Welcome back!
For our fourth meet, it was decided that we will read Lisa Ko’s The Leavers. Ko names herself a “triple scorpio” on her Insta profile, and is still considerate of community care/safety against COVID, so this read will surely be more intense than I expected. I hope you can make it!
We will do so alongside an art work I hope another member can choose? Please post in the comments
Lisa Ko’s novel The Leavers follows a convention of the protest novel genre; Ko dramatizes the personal—a family torn apart—in order to draw attention to a structural social problem.
The Leavers, about an undocumented mother who suddenly disappears and the young American-born son she leaves behind, could hardly be better timed. The political resonance of The Leavers is no coincidence; Ko got the idea for her affecting debut from a 2009 New York Times article about an undocumented immigrant from Fuzhou, China, who spent a year and a half in detention (much of it solitary) after being arrested at a Greyhound station in Florida on her way to a new job. That woman’s story inspired the character of Polly Guo, the mother in Ko’s book; her son, also mentioned in the article, yielded Deming, Polly’s 11-year-old. — Amy Weiss-Meyer, The Atlantic
Lisa Ko explains how she wrote The Leavers. It took seven years.
Not finishing the novel would have dealt my psyche a blow whose imagined pain was worse than the considerable frustrations of facing my limitations every day.
Lisa Ko explains why she wrote The Leavers.
Nearly a quarter of the 316,000 immigrants deported from the United States in 2014 were parents of children who were US citizens, and there are currently more than 15,000 children in foster care whose parents have been deported or are being im-
prisoned indefinitely. The Leavers is my effort to go beyond the news ar-
ticles, using real-life details as a template to build from, not to adhere to.
It’s the story behind the story, a tribute to sweat, heart, and grind. But it’s
really the story of one mother and her son — what brings them together and
takes them apart.
The meeting is coming Monday 26 June 2023 at 8pm EST. For those in Montreal, we will try to meet in person. I’ll send the ZOOM link in a separate email until I figure out how to make this Substack private.
Have you had a chance to pick up the book? The book is available at the Toronto and Montreal libraries, and surely others too. If you need an e-copy, let me know.
The Leavers has won so many awards!
PEN/Bellwether Award for Socially Engaged Fiction
National Book Award for Fiction Finalist
PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction Finalist
Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award
New York City Book Award for Best First Book
Asian Pacific American Award for Literature
Aspen Words Literary Prize Longlist
People, Book of the Week
NPR, Best Books of 2017
Irish Times, Best International Fiction 2017
Paste Magazine, 40 Best Novels of the 2010s
Los Angeles Times, Best Books of 2017
Electric Literature, 25 Best Novels of 2017
O, The Oprah Magazine, Our Favorite Books of 2017
Huffington Post, Best Fiction Books of 2017
Entertainment Weekly, Best Debut Novels of 2017
iBooks, Best Books of 2017
Poets & Writers, Best Debut Fiction 2017
Christian Science Monitor, 30 Best Books of 2017
Redbook, Best Books of Summer 2017
Book of the Month Club: May 2017 Selection
I’ll send out another email a week or so before with some more prompts and tidbits about the book, Ko, and the artwork chosen. Unless someone else wants to take that on for next time?
xx
Magda
Not sure if this on point as I haven't read the book, but maybe a piece or a curatorial program from this collective (for the art component!) https://migrantartistsmutualaid.org/donate/about/