Nicole Chung, author of the memoir, All You Can Ever Know (Catapult, 2018), is The Ruby's November Writer in Residence. The Ruby's Writer in Residence program seeks to support the best writers writing, and to bring writers from outside the Bay Area to The Ruby to read. Writers in residence stay in our upstairs writers loft. Join us for a reading and casual conversation.
About All You Can Ever Know
What does it mean to lose your roots—within your culture, within your family—and what happens when you find them?
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From early childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hopes of giving her a better life; that forever feeling slightly out of place was simply her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as she grew up—facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from—she wondered if the story she’d been told was the whole truth.
With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets—vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.
About Nicole Chung
Nicole Chung’s debut memoir All You Can Ever Know will be published on October 2, 2018. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Shondaland, ELLE, Longreads, BuzzFeed, Vulture, and Hazlitt, among others. She is the editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine and the former managing editor of The Toast. Find her on Twitter @nicole_soojung.