Love Love
by Sung J. Woo

A novel about art and athletics, family and adoption, remembrance and forgiveness – and Judy and Kevin, sister and brother.

Judy Lee’s life has not turned out the way she’d imagined. She’s divorced, she’s broke, and her dreams of being a painter have fallen by the wayside. Her co-worker Roger might be a member of the Yakuza, but he’s also the only person who’s asked her on a date in the last year.

Meanwhile, Kevin, an ex-professional tennis player, has decided to donate a kidney to their ailing father — until it turns out that he’s not a genetic match. His father reluctantly tells him he was adopted, but the only information Kevin has is a nude picture of his birth mother.

Told in alternating chapters from the points of view of Judy and Kevin, Love Love is a story about two people figuring out how to live, how to love, how to be their best selves amid the chaos of their lives.

Happy Mother’s Day weekend!  To begin the celebration early, check out the essay I wrote for the Modern Love section of The New York Times.  It’s online now; the print version will appear in the Sunday paper.

Overfed on a Mother’s Affection

By SUNG J. WOO

My mother held out a Tupperware container of chicken thighs and drumsticks, roasted with kimchi, bell peppers, onions and scallions. It’s a great dish, one of my favorites.

The podcast and the essay are already out there,  but the actual broadcast of  my essay is happening today, sometime between 6 and 9 am and then again between 4pm and 8pm on WNYC, via 93.9 FM and AM 820.  So if you the type to listen to the radio live, tune in!

The good folks at WNYC News ran “six months after Hurricane Sandy”-themed programs yesterday, and they were kind enough to invite me to contribute.

Here’s the truth: I kinda sorta miss Sandy.  Not her destruction of beloved homes and property, no, of course not, nor the inconvenience of driving around an hour for a viable gas station.  And don’t get me wrong – I love hot showers.  And cable TV.  And the Internet.  Everything about the modern world, I love.

But at the same time, didn’t it feel like we were all in this big, horrible mess together?  That we were in a crisis, and people were going out of their way to be extra nice?  Take my neighbor, for example.  Great guy, but waving from afar is pretty much our relationship.  And yet there he was, knocking on my back door after our neighborhood blacked out, offering the end of a very long extension cord that ran from his generator.  His mother-in-law lives next door, so he had to share his juice with her, too, but that didn’t stop him from gifting us with a few sparks of his electricity.

[read more]

[download/listen to podcast]

[Liesl Schillinger's Sandy essay]

[Torrey Maldonado's Sandy essay]

Sunday March 17, 2013
2:00PM – 4:00PM
Authors@GNL Asian-American Authors Roundtable
Contact: Jonathan Aubrey 466-8055, ext. 219
jaubrey@greatnecklibrary.org
Authors will discuss their experiences as Asian-American writers. This program will include audience Q&A, book raffles, book signings, and author readings.

[download pdf]