Flashlight
Flashlight
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Susan Choi on Flashlight
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Two threads, one trip, twenty years apartChoi was a child in Japan in the late 1970s when North Korean agents were quietly abducting people from the country’s coastal towns. She did not know this at the time. Decades later, learning about those disappearances collapsed the distance between her own hazy childhood memories and a set of catastrophes she had never known were happening around her.
I would call it an overlap between a period of my life and this series of very private catastrophes that had befallen other families during the same time.
Long before she understood how to shape the abduction material into a novel, Choi had been drawn to abduction as a subject across her career. Her second book took the Patty Hearst kidnapping as its center. When Vogue pressed her on whether the North Korean abductions were a new preoccupation or a familiar one, she traced the continuity without apology.
I’m very, very fascinated by abduction stories of all kinds. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always found abduction to be a very disturbing, compelling human behavior... my second book was about the Patty Hearst kidnapping, because I was really interested in that abduction. These abductions that have taken place in Japan were just one of those things that I was really interested by.
Even with her source material in hand, she faced a specific problem: the event at the novel’s center felt too extreme to stage directly. She worried readers would not believe it. The short story she published in The New Yorker in 2020, during quarantine, was her way around this barrier, beginning with the aftermath and withholding the event itself.
I had the characters, their situation, and a strong sense of their fates, for lack of a less weighty word, but part of me was afraid that the fates I’d envisioned might seem implausible to readers... I decided to just skip over the event completely and write about the aftermath, without even really revealing to the reader what the event was. That’s how the New Yorker story came to exist.
That story became the novel’s seed rather than its summary. She grew the full book outward from the aftermath, reaching back toward the event only once she had the shape of what surrounded it.
How she wrote it
A minimalist project that refused to stay smallChoi entered the project with a model in mind: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation, a novel of roughly 140 pages built around a single location as history swept through it. She wanted to write something that spare. What she wrote instead became the longest book she has ever published, and no amount of cutting changed the arithmetic.
The subtraction never offset the addition. [paraphrased from audio]
The difficulty was not only one of length. The writing felt disorienting in a way she hadn’t experienced since her first novel. She had just won the National Book Award for Trust Exercise. The process here bore no resemblance to that.
I don’t want to say chaotic, because I think that that gives an impression of a lot of energy and movement and this was much more slow, meandering, confused, you know, like a blindfolded person trying to navigate a very complicated obstacle course. I mean, I really struggled with this book... Honestly, it was more like the first book I ever wrote than my sixth book. I just felt like I’d never written a book before.
The nonlinear structure created a practical problem: she lost track of her own timeline. The solution she eventually landed on was almost embarrassingly simple, and she delivered it to NPR with deliberate comic gravity.
I began this novel with the intention of writing something very short, and I feel like the novel kind of wrote itself like a snail shell. It just kept spiraling outward in both directions. I had a hard time keeping track of it, to be honest. And at some point, I had this revelation, which I’m going to share now with your listening audience as an amazing tip. I decided to put the events in chronological order.
The novel’s Japan sections draw on Choi’s own childhood memories of living there. She made a deliberate choice not to return for research. A visit in 2023 was personal, not preparatory. Her reason was not practical convenience but a conviction about what memory does that factual accuracy cannot replace.
I like working from memory; there’s something very emotional about memory. Memory is not accurate, ever. I wanted to preserve the ways in which my memories were inaccurate.
Reading Jenny Erpenbeck and Alice Munro in the years before writing Flashlight shifted the way Choi thought about how much a novel owes its reader. She had previously operated from an anxiety of withholding. The two writers showed her a different calculus.
I used to just pile it on, with the feeling that readers could never possibly ‘understand’ unless they had all this information — but then where do you stop? At some point, reading writers like Jenny Erpenbeck and Alice Munro, I started to see the whole backstory question from the opposite direction: How much can you leave out?
What she wants us to sit with
Contingency, care, and a history still arrivingThe families of those abducted from Japan spent decades being told their loved ones had drowned or simply left. North Korea did not acknowledge the abductions until 2002. Choi finished Flashlight without knowing it would publish into a political moment that made the state’s mechanisms newly legible to American readers. She described the coincidence to the Sewanee Review as something close to disorienting.
So many aspects of conditions [in North Korea] are now structuring our everyday reality. Just imagine how crazy it is to be publishing the book into a moment now where suddenly, these incremental but very steady and rapidly escalating attacks on our rights as Americans are going on right now as you and I are talking. This is at the center of our dialogue every day about our own society.
Choi has resisted reducing Flashlight to a thesis while she was writing it. When the Women’s Prize asked what she hoped readers would take away, she answered with something closer to a feeling than an argument, one that the novel earns over hundreds of pages rather than states.
That our lives are subject to so much contingency, so much that is beyond our control, that the best thing we can do is strive to care for other people as best we can.
Louisa, the American girl in Japan at the novel’s opening, follows the arc of the book across decades. Choi admitted to NPR that this character was the one most personally close to her, and that the distance she maintains from love throughout the novel made following her all the way to its end feel like a necessary act rather than a structural choice.
I think there’s a lot of me in Louisa, admittedly. It’s a hard thing to admit because she’s a character that is so committed to fending off love. But it was so important to me that she find love and some kind of peace. And that’s why we end up following her for many, many decades and many, many pages. But I think she gets there. I hope she gets there.