances of Japanese people that had taken place primarily in the late 1970s and that had included the disappearance of a young girl. I was really taken with that, not coincidence exactly, but I would call it an overlap between a period of my life and this series of very private catastrophes that had befallen other families during the same time.
So I had done all this research into those abductions, and I really wanted to write a novel that made use of that bizarre, terrible series of historical episodes and that also would let me return to my own memories. I just didn’t know how to do this. I was creating this fictional family and it seemed so outlandish that I could manage to work the abduction material into this very private, limited sphere that I just was stuck on it for a long time. I could not solve the problem. I think my fiction often proceeds in this really irrational way from a combination of things that I really, really want to write about, but they don’t combine easily. And so I kept thinking, How can I combine these things that I really stubbornly want to combine?
The story of “Flashlight” was this workaround where I thought, Maybe I can just skip to after the terrible thing happens to this family and just write about the repercussions, and I won’t really specify what the terrible thing is because I just can’t reconcile myself to being able to write this story. So I wrote this story about this unspecified terrible thing, although I had it in my mind what the terrible thing had been. I think that let me . . . that let me go forward—going backwards, starting after the terrible event, let me go back in time and think, Okay, I’ve managed to depict some consequences. Maybe I can actually depict this incident.
MLD: Listening to you talk about that process makes me think about one of the strongest effects of the book for me, which was that there’s this resistance to catharsis throughout the novel. A lot of the moments that you might think would get dramatized get skipped over. How did you find that structure?
SC: I like leaping over large stretches of time. Part of it is that I’m really interested in going against the grain of expectation. I don’t know if it’s a perversity or what, but I really find it interesting when other writers I admire leave things off-stage that you would have imagined would be at center stage, and instead it’s off-stage or barely mentioned. I love stories that are intermittent in the way they dramatize, not just the unexpected in terms of the events but also the intermittent narration where there are large hiatuses or blank spaces.
I really admire concision in other writers, so it’s ironic to me because Flashlight is such a monster, much longer than I ever imagined it would be. In fact, when I first started trying to put this material on paper, I had hoped for something quite lean. I think that’s another reason for the elliptical composition—I was aiming for something lean. I was thinking, How can I lay out this event and its consequences in a way that’s very lean and economical and isn’t attempting to capture everything? I skipped over large stretches of the histories of the characters and was often persuaded by my brilliant editor to go back and fill in where I didn’t initially want to. She was always right.
MLD: What do you think you get from the length, even though it wasn’t your initial intention?
SC: One thing that I found when I was trying to cut the book is that there was a sense of immersive intimacy that would come in those pages that were about, arguably, nothing. The thing I’m thinking of most specifically is the long chapter about Anne’s life after Louisa has left for college and she’s living this very circumscribed life because of her physical limitations. Even within that circumscribed life, she meets Walter, who lives fifty yards away, and they have these encounters. I had so much enjoyment writing those sections, and then I felt like, oh my god, this is too long, it’s too much. I kept going in and cutting and cutting, but I was never able to cut to the bone. There’s something about that section that resisted really brutal cutting because the writing wasn’t really about events. It was about the texture of Anne’s mind and her very limited life. I think I enjoyed writing this section so much because it felt like within the limitations that, on their surface are so distressing—that she can’t walk anymore and she certainly can’t travel, and the least task or errand ends up being the work of an entire day, practically—there was something so pleasurable in just entering completely into her world. I just really enjoy writing that stuff, and it made me feel this tenderness for this character.
MLD: I certainly felt that way. I’m disabled and live a quite circumscribed life, and I was incredibly affected by the writing about her. There’s a moment where you describe her love of basketball. I recognized that so intensely. When your body doesn’t work, the joy of watching people’s bodies that are so exemplary felt recognizable to me. I wanted to know how you accessed those details of the experience of being disabled.
SC: There’s a very simple answer and then a more complicated one. That character, in a period of her life, is heavily indebted to my mom, who has MS. It’s not as if I’ve been walking around for years thinking, I want to pick the texture for everyday life [for fiction]. But I guess while writing it, I realized that I had observed it so closely for so long. At the same time, I’m amazed to hear you share what you just did because that section is incredibly indebted to my mom and my observation of her, but not my full understanding at all. My mom did go through a period of fanatical basketball watching and I never understood it. That was me having to use the fiction-writer’s brain to think, Well, what might have been the attraction? Because I never said to her, Why do you like basketball? She had a guy friend who taught her about it, and I always assumed she liked it because she liked being with him and watching basketball together. But it’s amazing to me to hear you share what you just said about exemplary bodies, because I would have thought the opposite.
It’s that imaginative guesswork where you think, well, I want to depict her being crazy about basketball because she was. But I never understood quite what the attraction was, as someone who’s never understood sports at all. So I kind of assumed, maybe that’s what was going through my mom’s mind and heart when she watched so much basketball during this particular era of her life. I hoped that it was plausible that there was something about those bodies that she was entranced by, and that was joyful for her and not upsetting.
MLD: I’m not shocked to hear that there is an autobiographical component there. I read A Person of Interest right after Flashlight, and I was really fascinated by how similar those two books are. In the past, you’ve said you don’t write from your personal experience—I never believe authors when they say that.
SC: Yeah, we’re all lying when we say that.
MLD: I’m curious about that whole process, and how conscious it was initially.
SC: One of the things that definitely underlies the similarities between those two books is that there’s a lot that isn’t conscious. That character of the son from a previous liaison, which is now a recurring trope because it occurs in both books—there is an analog to that person in my life. I think my fiction has kept trying to figure out where to put this unplaceable person at various levels of consciousness. I often paint myself into these corners where clearly there’s some psychological thing going on with me, the author, where I keep returning to certain clusters of people that are versions of elements from my own life, that I’m trying to work out or act out in different ways.
So I wrote this event of this unknown other child of the mother, [Anne], showing up for this brief visit, and then I just couldn’t get rid of it. It was one of those things where, once I put it in the story-world, then I was stuck. I was like, Well, what do I do now with this person? One of the big surprises of the book was what that person evolved into. Invention kept leading to additional invention. Well, what if he shows up, and then he shows up in Japan? What if he stays? I think it’s obvious now, from the way I’m talking, I don’t outline plot. I don’t know if it’s an advantage or a disadvantage, but it’s a huge source of stress. I’ve just never been able to, even when I have a plot in mind; it just goes to pieces as soon as I start trying to execute it. So I’m always stumbling along inside my own story, wondering, What’s gonna happen and how will it end? This character was a great example that.
MLD: I want to talk about the sort of bigger scope of the book, the part set in North Korea. What were the practicalities of writing about a place that is obviously so inaccessible to most of us? Because those sections felt very persuasively horrible.
SC: I was concerned about it. I was having a conversation with one of the few people that I know who’s actually been to North Korea. The circumstances under which this person went were so constrained, as I think most people’s circumstances are who are outsiders. You’re heavily, heavily managed and the amount of the country that you’re allowed to see is incredibly circumscribed, and the range of experiences is incredibly circumscribed. It’s a performance. So there was that disadvantage. But it was also kind of, weirdly, an advantage because we don’t really know—those of us who are outsiders to that state. We don’t really know what’s happening or even how to assess the resources that we have.
I read a lot of first-person testimonials of people who’ve escaped North Korea. A lot of these testimonials have had a lot of doubt cast on them. I was really interested in the ways in which they’ve been questioned. I don’t think that any of them are 100 % spurious, but we just don’t know. Another thing that this person who’s been to North Korea said to me was, If you take all of those testimonials and add them together and take the average, you’re probably getting a pretty useful picture of experience. A lot of accusations have been made that certain things are falsified, or events are placed out of order or exaggerated, or somebody got the location of their prison camp wrong. All these things that are on the level of pretty fine detail where you think, Okay, but I’m not sure how much that stuff matters if you’re looking at the spirit of the testimonials, which is this evocation of this unthinkably oppressive, autocratic state. That will hopefully, for us, always remain very, very far to one end of the spectrum—a spectrum that we’re definitely on in this country, amazingly. But hopefully we will be moving in an opposite direction from North Korea.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is, I was both really scared to even attempt to depict it, and emboldened by the fact that I thought, Well, none of us really knows for sure. I felt there was a certain importance in trying. I wanted to try, and I wanted to make some effort to communicate at least what I had experienced from reading these first-person testimonies, whether they’re reliable or not; I think the thing that was so powerful in them is real. It was tricky. Ironically, one of the things that really emboldened me was fiction. Adam Johnson’s novel, [The Orphan Master’s Son], Krys Lee’s novel, [How I Became a North Korean]: it’s better to try to empathetically imagine your way in, to try to draw in other people to do the same. Because even if you don’t get it “totally right,” it is a reality that exists right now.
MLD: Serk can be quite frustrating in a lot of ways throughout the first half of the book. But the purity of his devotion to Louisa when he is in North Korea is so moving, especially given that he’s in this horrible situation.
SC: I was so worried about writing those sections because it’s intimidating to try to depict someone in circumstances that I have no . . . there’s no analog at all. Thankfully, knock wood, I have two children who are safe and well at school at this moment. I didn’t really have anything personal to draw on. I think I was just trying to keep it really simple for myself. The simplicity is the difficulty of survival and the single imperative that he felt, that I imagined he felt, which was: Don’t die, try to find her. And trying to keep it clear to the reader the way in which his circumstances would be bearing down all the time to reduce the range of thought to just those two things.
In that, I think I was really helped by these first-person accounts that, regardless of the fact that, yes, a few post-publication accusations have been leveled at some of them, there’s enough corroboration that I just found those accounts astonishingly powerful. I think one of the things that was so powerful about all of them that I read, and I list them in the back of my book, is how stripped down they are to the day-to-day imperatives of survival. None of these writers ever strikes a note of self-pity or blame. It’s remarkable, actually, what they endure and report with real straightforwardness.
MLD: To conclude, your first book, The Foreign Student, is set in Sewanee, Tennessee. I know your dad went there, but I wanted to ask about your associations with the place.
SC: [Sewanee] has this enormous emotional significance for me because my father didn’t just go there: a lot of the details of my first book are, again, lifted quite directly from his biography. That place was so meaningful to my father to the very end of his life. It was an enormously powerful and significant force in his life. Whatever we might say about it, about a place that in the 1950s, when my dad was there, was absolutely racially segregated and obviously excluding of women, it was also a place that somehow made my father feel welcomed and cherished.
Very late in my father’s life, when he had pretty advanced cognitive decline—he often mistook me for other people, was living in assisted living, and was really diminished in his mental grasp of his own circumstances—he had a book of photographs of Sewanee. My father passed away almost three years ago, and probably within the last year of his life, I remember sitting with him and not really having any luck engaging him. I took out that book and started paging through it for him, and his mind came zooming back into focus. It was incredible. He was pointing out photographs and saying, Oh, that was professor so-and-so. He was naming buildings. At some point, he said, I was so proud to have been a student there. It was so moving to me.
I grew up in northern Indiana until I was eight or nine years old, and my father taught at Indiana University. My dad’s idea of a good thing to do on the weekend was to jump in the car and drive all the way to Sewanee, which was a long drive. We were right at the Michigan state line, and we would drive the entire length of Indiana through Kentucky, through a good chunk of Tennessee, to get to Sewanee, because my father kept in touch with professor mentors there. I think that landscape was like a spiritual home for him after he left Korea. It’s a really, really important place.