Cay Kim‘s debut novel, The Future Perfect, is a coming-of-age story about a young woman growing up between Korea and the United States. As her family moves back and forth between two countries, she struggles to reconcile the expectations placed upon her by a devoted mother with her own evolving sense of identity and belonging. Spanning childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, the novel is a moving exploration of family, ambition, cultural inheritance, and the search for a place to call home.
We asked Kim to answer our My Reading Life Q&A so readers can 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?
When I was in elementary school in Korea, there was a viral comic book series called Greco-Roman Mythology (they didn’t waste any breath with the title). The series had about a dozen books, each following a father retelling the classical myths to his son and daughter, whose questions deepened and prodded his storytelling. I was viscerally drawn to these myths, everything ranging from Sisyphus to the Battle of Troy to Persephone, for the same reasons I suppose why these stories have endured in our culture for millennia—they are just so elemental… with a singular scope of brutality and rawness such that truth about humanity jumps off the page. It’s uncanny to me that I’m not sure I would have become a writer had I not been captivated by these stories at a young age, and then again every time when they resurfaced during my education as a reader, particularly in poetry.
What book helped you through puberty?
The Anne of Green Gables series. I’m surprised to be answering again with a series, since as an adult I hardly read them… it’s powerful, isn’t it, the particular pleasure of reentering the same world with characters and places you are already acquainted with. This undeniably contributed to my experience, but I read Miranda July say in an interview that her favorite childhood books shared the theme of “orphaned girls who make secret, special places for themselves”—I think that was the biggest allure of the Anne of Green Gables series for me, as a fourteen-year-old alone in my dorm room at boarding school.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
I can think of so many books that would have helped me at sixteen had I had the capacity to understand them, but I think realistically the words would have flown over my head—like many books did and that I had to revisit in later years. A prime example is Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick. Forget sixteen, I couldn’t even get through it in my early twenties. But at the behest of reader friends, I gave it another try a few years later, and it would be an understatement to say it unlocked worlds for me. There were simply other books I had to digest first before Sleepless Nights was able to reach me—had I read Sleepless Nights at sixteen, it would have left no mark. But it’s thanks to the books I did read at sixteen that I’ve developed the eye and capacity for reading the books that are changing my life today.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
It’s my dream to be a writing professor one day, so it makes me tingle to think about a syllabus. I think I’d want to sequence of books and writers in a way that tells a story, for each in the sequence to have intimate relation to one another, while also making leaps in time, culture, and geography. Perhaps something like: So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, A Personal Matter by by Kenzaburō Ōe, The Temple of the Golden Pavillion by Yukio Mishima, Skinship by Yoon Choi, Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, and, latest but certainly not least, Y/N by Esther Yi.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
My initial source of inspiration was We the Animals by Justin Torres. These days my favorite novels tend to be slim little objects with language distilled nearly to poetry, to their most essential, crystalline bones, and it was We the Animals that prompted that predilection for me. Other poetically rooted coming-of-age classics were also important, such as The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and Drown by Junot Díaz. So was Skinship, Yoon Choi’s revelatory story collection that can be described as an X-ray for the interior lives of Korean Americans, and Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan, a poetry book that begins with a long ode titled “You, Very Young, in New York,” whose employment of language is just so innovative and stunning, and which also taught me how to write with grace about youth without sentimentality.
What books are on your nightstand now?
The Hill by Harriet Clark. Years ago, I read its first chapter in the very first issue of The Paris Review I read cover to cover, which was such an astonishing experience that it led me to subscribe to the magazine. When the writer was just an infant, her mother was sentenced to life in prison for being the getaway driver of an armed robbery. That premise itself blasts open and reinvents the genre of the mother-daughter story, but even at a molecular level the novel is incredible.
I feel like I always have a Toni Morrison novel in my stack, Beloved at the moment, just for good measure. Having the great dame of modern literature preside my nightstand keeps my life in check.
I also have The Easy Life by Marguerite Duras and a few of her other tiny “novels.” People know her for The Lover, which is my favorite novel of all time and so would be redundant to have on my nightstand, but reading her earlier works are fascinating to me because you can see very clear traces of her experimenting, learning how to write toward her masterwork.