Angie Kim Talks Second Novels, Fifth Careers, and Happiness

Goodreads: At a high view, how would you describe Happiness Falls in a couple of sentences?

Angie Kim: This book is about a biracial family in crisis, that is thrust into crisis mode when a beloved father goes missing one day and the only person who was with him, who might be able to say what happened to him, who might know what happened to him, is a nonspeaker by virtue of having autism and a rare genetic disorder, Angelman syndrome.
 
The family must come together to try to connect and communicate with each other, and him, and also to get to know a father's secrets so that they can try to figure out what happened.

GR: You've got such an interesting background with attending Stanford and then Harvard Law. How did you start writing fiction?

AK: Being a fiction writer is actually my fifth career. I was a lawyer in my 20s. Maybe four years into practicing law, I had this month where I did three trials in a row. Being in the courtroom was my favorite aspect of being a lawyer, and I hated everything else about it. I had this wonderful month, and afterwards I went to this beach area and read a book that I happened to have, Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods. 

GR: You mentioned that book in Happiness Falls.

AK: Yes, it's in a footnote. I read it from cover to cover, drinking wine, looking at the ocean surf. It was just such a glorious experience. And I thought, “I haven't had a day like this where I haven't been stressed about something about work in four years.” 

I told my husband later that night that I wanted to quit and go find something that made me fulfilled on a macro level but also day-to-day happy. 

I quit and I went into management consulting. I then became an entrepreneur in the dot-com era, and then I was a stay-at-home mom for a good 10 years. 

We have three boys, and all three of them had mysterious ailments as babies. Writing came out of that experience. I felt the need to process what I had gone through with the kids. My husband pointed out that a lot of these essays about our children, they weren't just my story, they were the family’s story. They were the children's stories as well. He suggested that I start writing fiction. 

I started with short stories, and as soon as I completed my first short story, I was like, “This is it.” This is what I have been wanting to do. By this time, I was in my 40s. 

Once I had some publications, and won some contests and things like that, I decided to try my hand at a novel, which was Miracle Creek. And Miracle Creek was published on the week that I turned 50. 

So, there you go.
  GR: I love success stories that come later in life. It's never too late. It seems the concept and study of happiness has really taken off in the past decade or so. What made you put so much about the concept of happiness in the midst of a missing-person story?


AK: Happiness is something that I've been fascinated with since I was little. I think it comes from my immigrant experience. 

When I was in Korea, we were really poor. We didn't have running water in the house. The three of us lived in one tiny room that was in somebody else's home. 

We moved when I was 11, and I remember hearing…just the excitement, and my parents describing the visa that we got, as akin to winning the lottery, and my friends all saying how lucky I was and how happy I was going to be because we were going to this huge house—my aunt's house—in the suburbs of Baltimore. 

[There was] a stark difference between what I was expecting and what I actually experienced. 

My parents worked in a grocery store in downtown Baltimore, and the hours were so long that they ended up sleeping there in a storage cupboard in the back. I went from seeing them, being in the same room with them every day, and being very close with them, to not seeing them at all. 

Then, on top of that I also experienced the strange thing of losing all of my confidence and competence because I didn't speak English. I think it's so deeply rooted in our society, this assumption that equates oral fluency with intelligence, which of course is another strand in the novel. 

I experienced that for the first time so I felt stupid even though I should have known I wasn’t—but just the shame of not being able to speak. And the frustration. So that made me deeply unhappy. And I complained to my parents that I wanted to go back. 

A lot of that experience is in my first novel, in Miracle Creek. I'm not sure that I started thinking about it this explicitly, but it's something that I thought a lot about, this idea of happiness—Aristotelian kind of notions of what constitutes fulfillment. 

GR: Why did you pair autism and Angelman syndrome in Eugene’s character?

AK: These characters have been with me for more than 10 years. 

I first wrote a short story, “Buried Voice,” about this family in Mia’s voice. The story is a magical realism story about a pair of twins, John and Mia, running around this Korean graveyard outside Seoul trying to find their nonspeaking brother's voice literally in the ground—they think that his voice has seeped into their grandmother's graveyard for various reasons. I think it's my favorite short story I've ever written. 

That voice stayed with me. That family stayed with me. 

I love this biracial family—the family is very quirky. The mom is a linguist, the dad is a former management consultant who has very specific opinions and ideas about lots of different things. Mia was—to me—very funny. I love her voice, and she's very precocious. 

My first novel is about HBOT (hyperbaric oxygen therapy). While I was doing that therapy to one of my kids for his ulcerative colitis, I met a bunch of families that have children with autism. Over the years, I have watched them grow up and learned about that world and been inside it in some ways. 

Every time I thought about Eugene, I saw him doing some of these things that a lot of autistic kids do, as far as some of the high-pitched noises and the repetitive behaviors and nonspeaking and motor difficulties. But I also saw him as always having this beatific smile. I wondered what that smile was about.

When I was on tour for Miracle Creek, I was looking up the website of a therapist who was using this spelling therapy for nonspeakers. I saw that one of her board members had a child with Angelman syndrome, and I’d never heard about it. 

I looked it up and I just got chills because the way that it was described was exactly how I see Eugene in my mind, with the persistent smiles and laughter and motor impairments, nonspeaking for the most part, and having gastrointestinal types of issues. Also, that it's usually—or it can be—comorbid with autism, and that it can sometimes be misdiagnosed as autism. 

I started reaching out to people and reading everything I could about it, did a ton of research, met families with children with Angelman syndrome, talked to a lot of experts, and came to find out that the way I was seeing Eugene in my mind was most likely to be a dual diagnosis of autism and Angelman syndrome. 

GR: Building on that story and unpacking that a little bit more, how do you do your research?

AK: For this book I had so much research that I had to do because there were so many fascinating things that would pop into my head and, in Mia's voice, it brought up so many other related or sometimes unrelated issues. 

There's a fair amount of Googling going on, but for the things that I really, really cared about, which were the Angelman syndrome, getting that right, the nonspeaking letterboard therapy, which is a real-life therapy, that I wanted to make sure that I was representing correctly. 

I like to do a lot in person, but during the COVID era it was Zooming with people and trying to learn as much about the real-life experiences of these people as much as possible. 

And then also, possibly because Miracle Creek was my first novel, a lot of the research from that came from my own experience. I wanted to do a similar thing here, with respect to not just writing about something based on what I read, but meeting the people, and also making that a part of my life. 
For example, with respect to the nonspeaking side of the research, I started volunteering at a therapy center near me teaching creative writing to non-speakers. I get to experience what it's like to communicate with them, with me speaking and them responding by spelling.

Seeing that in real life, once you’ve experienced it, it's life changing to me. 

GR: Wow—that I can only imagine. In terms of the plot of this book, this is a missing-persons story. How do you develop and map out the plot and twists? Do you have a whiteboard or print pages out, or do you just sit down and revise?

AK: It's more the latter. The way that I write is, I call it method writing—similar to method acting. 

I did a lot of method acting training [in high school]. When I started writing, that's how it made sense to me to write, to inhabit the character, and act out what they would say, how they would react. I see it as scenes in my mind…as I'm pacing back and forth, and muttering things out loud to myself, and writing and free writing and things like that. [Laughs.]

Since that's the way that I write, it's not until I’m done that I can figure out what that scene should be and how it's going to play out. It plays out in real time, as I'm writing and as I'm thinking about it. Because of that, outlines are kind of useless to me. 

At the same time, I'm a huge story structure and architecture geek. As I'm drafting, after I've done all this free writing and acting it out in my head, the other part of my brain—the story structure and architecture side of me—is going, “What's happening here? And how is that relevant to where you are in the story?” 

I almost retroactively superimpose this structure after I've finished the scene or chapter. Once I'm done with the first draft, I have this very, very short outline that I've been jotting down as I finish each chapter, and then I can edit accordingly. 

GR: That is fascinating! Switching gears, what is your favorite genre of book?

AK: My favorite genre is linked stories, which are short stories or chapters that are woven together in some way. Books like Olive Kitteridge, which is the same character, A Visit from the Goon Squad is probably one of my top-five favorites. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, again, all these different stories that are seemingly disparate but are connected and bound by a very, very tight throughline and structure that you realize when you get to the end. 

I love when people tell seemingly disparate stories that show very different aspects of people and their lives. But being the story structure and architecture geek that I am, I also like when the story is propulsive in a way through the linking, whether it be a character whose fate I'm interested in finding out about, or whether it's a puzzle that I'm trying to solve like a mystery. 

I feel like that's what I tried to do with Happiness Falls: using the missing-person mystery almost as a hook, like a Trojan horse. You put it in, and then once you’re hooked into the story—and there is that present-day story of the investigation—but that gives me a way in to frame it and anchor the story so that Mia can go off and tell all of these sometimes seemingly random things like about her and John running around, having these Vulcan mind melds when they were little. I'm sure some readers are like, “How is this relevant,” and you find out at the end how it comes together. 

GR: What are you reading now?

AK: Back to these link stories, I am reading some of them right now. 

I am reading Daniel Mason's North Woods, which is coming out later in September. It is one of these linked stories, and the link is a house in the woods. It spans something like 400 years and lots of different formats of storytelling. But it's all linked together by this house. 

I am also rereading Anthony Marra’s The Tzar of Love and Techno. It's got some objects that interlink some of the stories as well as some of the characters and the location. The links are a little bit looser, but the links are enough to intrigue me and to make me think of each story almost like a puzzle. The stories themselves are gorgeous. And then I'm trying to figure out how they link up, which is another level of layering of the puzzle of reading and storytelling that I love so much. 

GR: What is the one thing you would want people to remember about Happiness Falls?

AK: No matter what the cause, whether it be autism or Angelman or somebody being an immigrant or some medical reason, just because you can’t talk doesn't mean you can't think or understand. If there's one thing that I hope people take away from reading this book is to question the assumption that oral fluency is equivalent to intelligence.

GR: Last one: You referenced Tim O’Brien’s book In the Lake of the Woods earlier and in your book, and that is a story open to interpretation. Would you say the ending of Happiness Falls is definite?

AK: I don’t think it is. I wanted the ending of this story to be satisfying. I think there's enough of a resolution and enough answers that it is. 

There's also an opening that I provide for the readers. In the Lake of the Woods there really isn't any kind of resolution—there are seven different hypotheses—and by the time you finish reading, each scenario he presents is equally likely. 

Whereas here, I think most people have an idea of what they think happened. And sure, there are some doubts, but that's similar to real life. Even though this is a novel and a fictionalized story, one of the points that I'm trying to make is about missing-person cases, and those being such frustrating, open-ended mysteries. Often in real life with missing-person mysteries, you don't get any kind of a resolution. Given that point, it makes sense that we wouldn't know for sure. 

There is a resolution, there is a satisfying ending, but there is also just the tiniest, tiniest bit of question that possibly what you think, what you're almost positive about, might not be true. I think that makes it fun. I think that's one of the pleasures of reading books.