Read This Book . . .

There are few living nonfiction writers that I adore more than Nicole Chung. She used to be the editor of Catapult Magazine before going freelance and now has a newsletter with The Atlantic. Her insights are always so well thought out and perfectly articulated. Every time I open up her latest newsletter, I know I’m going to be encouraged to think about the world in a new way.

Her previous memoir, All You Can Ever Know, focused around her experience looking for her biological family. Chung is a Korean American adopted by white parents. She was always told that she was born early and her biological parents didn’t have the means to care for her. But, of course, that’s not exactly what happened.

In A Living Remedy, Chung focuses on her parents, the couple that adopted her, and her relationships with them. She loves her parents deeply. Even though they never had a lot of money, her parents did everything they could to give Chung every advantage. They never quite understood why Chung wanted to be a writer, but they supported her anyway. Much of the book centers around how both of her parents died a handful of years apart. Her mother had been in recovery from cancer for years when Chung’s father passed away. And then, her mother’s cancer returned. The pandemic began right after the doctor told them there was nothing more he could do.

Chung’s prose is often sparse, but you feel with her as she tells you the story of her love for the two people who raised her and made her who she is today. After finishing A Living Remedy, I can’t help but think that this is one of the memoirs I will recommend to young people who might not remember the complicated chaos that was the pandemic. She has captured that time perfectly. As she describes her frustration and sadness of not being with her mother during the pandemic, you cry with her. Her writing is so open and honest about the experience of losing a loved one in a time when she couldn’t even visit her mother because of social distancing.