Creating Universal Stories From the Most Personal

I had my first taste of being an author in second grade. After being thoroughly traumatized by Raymond Briggs’s picture book, The Snowman (the book came out in 1978, long before I was even born, so I’ll freely spoil it for you—the snowman melts in the end), I wrote my own gender-bent version of it, not only making both the main character and the snowman girls but also making sure that the snow-girl does not, in fact, die at the end. If memory serves me right, this short book was for a school project, but the experience was fun enough for me to try my hand at writing my first original work in fourth grade, a sci-fi adventure book inspired by the Magic Tree House books where a sibling duo travels to different planets (I drew my own aliens and had a blast).

(I Got 8 Agent Offers; Then, My Book Died on Sub.)

See, I’ve always known I wanted to be an author. But what I didn’t know was what would be my first “big break.” From eighth grade to when I got my agent shortly after college graduation, I wrote everything from dark, paranormal fantasies about angels and demons to bittersweet contemporary romances about teens in a garage band. Back then, I naively thought getting an agent meant a guaranteed “happily ever after.” But when my agent and I submitted various projects for two years without much luck, I grew desperate. I wrote more books, even trying my hand at writing thrillers and historical fantasies. I was blindly throwing darts, working on book idea after book idea and hoping one would find the bull’s eye. But none struck true until 2018, when my agent, Penny Moore, suggested I try writing a chapter book.

If you told teenaged me that my first book deal would consist of not one but four books, she wouldn’t have believed you. And if you told her that the books would blow up into a twelve-book-long chapter book series inspired by her own spunky kid self, the very same individual who started her on this long, convoluted journey in the first place, she’d have laughed in your face. And yet, that’s exactly what happened, and my very first book deal was for the first four books of the Mindy Kim series, which is based on my own experiences of living in the Orlando, Florida, area in elementary school.

What’s funny about the Mindy Kim series is the fact that when I started writing the series, I never expected to write so much about myself or my own family. Sure, the first book, Mindy Kim and the Yummy Seaweed Business, is loosely based on my own experiences of being one of the only Asian American kids in my school (disclaimer, this was back in the early 2000s, I have no idea what the demographics of that area is like now). But other than that, well, I was a 24-year-old with some broad ideas. I knew I wanted to write about my own Korean culture, since I grew up with little or no books featuring Korean American protagonists. And I had a list of the things I wanted to happen in the series (her getting a dog at some point was a must!). But I had no idea that in the seven years that I would work on the books, I would be essentially writing a series about me and my family.

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Don’t get me wrong. Mindy is definitely not me, and Mindy’s family is not mine. Unlike Mindy, who was born in California, I was born in South Korea and am a proud immigrant. Both my mother and father are still alive, and I do not have any siblings. But while writing this series, I somehow ended up incorporating everything from small details like how my father struggles to cook (Mindy Kim and the Yummy Seaweed Business) to priceless memories like the ones I have of various family vacations (Mindy Kim and the Trip to Korea and Mindy Kim and the Fun, Family Vacation). I even ended up incorporating my own grief and loss into the series, like when I transmuted my own painful experiences of losing family members, both as a kid and as an adult (Mindy Kim and the Yummy Seaweed Business and Mindy Kim and the Mid-Autumn Festival). Bits and pieces of my family enmeshed themselves into every book in the series, making every installment all the more precious to me.

And perhaps what was the most shocking (to me, at least), was how this very personal series ended up resonating with thousands of readers around the world. For the last five years, since the first two Mindy Kim books came out in January 2020, I’ve received emails from kids, parents, teachers, and librarians who told me how Mindy helped them (and/or someone they knew) feel seen. How kids can’t stop reading the books because they reminded them of themselves. I’ve written other books besides this series, but Mindy Kim is still by far my most successful writing venture, definitively outselling the rest.

One of my favorite quotes is by a psychologist named Carl Rogers, who stated that “what is most personal is most universal.” When I first encountered this quote as an AP Psychology student in high school, I remember scoffing in disbelief. What do you mean, the most personal is the most universal, I’d thought back then. No one can relate with the x-y-z stuff I have going on right now! Which was hilariously a very stereotypically-angsty-teenager-thing to think.

But now, I think I’m starting to get it. Because even though I’ve tried writing pretty much everything under the sun for the last 20 or so years, the books that ended up resonating with the greatest number of people have been the stories closest to home.

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