Helena Rho: There’s a Burden That Comes With Historical Fiction

Helena Rho is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominated writer and the author of American Seoul. A former assistant professor of pediatrics, she has practiced and taught at top ten children’s hospitals: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. She earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh. Follow her on Instagram.

In this interview, Helena discusses messy families and doing more research than what ends up in the book with her new historical fiction, Stone Angels, her advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Helena Rho
Literary agent: Amy Bishop-Wycisk
Book title: Stone Angels
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group
Release date: March 4, 2025
Genre/category: Historical Fiction/Women’s Fiction
Previous titles: American Seoul: A Memoir
Elevator pitch: In a Pachinko meets Persuasion, a 40-year-old woman journeys back to her cultural homeland and uncovers a harrowing secret. Combining elements of migration and identity with a slice of painful World War II history and a precious second chance at love, Stone Angels is a poignant family drama told through the bold and determined voices of three women, mothers and daughters and sisters, navigating the beauty and brutality of their lives.

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In 2006, I was studying Korean language at Konkuk University in Seoul and reconnecting with my mother’s family when I first learned about the hundreds of thousands of girls and young women who were forced into sexual slavery by Japan during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945). They were known as “comfort women,” although the victims were mostly teenagers, and some of them were as young as 9- and 10-years-old. As an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the time, I thought I’d eventually write a long form piece about them. But in 2015, I was given a special book, Can You Hear Us?, a verified, compiled oral history of Korean survivors translated into English. It changed my life. Although I’d never written fiction of any kind previously, I decided to write a novel. Because only through fiction could I imagine the life of a single victim, her family, her friends, and her community, all destroyed by systematic, institutionalized sex trafficking by a government.

Ten long years. Once I started writing, I realized I couldn’t sustain the narrative only through the point of view of one of the sexual slaves—I can’t stay in darkness for that long—so I chose a multi-generational approach and three different points of view. All women. And then I decided that falling in love was integral to my central character’s journey. But the problem was I’d never written a love story. My first thought was, How hard could it be? Such a foolish question! And a history of reading dime-store romances as a teenager was wholly unhelpful. In desperation, I turned to Jane Austen and Persuasion, a wildly romantic story about second chances. Also, I watched a lot of Korean dramas, which juxtapose tragedy and comedy in surprising and delightful ways and are far more complicated than they’re given credit for.

Stone Angels is my debut novel. But it’s my second book because my memoir, American Seoul, came out in 2022 by a different publisher. I felt like I was learning everything all over again, and it was bewildering because I’d also changed genres. But it was also very exciting. For instance, because my novel was selected to be in Club Car, the book club of Grand Central Publishing, I got the opportunity to include my son’s favorite tofu recipe for the book club kit. It was a lot of fun but also a lot of work! Normally, I just wing this recipe, adding and adjusting. Instead, I rigorously taste-tested it for a week to make sure I had the right ingredients and quantities and the right order in my cooking instructions—I almost got sick of tofu, which is one of my favorite foods.

Yes! Angelina Lee, my central character, wouldn’t do what I wanted her to do. I had based her on a loose version of Anne Elliot from Persuasion, but she refused to choose the character who I thought was my iteration of Frederick Wentworth from Austen’s novel. It was maddening until I realized that my novel would not be faithful to the original. Another surprising thing was the research and fact checking took a lot longer than I anticipated. And I made three separate trips over a five-year period to Korea, each time thinking I was done with research. So wrong! Looking back, I was anxious because there’s a burden that comes with historical fiction, and I didn’t want to get the facts wrong, so I did way more research than appears in the novel. I also discovered that I enjoyed pretending to be a scholar.

My character Angelina Lee chances upon a horrific family secret while she’s coping with an ugly divorce, unhappy children, and the death of her mother by suicide. Families are messy. I’d like to appropriate what Leo Tolstoy once said about families and put my own twist on it: All families, whether happy or unhappy, are unique and yet the same. I hope readers will identify with Angelina’s family and laugh and cry along with the characters. And I really hope readers will avail themselves of the resources in my Author’s Note and learn more about the victims of sexual slavery by Japan.

This is your daily reminder to find your people. Find a community where your work is valued but critiqued honestly and with respect. Start a writing group (in person or online), join a writing meet-up, start a blog, attend a writer’s residency. No writer is an island, and we all need some kind of support to sustain us.