Debut Book Launch: Mary H.K. Choi on 'Pool House'
Event Details
New York Times best-selling author Mary H.K. Choi is excited to present her debut adult novel Pool House, joined in conversation by fellow author and Westporter Julie Sarkissian. Choi is an award-winning YA author who now writes for adults as well — add her to your list of authors to look at for!
Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event.
About Pool House
Best-selling young adult author Mary H.K. Choi debuts a brilliantly observed adult novel about mothers, daughters and the complexity of family set against the backdrop of Hollywood.
Stevie cannot escape her mother. Abandoning college plans to work a dead-end job, her days are a purgatorial bore. Many dream of moving to L.A. and into the spotlight, but Stevie can’t wait to move away from it, and her mother’s orbit, to start over.
Moon is many things: an out-of-work actress, a recovering addict, whatever a mistress becomes when she’s widowed, and a mother. Reeling in the aftermath of her lover and TV husband’s death, Moon struggles to process her grief. And the last thing she expects is for Stevie to leave her too.
Now, neither Stevie nor Moon can afford to quit each other. And their cost of living forces them into a glass-walled pool house in the backyard, while their home is rented out to pay the bills. But when Adam, Moon’s former TV son and Stevie’s forever crush, arrives for the funeral, the three are pulled into a messy orbit, moving back into the ‘Big House’ and play-acting a picture-perfect family even as tensions rise and relationships unravel.
Pool House is a course charted through the wilderness of motherhood, a story about the challenges of navigating class, fame, burgeoning sexuality, and grief as two women grapple with what it means to grow up and grow older in Hollywood.
About the Author
Mary H.K. Choi is the New York Times best-selling author whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, New York, GQ and Elle. Formerly she was the culture correspondent for Vice News on HBO, a columnist at Wired and Allure magazine, a guest columnist for the Townies series at the New York Times Opinion desk, as well as the executive producer of the House of Style documentary on MTV. She was awarded the Katherine Min fellowship at MacDowell and has also written comics for Marvel and DC. She is currently developing her books for film and TV and working on her fourth novel. Follow her on all social media at @choitotheworld as well as the choitotheworld substack that covers mental health, culture, and technology.
Julie Sarkissian is the author of Dear Lucy, published by Simon and Schuster and nominated for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her essays, short fiction and book reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, The Huffington Post, The New York Observer, and Flavorwire, among others. Born and raised in southern California, she has a BA in English from Princeton and an MFA from The New School. She worked for Sackett Street Writers in Brooklyn as a fiction instructor and manuscript consultant before moving to Westport.
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