A Living Remedy: A Memoir

Written by Nicole Chung

Narrated by Jennifer Kim

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

Winner, Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing

Named a Best Book of the Year by: Time * Harper’s Bazaar * Esquire * Booklist * USA Today * Elle * Good Housekeeping * New York Times * Electric Literature * Today

From the bestselling author of ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW comes a searing memoir of family, class and grief—a daughter’s search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she’s lost.

In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you’d hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship behind, yet are unable to bring anyone else with them.

Nicole Chung couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she'd long wanted. But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in – where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations – looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets.

When her father dies at only sixty-seven, killed by diabetes and kidney disease, Nicole feels deep grief as well as rage, knowing that years of precarity and lack of access to healthcare contributed to his early death. And then the unthinkable happens – less than a year later, her beloved mother is diagnosed with cancer, and the physical distance between them becomes insurmountable as COVID-19 descends upon the world.

Exploring the enduring strength of family bonds in the face of hardship and tragedy, A Living Remedy examines what it takes to reconcile the distance between one life, one home, and another – and sheds needed light on some of the most persistent and grievous inequalities in American society. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9780063031647

Nicole Chung

Nicole Chung is the author of the national bestseller All You Can Ever Know. Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, the Washington Post, Time, and many other outlets, All You Can Ever Know was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a semifinalist for the PEN Open Book Award, an Indies Choice Honor Book, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Chung's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Time, GQ, Slate, and the Guardian. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she now lives in the Washington, DC, area.

Reviews for A Living Remedy

[Kati Thompson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A beautifully written memoir on the complexity of adoption, poverty, and grief. So many tears were shed with this book.

[Linda Pattison · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

That my daugter is also adopted and Korean, are about the same age and both with 2 daughters. Some relavent emotions and relationships.
Very touching. Thank you, Nicole.
Very thoughtfully written.

[JR Yutzy · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Her father, a lifelong smoker, died at the age of 67. She writes ‘ it is still hard for me not to think of my father’s death as a kind of negligent homicide, facilitated and sped by the state’s failure to fulfill its most basic responsibilities to him’
Does she wish the state would step in and make cigarettes illegal? What about sugar? And a thousand other things that are bad for us? I understand grief, my brother recently died at 41 from a heart attack, so she has my deepest sympathies in her loss. But God have mercy on our country if more then 5% of its citizens think like Ms. Chung.