Eunice Hong graduated from Columbia Law School, creates jewelry, and is a weaver. She also is the winner of the Red Hen Press Fiction Award for her debut book Memento Mori, which is a saga about a Korean family that uses the myths of Eurydice, Orpheus, Persephone, and Hades to explore grief, love, trauma, and death.
The book is available for pre-order now ahead of it’s August 13 publication and we’re happy to reveal the cover, designed by Leah Paul, to our readers with a brief Q&A with the author that dives into the behind-the-scenes process.
While writing the book, did you have any ideas for what you wanted the cover to look like?
I didn’t! Maybe it’s because the book didn’t begin as something I intended to publish, but cover ideas never entered my mind. Even after I finished writing the book, I struggled with this question. When I was submitting the final manuscript, the lovely people at Red Hen Press asked if I had an art style I wanted for the cover, and I remember my whole brain going blank. No thoughts, head empty. I just started throwing things on the page as they popped into my head—maybe Eurydice and Orpheus, and the underworld and the overworld, and maybe a Korean flag and Korean clothes and a mirror image effect, and should we have a skull in there somewhere for the memento mori part, and of course the constellation Lyra since to the Greeks it was the lyre of Orpheus?
Looking back, I did end up having a lot of disparate ideas, but no real direction.
Can you explain what the design process was like once you started working with your publishing team?
It was so exciting to witness how the design team interpreted and clarified my ideas into a cohesive vision, and how the cover evolved from the formless void of my mind into what you see now.
The first version of the cover was actually completely different. It featured a colorful city skyline and Lyra rising in the night sky, with a set of stairs in the foreground leading up to a balcony. But, while absolutely beautiful, that version gave the impression (to me, at least) of something between a romantic drama and a light beach read. To be clear, there are a lot of moments in the book that are quite funny, and the story of Eurydice and Orpheus could certainly be seen as a romantic one. But the book centers on grief and mourning. The title, Memento Mori, can be translated from Latin as “remember death” or “remember you will die.” Not exactly light, though this has become a running joke with my friends, who now exclusively refer to my book as a “light beach read.”
I asked the publishing team if they could incorporate the underworld aspect more explicitly to better convey the themes of the book. A few months later, they sent me brand new art featuring Eurydice and Orpheus on winding stairs with the constellation in the background. From there, we worked together to hone the details, especially around the placement of the two characters and adding the colors of the Korean flag to the background. At the last minute, the publishing team had the inspired idea of including the Korean transliteration of the title on the cover, which I think is unusual for a novel that is primarily in English. I loved it.
What was it like seeing your finalized cover for the first time?
I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it. It’s perfect. The design team somehow translated my scattershot suggestions into this gorgeous, bright cover that draws the eye in but also stays true to the tone of the book. The light beach read, if you will.
How does the cover work to convey what the contents of the story are?
In Memento Mori, the protagonist, who is Korean-American, tells the Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus to her younger brother in a series of bedtime stories, and also herself uses the myth as a way of trying to understand the tragedies she and her family experience. One of those tragedies is her grandmother’s slow loss of memory and body to the grip of Alzheimer’s disease and the difficult decisions the family has to make about survival versus quality of life.
This is why Eurydice and the underworld—not Orpheus and the night sky—grace the top of the cover. Because what the book asks is: did Eurydice want to return from the underworld? Did anybody ask? Did Orpheus ask? Maybe this life, for her, was not what she wanted.
My favorite part is that Eurydice and Orpheus are drawn in the style of Ancient Greek black-figure pottery, but if you look closely, you see that they are wearing Korean hanbok. And, of course, the whole cover is a Korean flag. The stairs call to mind the black trigrams in the four corners of the flag and also double as a visual evocation of a piano, which the protagonist plays as a means of escape and reflection.
The cover makes clear that Memento Mori is not only a story involving Greek myth but, first and foremost, a love letter to the Korean-American experience. I’m so grateful to the design team for bringing this to life in the most extraordinary way.