R.O. Kwon on Alexander Chee, 'Sister Outsider,' and The Book That Everyone Should Read

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Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.

It took 10 years for R.O. Kwon to write her first novel, The Incendiaries (2018) and nine for her second, Exhibit: A Novel (Riverhead).

Her bestselling debut, based on the loss of her once-deep faith, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award for Best First Book, Los Angeles Times First Book Prize, and Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Fiction Prize and an Aspen Prize, Carnegie Medal, and the Northern California Book Award nominee. It is being developed as a limited TV series. She was a Yaddo, National Endowment for the Arts, and MacDowell fellow, and has won scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference (where she was on the wait staff before attending) and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College, where one of her mentors was Michael Cunningham. She co-edited the short fiction anthology Kink with Garth Greenwell.

The Seoul-born, L.A.-raised, S.F.-based Kwon lived and worked in Paris and also had a summer job in Geneva as an undergrad at Yale, where she studied economics. She thought she’d become a missionary or preacher or a pianist; worked at a management consulting firm for 7 months; joked she watches Korean shows when she feels dead inside in a piece she wrote on Squid Game (she watched all 9 episodes in 24 hours); danced to support Volumes BookCafe in Chicago; volunteered as a patient escort at Planned Parenthood; and taught Korean literature as a visiting writer at Stanford.

Loves: Sentences, words, syllables, and punctuation; cheese, reading about physics, revising.

Fan of: Artists Fan Ho, Wangechi Mutu, Ana Mendieta; Guo Pei and Alexander McQueen; photographers Ren Hang and Luo Yang.

Writing musts: Listening to music (she played one song 30,000 times while writing The Incendiaries); writing by hand; kimchi and handstands and stretching.

Good at: Not being distracted by the Internet.

Bad at: Celebrating.

Dislikes: Interruptions; volumizing mascara.

Likes: her 20-volume OED used set; tights (to go with her monochromatic wardrobe of black dresses), skin care (though is skeptical of facials), dried squid, and Garak Market in Seoul; toner or essence; power-lifting. Pick up one of her recs below.

The book that…

…I recommend over and over again:

Audre Lorde is often and widely quoted, and though her words are already brilliant piecemeal, it can be life-changing to read her thinking at length. Sister Outsider brings together some of her most thrilling speeches and essays, including “Uses of the Erotic,” which argues for the erotic as a wellspring of power and creation.

…made me miss a train stop:

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” or so it’s said, and while the quotation can be interpreted as having to do with futility, I find it to be more of an opening. I love reading about music, dance, visual art, and so on, and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida is enthralling about photos, grief, and light as “a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”

…broke my heart:

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene follows a desperate love triangle between a man, a woman, and God. In Greene’s novel, sexual and romantic passion are at least as urgent, as powerful, as the seductions of religious faith, and each time I reread The End of the Affair I hope against all reason that things will turn out differently than they did the last time around.

…has a sex scene that will make you blush:

If you haven’t yet read the splendid Luster by Raven Leilani, you might want to run to do so. And once you’ve read it, there’s a gorgeous essay by Garth Greenwell in the Sewanee Review about a single long sentence from Luster that begins as follows: “Slowly, he eases me down onto his grand, slightly left-leaning cock, and for a moment I do rethink my atheism…”

…I’d pass on to a kid:

If I weren’t a writer, I’d love being a lexicographer and working with dictionaries, words, for the rest of my life. A little while ago, after I published my first novel, I bought a used set of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. My niece is five years old and already loves words; I can’t think of better future company for this dictionary.

…currently sits on my nightstand:

I have a pile of nightstand books high enough that it keeps toppling, so I should probably do something about that, but a few recently published books at the top of the stack include Hala Alyan’s The Moon That Turns You Back, Crystal Hana Kim’s Stone Home, and Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes.

…made me laugh out loud:

I’ve read Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s The Man Who Could Move Clouds several times, and, each time, the book has me holler-laughing. Rojas Contreras’s memoir explores curanderismo, familial curses, ghost stories, histories of violence and healing, and so much more. I’m going to re-read this book until I die.

…helped me become a better writer:

There’s a passage in Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel that I can’t quite read without tearing up. It was excellent company during the years I spent working on Exhibit, a novel that began with writing down what I’ve spent most of my life trying to hide: “You imagine that the worst thing is that someone would know. The attention you need to heal you have been taught will end you. And it will — it will end the pain you have mistaken for yourself. The worst thing is not that someone would know. The worst thing is that you might lay waste to your whole life by hiding.”

...everyone should read:

The power and grace of Solmaz Sharif’s Customs extend from the first poems to the last lines of her acknowledgements, which end as follows: “Thank you, fear. That’s enough now.”

...I last bought:

Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey is as unforgettable as it is difficult to describe. One could call it a collection of lectures on poetry; one might also think it a book-shaped miracle. I love buying this collection to give to friends.

Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

Luster by Raven Leilani

The Moon That Turns You Back by Hala Alyan

The Stone Home by Crystal Hana Kim

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Customs by Solmaz Sharif

Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle

The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

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