Lisa Ko on Burning Her Journals

photo: Julianna Sohn

“There was this anxiety about losing the past. If I didn’t write it down, did it even happen? Would I remember it? What would that mean for me?”

Lisa Ko is the author of the new novel Memory Piece and the nationally bestselling novel The Leavers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Ko’s writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, and The Believer.