In-Store: Mary H.K. Choi: Pool House w/ E. Alex Jung

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
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Bestselling young adult author Mary H.K. Choi debuts a brilliantly observed adult novel about mothers, daughters and the complexity of family set against the backdrop of Hollywood.

Stevie cannot escape her mother. Abandoning college plans to work a dead-end job, her days are a purgatorial bore. Many dream of moving to L.A. and into the spotlight, but Stevie can’t wait to move away from it, and her mother’s orbit, to start over.

Moon is many things: an out-of-work actress, a recovering addict, whatever a mistress becomes when she’s widowed, and a mother. Reeling in the aftermath of her lover and TV husband’s death, Moon struggles to process her grief. And the last thing she expects is for Stevie to leave her too.

Now, neither Stevie nor Moon can afford to quit each other. And their cost of living forces them into a glass-walled pool house in the backyard, while their home is rented out to pay the bills. But when Adam, Moon’s former TV son and Stevie’s forever crush, arrives for the funeral, the three are pulled into a messy orbit, moving back into the ‘Big House’ and play-acting a picture-perfect family even as tensions rise and relationships unravel.

POOL HOUSE is a course charted through the wilderness of motherhood, a story about the challenges of navigating class, fame, burgeoning sexuality, and grief as two women grapple with what it means to grow up and grow older in Hollywood.

Mary H.K. Choi is a New York Times bestselling author whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, New York, GQ, and Elle. Formerly, she was the culture correspondent for Vice News Tonight on HBO, a columnist at Wired and Allure, and a guest columnist for the New York Times Opinion desk, as well as an executive producer of the House of Style documentary on MTV. She was awarded the Katherine Min Fellowship at MacDowell and has also written comics for Marvel and DC. She is currently developing her books for film and TV. Follow her on all social media at @choitotheworld, as well as the choitotheworld Substack that covers mental health, culture, and technology.

E. Alex Jung is a features writer at New York Magazine. He joined the staff in 2013 and his interview subjects have included Michaela Coel, Bong Joon Ho, and Jennifer Coolidge. He received a GLAAD nomination for his profile on comedian Joel Kim Booster, and has two National Magazine Award nominations for his pieces on the late fiction author Anthony Veasna So and then mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

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