Che Yeun‘s debut novel, Tailbone, follows a teenager who runs away from her abusive home to live in a boarding house for single women as a global financial crash threatens the people of Seoul. Heralded by the great Alexander Chee as an “unforgettable debut novel,” Yeun’s book finds hope in the darkest moments.
Her short has previously appeared in Granta, AGNI, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Kenyon Review Online. Outside of fiction, she earned a PhD in History of Science at Harvard University, and is currently a professor of History of Science & Technology at Texas A&M University.
We asked Yeun to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
For an elementary school project, we were each assigned an animal to research in our school library. I got the sea otter, to my great disappointment. What even was that? Why couldn’t I have something cool, like the tiger or the lion? But when I opened the first page of the first book and saw my first photograph of a sea otter floating in the great blue expanse, I was instantly smitten. I read the book over and over again to learn as much as I could about these perfect creatures.
What book helped you through puberty?
The manga series Slam Dunk by Takehiko Inoue, translated into Korean by Jung-Sook Jang. Our protagonist is a bumbling fool, an errant miscreant, who one day discovers his preternatural gift for basketball. Over 31 volumes, basketball teaches him everything he needs to know about ambition, cooperation, self-belief, and of course love. Basketball soothes his inner demons and sparks his purpose. Countless afternoons, I followed my older brother to the neighborhood courts to play with his friends and secretly, in my head, act out scenes from Slam Dunk. We stayed until it grew so dark we couldn’t see the ball or the hoop anymore. It was the first time I longed to live in a world that I knew didn’t really exist yet was, in this urgent burning way, more real than anything I could see or touch.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
Any book on 19th and 20th century Korean history. As a teenager and young adult I rebelled against my Koreanness and tried to know as little as possible about the history of our culture or our politics. Now, as I try to catch up, it often crosses my mind how much this pursuit could have enriched my transition into adulthood. To have any sense of what came before, the conditions that made my life possible, that it’s okay to have complicated feelings about a place or a part of my identity and still be open to learning about it, that it doesn’t have to swallow me up.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
I recently read Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee and was blown away. The Vegetarian by Han Kang. And everything by Philip K. Dick. Since I mostly teach history in my day job, the syllabus would also spotlight some of the Damn Good Writing in history and in the larger humanities, like The Instability of Truth by Rebecca Lemov, and Race after Technology by Ruha Benjamin.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. Native Son by Richard Wright. Passing by Nella Larsen. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Trash by Dorothy Allison. Legends of a Suicide by David Vann. No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July.
What books are on your nightstand now?
Whidbey by T Kira Madden, American Han by Lisa Lee, Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and The End of Alice by A.M. Holmes.