Susan Choi

Susan Choi in 2019

Susan Choi (born 1969) is an American writer.

Quotes

• I think that there's every reason for a young woman to feel very strongly that allying herself with a powerful man, regardless of how she has to do it, might be her path forward — might sometimes be her only path forward. And forming that alliance may be a decision she makes when she is less experienced, and a decision that she is able to recognize for how compromised it was later in life, but we still have to recognize that there's this whole baked-in social and cultural structure that's pointing her toward that decision. Just identifying all the "bad men" and putting them into a time-out isn't really going to address the ways in which sexism is baked into our society.
  • On sexism still being prevalent in society in “Susan Choi Takes Her Teenagers Seriously” in NPR (2019 Apr 9)

• The voice tends to come first and then everything else follows. It’s never worked for me to think, here’s a character and they should have this kind of voice, let me try to force that. If I can’t tap into a character’s voice, I can’t really write the character…
  • On feeling the voice of a character in “Trust, Serendipity, and Consent: An Interview with Trust Exercise Author Susan Choi” in Bookish (2019 Apr 16)

• I was also interested in what it’s like to experience in a really vivid and authentic-seeming way agency and choice in a circumstance that you might later in your life view completely differently, because as much as you were experiencing agency and choice, you were actually in a radically disempowered situation you weren’t even experienced enough to recognize. That’s why I think consent is such a complicated issue.
  • On consent being a theme in her book Trust Exercise in “Trust, Serendipity, and Consent: An Interview with Trust Exercise Author Susan Choi” in Bookish (2019 Apr 16)

• I think the “disfigurement” that Japan inflicted was less the idea of disfigurement, and more the idea of mystery. I’ve managed to finish all that I’ve written because there’s always a mystery at the heart of it which keeps me interested. I think that’s why Japan was interesting, and it seems to me, still, like a strange mystery.
  • On the role of Japan in her life in “Ghosts, Writing Who You Know, and Rethinking the Novel With SUSAN CHOI” in the Washington Square Review (2018 Feb 15)