Join us for a reading with Nicole Chung, who will read from her recent memoir, A Living Remedy. A conversation with author Taylor Harris will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Nicole Chung couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she’d long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in—where there are big homes, college funds, and nice vacations—looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets.
When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of precarity and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his early death. And then the unthinkable happens—less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID-19 descends upon the world.
Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another—and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society.
About the Author: Nicole Chung’s debut, the national bestseller All You Can Ever Know, was published in 2018. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and semifinalist for the PEN Open Book Award, it landed on over twenty Best Book of the Year lists. Her latest book is A Living Remedy, out now from Ecco. Chung’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, GQ, The Guardian, and Slate. Previously, she was digital editorial director at the independent publisher Catapult, where she helped lead their magazine to two National Magazine Awards. In 2021, she was named to the Good Morning America AAPI Inspiration List honoring those “making Asian American history right now.” Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she now lives in the Washington, DC, area.
About the Moderator: Taylor Harris is the author of This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown, a finalist for both the Library of Virginia’s 2023 People’s Choice Literary Awards in Nonfiction and the 2023 Southern Book Award in Nonfiction. Her debut was named one of the best memoirs of the year by Vulture and one of the best nonfiction books of 2022 by The Washington Post. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, O Quarterly, SELF, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Longreads, The Cut, Parents, Romper, McSweeney’s, and other publications. She lives with her family in Virginia and teaches writing workshops to students at Johns Hopkins University.
To order A Living Remedy, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.
"A Living Remedy is a bouquet of feeling—Nicole Chung weaves a groundbreaking narrative steeped in love, humor, the infinitude of memory, and the essentiality of community. Chung approaches the kaleidoscope of grief from its many angles, excavating its complexity with heart and candor; but Chung's prose also soothes, uncovering hidden corners of the heart and its many permutations. A Living Remedy is elegiac and heart-expanding, a memoir that's both an exploration of loss and a beacon for moving forward. We couldn't be luckier to have this gift of a book."
—Bryan Washington
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Nicole Chung Photo Credit: Carletta Girma