Susan Choi, TRUST EXERCISE

I did an Instagram Live with Susan Choi, which was so much fun. Susan's first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, came out in April 2019 and is the one we talked about the most. It won the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction. Susan and I also talked about quarantine hair secrets, our agreement that the world students live in today is more complicated than the one we grew up in, and that different secrets to writing a book sometimes feel just like learning to parent different children.