Susan Choi, FLASHLIGHT: A Novel
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.5 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 13 June 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Totally Booked: LIVE! In this special episode of the podcast (in-person at the Whitby Hotel with a live audience!), Zibby chats with National Book Award-winning author Susan Choi about FLASHLIGHT, a gorgeous, ferociously smart, and impossibly heartbreaking novel that traces a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory. Susan discusses the emotional and structural complexity of the book—how it was written out of order and quilted together with research and imagination. She delves into themes of family, grief, and cultural identity, and shares why she champions complex, even unlikeable characters. Finally, she reflects on her writing journey, from childhood stories and struggling through grad school to eventually working at The New Yorker and writing her first novel.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest, best-selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators, whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive |
| 0:24.0 | look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't |
| 0:29.3 | have to. |
| 0:30.3 | Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. |
| 0:36.2 | For more information, go to Zibbymedia.com |
| 0:38.7 | and follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens. |
| 0:44.3 | Welcome back to Totally Booked. |
| 0:46.4 | So delighted to have you here |
| 0:48.1 | and so excited to be talking about Flashlight, |
| 0:50.8 | the new book from Susan Joyce. |
| 0:52.9 | Welcome. |
| 0:53.5 | Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. |
| 0:59.0 | A last minute self-doubt moment there. I'm going to read you all Susan's bio really quickly and then we'll get into it. |
| 1:07.1 | Susan is the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for Fiction, as well as the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, a person of interest, and my education. |
| 1:17.7 | She is a recipient of the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction, the Penn WG. C. Bald Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. |
| 1:31.9 | She teaches in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Welcome, Susan. |
| 1:38.5 | So, Flashlight, we were just talking. We last did an interview during COVID. Her book came out in paper in hardcover |
| 1:46.1 | in 2019, trust exercise, and we talked about it for the paperback in 2020. And now here, |
| 1:52.1 | after five years, slash light. So what has happened in between? I know. It's like a blink of an |
| 1:57.0 | eye and also like a thousand years. Yes. Like was that even this century when we first talked? |
| 2:03.2 | That was 2020 when we talked. |
| 2:05.2 | I think that at that time I was first wrestling with the idea for this book. |
... |
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