“I’m conscious of having been so mad during so much of the writing of this book,” she says. It’s also a paean to anger, arguably the defining emotion of our time, and after decades of tamping it down, Choi came by it honestly around the time Donald Trump got elected and she separated from her husband. It is the sort of page-turning metafiction that readers love to argue about - a Gen-X bildungsroman that speaks to younger generations, a Russian nesting doll of unreliable narrators, and a slippery #MeToo puzzle-box about the fallibility of memory. I can’t find it on the walls.Ĭhoi has been writing novels for 20 years, but Trust Exercise, her mind-bending new book, is her best shot at joining the pantheon of authors whose faces are mounted on walls and recognized at the door. Choi bumps into the photographer, who insists he once took her picture at a festival. Elizabeth Strout stands nearby in a black leather jacket, prompting me to look around for her photo, too. The real Salman Rushdie swoops past his portrait. In the vast, modish reading room upstairs, dozens of portraits of the greatest living writers - from Karl Ove Knausgaard to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - loom over partygoers. She grabs a plastic cup of wine and eyes the new space, which resembles a Barnes & Noble designed by West Elm - thick blond wood and black walls with impractically tall bookshelves. But she joined up to use the Center’s dedicated “writers’ room” and is curious to check out her new digs.Īs we venture into the party in our February parkas - the coat-check attendants tell us there is no room - Choi can’t help but giggle at the indignity of nearly being bounced. She’s usually so exhausted after six hours of teaching and four hours commuting that she heads home and immediately crashes. She has just driven two and a half hours after teaching back-to-back writing seminars at Yale, then negotiated a series of contradictory parking signs out front. With a shining silver bob and a strong brow, Choi, who recently turned 50, looks like a cross between Stacy London and a younger Susan Sontag. Finally, she shrugs her shoulders, as if to concede that she’s just too polite to reject a partycrasher.
“But did you buy a ticket?” the woman presses. “Are you sure you’re on the list?” Choi explains that she’s a member of the workspace and was personally invited. Choi pulls off her soft gray beanie as the woman scans the list with a furrowed brow and then scurries over to another staffer.
When the novelist Susan Choi arrives at the launch party for the new Center for Fiction in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a woman bearing a clipboard is waiting to take her name.
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