Susan Choi is making a career of trying her father’s patience, said Jessica Murphy in Poets & Writers. Ten years after debuting with The Foreign Student, an invented love story involving a Korean-born undergraduate who was based on her dad, Choi has published a new novel that imagines how someone like her old man would respond if he became a suspect in a Unabomber-style terror campaign. The concept isn’t all that farfetched. Back in the 1960s, her father was a graduate-school classmate of Ted Kaczynski in the University of Michigan’s mathematics department. Had they stayed closer over the years, she says, who knows where FBI suspicions might have lead?
A Person of Interest, Choi’s ���enthralling” third novel, speculates that an innocent man might have difficulty clearing his name, said Megan O’Grady in Vogue. “When you’re accused of doing something you haven’t done, the first impulse is to feel guilt or unease,” Choi says. “Anyone would start behaving badly.” The vexed math professor in the book doesn’t share her father’s exact background. There are events in both men’s lives, though, that the average person would want to keep from scrutiny. “My father,” says Choi, “is very, very tolerant of the fact that many of the difficult truths that he ends up sharing with me end up then immediately getting fictionalized.” Fortunately his daughter has a gift for stories based on reality. Her American Woman, a fictional account of Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2004.
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