Nicole Chung on her memoir ‘A Living Remedy’

BY CRYSTAL SCHELLE Special to The News-Post

Family, loss and grief are at the center of author Nicole Chung’s sophomore release, “A Living Remedy.”

In her new memoir, the Washington, D.C., area author manages to weave together the story of her father’s sickness, the inequity in healthcare, his subsequent death, her grief, her relationship with her mother, the COVID-19 pandemic and ultimately having to say goodbye to her mother during the pandemic.

Chung, 41, explored the memoir genre in her 2019 bestseller “All You Can Ever Know,” in which she told the story of her adoption. The book went on to be a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a semifinalist for the PEN Open Book Award and an Indies Choice Honor Award.

When she’s not writing books, she is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, GQ and The Guardian.

Chung will make an appearance from 7 to 8 p.m. April 13 at Evangelical Reformed United Church of Christ, 15 W. Church St., Frederick. Hosted by the Curious Iguana, Chung will be in conversation with with Melody Schreiber, editor of “What We Didn’t Expect,” the D.C. correspondent for ArcticToday, a columnist for The New Republic, and a regular contributor to the Guardian US, The Washington Post, New York, The Atlantic and NPR. Seats for the ticketed event is available for purchase on Eventbrite.com.

Before her appearance, Chung took time for a telephone interview about “A Living Remedy” and the lessons she’s learned about her parents and herself. This is a small excerpt of her talk with 72 Hours.

As writers, we often find writing to be a cathartic exercise. Was that the type of experience you had with this book?

It actually was not terribly cathartic. I think that writing can definitely serve that purpose, and it sometimes has for me in the past. The writing I find the most therapeutic is the writing that no one else sees.

I’ve been a journaler for most of my life. It definitely was something different when I decided I wanted to write a book about my grief and about my family. Once you make that decision as a writer, you really have to think about what is there for the readers as well. It can’t just be telling your story, or even just relaying the events as they happen. There has to be something for readers to really hold on to, something for them to take away. I won’t say I didn’t write this for myself, as well. I really sat down to work on it, and I basically rewrote it. Five or six months after my mother died, I started working on the manuscript. At that point, I was thinking less about being cathartic and much more about how I wanted to tell the story.

“All You Can Ever Know” was about family relationships, and of course, this is too. Did you learn something different about your parents, your relationship with them, or about yourself during this process?

I think we’re always learning about and reassessing the relationships that are most important to us. “All You Can Ever Know” is much more focused on my birth family and what happened when I decided to search for them. It was much more focused on that search, which coincided with my first pregnancy, and what happened and why I decided to look for them. Certainly my adoptive parents and my child- hood played a part in that, but it was relatively brief toward the beginning, compared to a loving family where my adoptive parents are much more present, and you see much more of our lives and my upbringing.

To your great question about whether I learned something more about them in the intervening years, I haven’t really thought about it this way, but I think my relationship with both parents did change and grow, and in some ways, through the process of taking care of them when they were sick and losing them in very close succession.

Especially after my father died, my mother and I had to kind of learn a new way of existing and being a family without him. It had always been the three of us. I found myself in a very different role as the daughter of a widow. My father and mother were really each other’s rocks, and after my father died, I don’t think she necessarily thought of me that way, but I wanted to be there for my mother. I wanted to fill that role for her.

That was really one of the things that I wanted to write about, how the way we relate to each other, especially the people we are closest to, shifts over time. We learn new things about each other, often in crisis. And even now that they’re gone, I still think about them all the time and think about what they would say and what I have made of my life now. Relationships aren’t finite. I think I’ll probably always be thinking about our relationship and re-evaluating things.

What do you want the reader to take away from your book?

The longer I write, honestly, the less I believe in my power as an author to say what a reader should take away. I think about it from the perspective of the reader. I think it’s a sacred relationship between the reader and a book. I’m not trying to dodge the question. I’m really honored, actually, when people tell me there was a part of the book that they really resonated with.

Certainly, a lot of people have lost loved ones, and there is so much compounded grief from the past few years, so I hope that for those who have experienced losses, the book helps to think about their own lives and experiences with their loved ones and makes them feel a little bit less alone.

This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

Crystal Schelle is a journalist whose work has been published locally, regionally and nationally. She enjoys trivia, cats and streaming movies.