"Docile" Reveals Just How Hard It Is to Survive the Model-Minority Myth
Our August Read is a gorgeous debut that's being referred to as "the Korean American 'Girl Interrupted'"
Hi beach-goers, beach readers, and the UV-ray avoidant, happy August.
I’m popping into your inbox with OUR AUGUST MEMOIRING SELECTION, in case you missed it in last month’s post where I double-stacked our summer picks for vacation related/writing retreat reasons. (Both somehow in Western Canada, which if you know about my memoir-in-progress, and how it’s largely set in Toronto, is medium ironic.)
Speaking of moi, I was super honored to be interviewed about Memoiring by
for The Creative Independent, an outlet I love. I hope you’ll take a look!Now, onto our August Selection. Here’s everything you need to know about Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl (July 2024), a gorgeous debut by representational painter Hyeseung Song. Chloé Cooper Jones, author of Easy Beauty, called it “a revelation.”
Docile is about:
💥 Korean American girlhood in wealthy, white suburban TX
💥 Challenging family dynamics (to say the least)
💥 Getting into Harvard only to check into a mental health institution
💥 Breaking the model-minority myth to break free
💥 An artist’s coming of age
Sign ups are open to Zoom with Hyeseung Song on Thursday, September 5 at 6:30pm ET. Author Zooms are free for Memoiring Substack subscribers!
TLDR book blurb: For readers of Crying in H Mart and Minor Feelings as well as lovers of the film Minari comes a searing coming-of-age memoir about the daughter of ambitious Asian American immigrants and her search for self-worth.
Hyeseung Song, who I interviewed for the Memoiring panel at the Deep Water Literary Festival, shared that Docile began in notes and scenes almost 20 years ago. It movingly details how Song strove to overcome her Texas childhood “on the wrong side of the tracks of a wealthy white neighborhood.” Her mother was controlling and her father pursued get-rich-quick schemes wanting to be a billionaire. Ultimately, he bankrupted the family.
“One of my greatest hopes is that Docile steps in with its message that what Asian American young adults are dealing with is something complicated at the intersection of race and mental health.” —Hyeseung Song in The Hawaii Review of Books
Getting excellent grades and into all the right schools helped Song for a while, but at Harvard, the model-minority myth caught up with her, she says, and Song wound up in a hospital for a suicide attempt. Dropping out of graduate school and disappointing her parents allowed her to return to her childhood passion of painting and find the self she’d lost.
Docile is a stunning portrait of an artist told through the hard-won life experience of a Korean American woman. Acknowledging the emotional work it takes to write a memoir, and the decades it took to fully capture hers, Song says, “I was encouraged to write from the scar, not the wound. That’s what I’ve done.”
Get a copy of Docile and sign up now for Thursday, September 5 at 6:30pm ET when Memoiring is in conversation with Hyeseung Song over Zoom. Bring your questions for her and see you there!