The Wanderer’s Curse: A Memoir

In this tender and searching debut, Bon Appétit editor Choi explores her and her mother’s nomadic tendencies. After Choi’s mother divorced Choi’s father, she moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, in 2007—a city populated by “unusual folk who had settled, or stalled, on their way elsewhere.” Choi was initially baffled by the decision—and by her mother’s subsequent moves to seven different states over the next several years—but then she found herself on a similar path. First, she fled California for New York in college, hoping the city might “furnish me with an identity,” then she got fed up with Brooklyn and started a journey across the South. As Choi catalogs those moves—which led her to settle, finally, in Tulsa, Okla.—she comes to accept that she “was a walking Mad Libs variation of [her mother’s] identity crisis.” Interweaving childhood anecdotes that characterize her mother as a hard-nosed, eccentric matriarch with bits of Korean folklore, including an explanation of yeokmasal, the “curse” of the book’s title, Choi delivers a funny and relatable ode to the pleasures and pitfalls of calling many places home. It’s a promising first effort. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME. (May)