New Dominion Bookshop will host a book reading and signing with author Nicole Chung on Friday, Oct. 13, at 7 p.m.
Chung will be reading from her new memoir, A Living Remedy, which was released from Ecco this past spring. A conversation with author Taylor Harris will follow.
This in-person event will be free to attend and open to the public.
The book explores how 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 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 67, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Chung 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.
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 more than 20 Best Book of the Year lists.
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.
New Dominion Bookshop is located at 404 E Main St. in Charlottesville.
For more information, visit www.ndbookshop.com
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Crystal Graham
