In person at Brookline Booksmith! Celebrate the release of The Wanderer’s Curse with author Jennifer Hope Choi, in conversation with Tiana Clark.
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The Wanderer’s Curse: A Memoir
A Korean mother runs off to Alaska, sparking a greater season of wandering. Could her daughter be destined for the same?
When Jennifer Hope Choi first stumbled upon the “curse” known as yeokmasal—an allegedly inheritable affliction causing one to roam farther and farther from home—she immediately consulted her mother. “Oh yeah,” Umma quipped. “I have that.” Technically this wasn’t a revelation. Since 2007, the no-nonsense open-heart surgery nurse had moved suddenly from the Golden State to the Last Frontier, shuttling over the next decade through seven states.
For much of her adulthood, Choi had fancied herself nothing like her immigrant mother, late-blooming vagabond spirit and all—until life in Brooklyn imploded, spurring her to relocate to South Carolina and reckon with startling truths. Artmaking had left her in debt, single, and jobless. Questions hovered, gathering ragged like fractus clouds: Was it time to give up writing? Would she ever have a place of her own to call home? Or was she doomed to bunk up with Umma in the Deep South indefinitely?
This probing memoir follows Choi through her many former homes, from a crumbling Chinatown tenement to a haunted museum in Georgia. Connections emerge, between her curious trajectory and idiosyncratic Korean identity narratives: a mystical Korean dog breed, pro golfers, modern Korean cults, the four pillars of destiny, and Korean American art. One question lingers throughout her search: What might be gained from living in residence with uncertainty?
Told with whip-smart sensibility, The Wanderer’s Curse is an electric mother-daughter story, exploring ideas of belonging, self-determination, and possibility, leaving readers to wonder what we take with us generation to generation, what we wish we could leave behind, and how we move on.
Jennifer Hope Choi is a National Magazine Award–nominated editor at Bon Appétit. Her writing has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing and appeared in the New York Times, Guernica, Lucky Peach, VQR, and BuzzFeed. Her debut, THE WANDERER’S CURSE, will be published by W. W. Norton & Company.
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections Scorched Earth (2025) and I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (2018), which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Clark is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Clark’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other notable publications. She is currently the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.
Clark is at work on a memoir-in-essays, Begging to Be Saved, which explores Black burnout, millennial divorce, faith, art-making, and historical methods of Black survival.
