What is Yoojin Grace Wuertz reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Yoojin Grace Wuertz, author of Everything Belongs to Us.

Her entry begins:

Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember: The Stroke that Changed My Life by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee

This was a surprising read for me because it was so much more than I expected. This is a memoir about what happened to a woman when she had a stroke at the age of 33. Her short-term memory was so debilitated that she could only hold fifteen minutes in her mind at a time. Minor details like what she ate and when she took medication had to be recorded into her journals, to give her a sense of her own daily narrative. She had been an extrovert, but in her recovery she no longer had the mental stamina required to hold extended conversations or participate in noisy restaurants, which were too stimulating and exhausted her limited reserves. She became, as she says, like...[read on]

About Everything Belongs to Us, from the publisher:

Two young women of vastly different means each struggle to find her own way during the darkest hours of South Korea’s “economic miracle” in a striking debut novel for readers of Anthony Marra and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie.

Seoul, 1978. At South Korea’s top university, the nation’s best and brightest compete to join the professional elite of an authoritarian regime. Success could lead to a life of rarefied privilege and wealth; failure means being left irrevocably behind.

For childhood friends Jisun and Namin, the stakes couldn’t be more different. Jisun, the daughter of a powerful business mogul, grew up on a mountainside estate with lush gardens and a dedicated chauffeur. Namin’s parents run a tented food cart from dawn to curfew; her sister works in a shoe factory. Now Jisun wants as little to do with her father’s world as possible, abandoning her schoolwork in favor of the underground activist movement, while Namin studies tirelessly in the service of one goal: to launch herself and her family out of poverty.

But everything changes when Jisun and Namin meet an ambitious, charming student named Sunam, whose need to please his family has led him to a prestigious club: the Circle. Under the influence of his mentor, Juno, a manipulative social climber, Sunam becomes entangled with both women, as they all make choices that will change their lives forever.

In this sweeping yet intimate debut, Yoojin Grace Wuertz details four intertwining lives that are rife with turmoil and desire, private anxieties and public betrayals, dashed hopes and broken dreams—while a nation moves toward prosperity at any cost.

Visit Yoojin Grace Wuertz's website.

My Book, The Movie: Everything Belongs to Us.

The Page 69 Test: Everything Belongs to Us.

Writers Read: Yoojin Grace Wuertz.

--Marshal Zeringue