Every Thanksgiving, my family does a tradition we call gratitudes. After dinner, we go around the table and list everything we’re grateful for in the past year. This year, for the second year in a row, I spent the holiday at work, and so my family flew to Boston and we fit in our celebration (and our gratitudes) around my work schedule. I wanted to share some of my gratitudes here—it’s been a busy year, one spent largely offline, and it has been good in many ways and hard in many ways too.

Gratitude #1: My dad gripes endlessly about cooking Thanksgiving dinner in a foreign kitchen and yet does it anyway. My mom packs a meal for me to take to the ICU for each of my night shifts. It can be easy to feel lonely in residency—the hours are long, the schedule is irregular, your day off is a random Tuesday and almost never an actual weekend day—but then I’m reminded, suddenly, of the abundance of love around me.

Gratitude #2: Writing dates with friends in Boston coffee shops, in the buttery afternoon light of an English townhouse, in my apartment with a shared Google Doc. I have done more and better writing this year than I have in a long time, and I think it’s because I’ve been reading more, thinking more, playing more. I’m done with major revisions for ANATOMY, and then I’m done / nearly done with two other projects. Both are in new genres for me…!

Gratitude #3: The little bit of sunrise at 6:30 AM during my walk home from work, the temporary state that is good health, friends in medicine who know what this feels like and friends outside medicine who will listen even when they don’t. I’m in the trauma / burn ICU this month and maybe someday I’ll be able to write about it, but...not anytime soon. In the meantime, I’m trying to tell the people I love I love them. I’m trying not to take any of this life for granted.

What I’m reading:

• CHILDREN OF TIME by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’m obsessed with this book. I have told everyone I know about it. It’s basically if space-faring humans tried to speed up evolution for monkeys on another, Earth-like planet, but accidentally ended up doing it to spiders instead. The spiders develop a civilization! It spans generations! It is so smart and so unexpected and I cannot stop talking about it.

• INTIMACIES by Katie Kitamura. Technically, I read this one a while ago, but I’ve basically spent the last few months working my way through Kitamura’s entire body of work after being introduced to her through AUDITION. The language is so precise! I feel about these books the way I feel about Weike Wang’s, which is to say, reading them feels like I’m becoming a better writer.

• SOURDOUGH by Robin Sloan. You know when you start reading a book and you know immediately you’re in good hands? That’s me with this book, set in SF about a tech worker who (accidentally) ends up as a baker after being tasked with taking care of the sourdough starter from the restaurant she always orders take-out from. I’m only a handful of chapters in and it’s exactly the kind of thing I like (meditations about finding yourself adrift in early adulthood a la GINGKO SEASON by Naomi Xu Elegant and KAKIGORI SUMMER by Emily Itami, two other recent faves).

Other books on my reading list: THE ISLE IN THE SILVER SEA by Tasha Suri (I’ve been thinking about knight books ever since THE EVERLASTING…), INNAMORTA by Ava Reid (out next year!), I’LL FIND YOU WHERE THE TIMELINE ENDS by Kylie Lee Baker.

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What I’m writing:

Lots of things, as discussed! Here’s an excerpt from the project that’s been occupying most of my mind lately…

It was the height of summer, and everything was in bloom: the crocuses, the lilies, the larkspurs, the roses. He reached for a rose, plucked it. “Did you know the poets say you are the most beautiful woman in the world?”

A thorn had cut into his skin. On instinct, I reached to wipe the blood away. “Poets are so often prone to exaggeration.”

“Not this time,” he said, and the way he looked at me, I believed it. I still had his blood on my hand, and I raised my finger to my mouth. The taste of it was rich, coppery. As I watched, he broke off the green stem of the flower so that there were no thorns, no leaves—just the soft unfolding of petals. He tucked the flower into the crown of my hair, his hands trembling just slightly as he brushed the shell of my ear. I could still see where the thorn had cut him, that careful well of blood. “I will give you everything, Helen,” he promised, and the shine in his eyes looked like devotion. “Everything the light touches shall be ours.”

Thanks for reading, as always! I recognize this is my first newsletter of 2025 and, well, it is what it is. Lots more to come re: ANATOMY and other books!

Grace

It’s hard to believe we’re in the last few days of 2024 — it feels like I’ve blinked and the year has passed. Lately, my life has been primarily doctoring, with writing snuck in at odd hours (while eating dinner, those rare days off, my notes app as I’m falling asleep). I’ve just turned in my latest draft of ANATOMY, though, and each time it feels closer to the shape it’s supposed to be.

Mostly, though, I’ve been thinking about medicine and the ways it’s changing me. One of the strange, surreal things about residency is that the days are so busy that otherwise important / meaningful / often heartbreaking moments just…happen, and then you move on because you have to, there are more patients to see, there are hours more left in the hospital. You break the news to someone you’ve just met that they have metastatic cancer, you perform CPR on a patient on the floor of a hospital room, knees aching, you come home and fall asleep immediately and do it again the next day. Every day, I’m thankful for this job — what a privilege it is to bear witness in these moments — but I’ve increasingly noticed how normal it feels to be surrounded by suffering, by grief, by death. Someday, I think, I’ll write about it. For now, I’m mostly just living it.

An annual round-up of oddly specific book recs:

• THE LAST HOUR BETWEEN WORLDS by Melissa Caruso, about a single mother, a time loop, and a party that descends through different layers of reality (pair with another fantasy novel about motherhood: THE BOOK EATERS by Sunyi Dean)

• LAND OF MILK AND HONEY by C. Pam Zhang, about class consciousness, food, and desire (pair with a collection of short stories that feels equally sharp and dreamlike: NINETAILS by Sally Wen Mao)

• STRANGE PRACTICE by Vivian Shaw, about a primary care doctor for the undead, a murder mystery, and some of the most accurate medicine I’ve seen in fiction (pair with a contemporary novel about medicine that will also have you laughing out loud: BETWEEN FRIENDS & LOVERS by Shirlene Obuobi)

• ROUGH SLEEPERS by Tracy Kidder, nonfiction about Boston’s unhoused population and the Harvard physician who cares for them (pair with a memoir that will also elicit big, complicated feelings about how we interact with the world around us: H IS FOR HAWK by Helen Macdonald)

That’s all! Some goals for this coming year: to keep reading widely and joyfully, to practice better medicine every day, to turn in a final draft of ANATOMY, to finish drafting a project I’ve been working on since 2015 — more to come on that.

See you in 2025,

Grace

P.S. For the second year in a row, my younger brother has coded his own version of a Goodreads Wrapped (available to all!). I am delighted both as a reader and as his sister, obviously — you can check it out at myyearinbooks.com for some fun + personalized reading stats.

I’m writing to you, for the first time, from my new apartment in Boston. These past few months have been full of change—I graduated medical school, moved across the country, turned twenty-nine. I rang in this last year of my twenties on Cape Cod, with a rare weekend off, eating ice cream by the Atlantic Ocean and thinking about how lucky I feel to be doing work that feels so deeply meaningful, in all aspects of my life. Working in the ER (and introducing myself as a doctor…!) has been strange, surreal, infinitely challenging, infinitely rewarding. I dream about the hospital, most days. I’ve been trying to write about it, little journal entries that remind me I’m a person and allowed to feel (eek!), which has mostly been a work in progress.

And, of course, speaking of works in progress, I’m still working on book two (brief refresher: academic rivals, grad students turned spies, lots of meditations on science, what it promises, and who it belongs to). I received my edit letter a couple months ago, and despite the general busy-ness of my schedule, it’s been a joy to sit down with this book and shape it into a truer version of itself. There’s a lot that is visible about publishing—book deals, cover reveals, preorder campaigns, books in bookstores—but the act of writing itself is still very solitary. Am I doing a good job? No one knows except for me, and sometimes not even that! All I can do is sit down and write. In this way, I suppose, it’s similar to medicine: we go on, every day, even when the days are hard.

An excerpt from ANATOMY:

“What if,” Peter said, and he felt a strange, swooping sensation within him, the feeling of falling, “I told you I didn’t want to be friends?”

She raised a brow. “I always knew you were fickle. We only just shook.”

“I know,” he said. And, because it was Rosalind, he didn’t say anything more. He didn’t need to. Friendship. It’d never been exactly what he wanted, not with her. Not when they were teenagers and he’d learned to sharpen himself against her edges, not now in the cold, crisp dark.

“Ah,” she said.

How many times had this happened before? A greenhouse in the summer, Rosalind brushing leaves from his hair. His face almost touching hers, the dim light of a Stanford stairwell, the two of them playing pretend. Her hand on his shoulder and his on her waist, violins ushering them into a waltz. Here, in the narrow hallway, he could see the flicker of her lashes in the dark, the moonlight that brushed her hair, her skin. He was almost certain she would say no, but instead she lifted her gaze to his. “Well,” she said, voice slow, thoughtful, as if she were reasoning with him or maybe herself, “we were never really friends in the first place, were we?”

In the same way that I think of PORTRAIT as an identity story disguised as a heist story, ANATOMY is a spy novel with a love story at its heart. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. It won’t be out til 2026, probably, but it’s up on Goodreads if you want to keep an eye out!

What I’m reading:

• I HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL by Natalie Sue, which kept me up literally all night when I really had other intentions, about a woman who accidentally gains access to all her coworkers’ emails and sees exactly what they won’t say aloud. Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of novels about workplace despair and late-stage capitalism (lol), so if that’s also your oddly specific mood, other books in this category include JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND, about a young man hired by the government to erase people’s nightmares for the sake of workplace productivity, and THE PAYBACK (forthcoming), about a group of mall workers banding together for a heist to clear all student loan debt. Also, a longtime favorite of mine, THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS AN EASY JOB.

• THE MINISTRY OF TIME by Kaliane Bradley, which had the most absurd, amazing premise and spectacularly delivers on it. A government funded time travel program, the worker hired to help a new time traveler adjust, the two of them falling hopelessly, tragically in love.

• ALL THE BEAUTY IN THE WORLD by Patrick Bringley, a memoir by a security guard at the Met about the ten years he spent working there. My friend Becca recommended this one to me, and it’s going to be one of those books I recommend everyone, forever and ever. I was filled with wonder and gratitude and grief, I cried on the train, I felt more deeply than I have in a while.

That’s all! Let me know about Boston recommendations, restaurants to try, ways to occupy my time when I’m not in the hospital / writing on my couch, etc. I’m on the hunt for the best boba in the area, obviously.

Grace

It’s hard to believe it’s (almost!) the end of the year already. I’m writing to you from my parents’ place in Texas, as I’m racing to finish all the writing—and reading—I want to do before 2024. I’m also in the midst of emergency medicine residency interview season, trying to parse out where I want to spend the next several years of training. This has involved a color-coded spreadsheet and more time than I should down internet rabbit holes, alas.

What I’ve really been thinking about lately, though, is life in seasons. There are seasons in which the work is visible—book launches! deal announcements!—and seasons, like this past year of mine, where the daily toil (and joy!) of writing has to be reward in and of itself. There’s been a recent kerfuffle in the book world about a debut author behaving badly, and I don’t have much to add except that writing and publishing are two different matters entirely, and I guarantee you only one of those can offer fulfillment. It’s not publishing. For those of you who’ve been around for a while, you’ll remember that PORTRAIT OF A THIEF isn’t the first book I wrote, or the first book I attempted to sell. There were many years of watching friends publish books (plural!) while I wondered, in the midst of celebrating their successes, if any of this would ever happen to me. The best advice I got, from my friend Becca Mix, was this question: Would you trade your book for theirs?

Then and now, the answer was always no. Even for all the accolades, the trade reviews, the bestseller lists, the sheer luminous feat of getting published in and of itself—I think why we write, or at least why I write, is to read a story that isn’t yet written. Maybe, also, to find some healing while writing it. All this to say, writing is the work and the joy and the wonder. Everything that publishing offers—sure, it can be pretty spectacular, in the way that stumbling upon fireworks in the dark is spectacular, but more importantly it’s almost entirely outside of our control. I think, at some point, much of our time is better spent on things we can do something about, which in this season involves lots of reading and finishing (soon!) this draft of my next book.

Speaking of publishing, though, and the unexpected joys it can offer, PORTRAIT OF A THIEF has officially earned out! For those of you outside of publishing, this essentially means that my book has made more than the amount my publisher paid me, and now I earn a percentage of each sale. This doesn’t always happen, so if you’ve picked up PORTRAIT already, thank you, thank you, thank you. If you haven’t yet, I think it makes a great gift for any college student / aspiring artist / heist leader, with the bonus that I’ll earn a dollar and some change.

Other than that, one of my tentative goals for the new year is to write a (brief!) newsletter series on publishing—I know so much more than I did when I first signed with my agent seven years (!!) ago, and I’ve collected enough good advice from friends that I’d also like a place to put it. If you’ve got specific questions about publishing, or topics you want covered, let me know and I’ll jot it down!

A handful of dreamlike end-of-the-year book recs:

• EMILY WILDE’S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF FAERIES by Heather Fawcett

• THE MEMORY EATER by Rebecca Mahoney

• WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR IS IN THE LIBRARY by Michiko Aoyama, translated by Alison Watts

• THE PRINCIPLE OF MOMENTS by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson (out next year!)

• THE FACULTY LOUNGE by Jennifer Mathieu (out next year!)

Also, an incomplete collection of books I’m looking forward to reading in 2024: BETWEEN FRIENDS & LOVERS by Shirlene Obuobi, THESE DEADLY PROPHECIES by Andrea Tang, INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT SPACE by Emily Austin, A LETTER TO THE LUMINOUS DEEP by Sylvie Cathrall.

Thanks for reading! Here’s to another season of reading, and writing, and sharing more of what I’ve been working on (eventually!) —

Grace

I’m writing to you from another coast for once — I’m in NYC for the month, doing an away rotation in the NYU Emergency Department and, between shifts, catching up with friends both in and out of publishing. I lived in NYC for a couple years before med school, and it’s strange to come back and see all the places I used to frequent, layered over by time and all the ways I’ve changed since then. It’s kind of the same feeling I get when I go back to Texas and realize that we now have boba in my hometown, or that I no longer exactly remember the back roads I used to know so well. Time is a strange thing, and growing up even more so.

I’m in the depths of working on book two right now, thinking about the sort of themes and character arcs I want to bring out, and so the passage of time seems to be an ongoing theme — Anatomy is about many things, but most of all it’s about two characters who have known each other for years, and suddenly realize maybe they don’t know each other at all. There’s a lot of heartache, as well as all my feelings about science and competition and ambition (and also, falling in love!).

Some housekeeping: I’m doing a special event in Brooklyn on the evening of Wed, Sept 20th, featuring my younger sister Sharon (of TikTok fame!). We’re planning some fun sister games, so come say hi and grab some exclusive Portrait stickers! Other than that, you can always check my events page for updates (a few more coming up on the West Coast this year!). The rest of my time is going to be spent writing, applying for residency (!!), etc etc.

What I’ve been reading:

• A FRAGILE ENCHANTMENT by Allison Saft, which is the Bridgerton-meets-magic book of my dreams, full of dreamy prose and scenes that had me grinning from ear to ear. An engaged prince, a magical dressmaker, the gossip columnist who begins to notice that there’s a lot of chemistry between them…

• THE BOY YOU ALWAYS WANTED by Michelle Quach, which is such an exquisitely done contemporary YA novel about a girl who recruits a reluctant family friend into a scheme to help her dying grandpa. There’s so much here about grief and family and what it feels like for your whole life to be on the cusp of change (I cried!).

• A SONG TO DROWN RIVERS by Ann Liang, an epic Chinese retelling of the beauty Xishi, about a young woman recruited to serve as a concubine for a rival king (and, in truth, dismantle his kingdom from within). This one comes out next year (and I’m blurbing it!), so keep an eye out!

See you next time,

Grace

It’s summer in the Bay Area, and everything feels gloriously slow, lazy, full of sunshine. A lot has happened in the past few months, most of it non-writing related: I visited my family in China for the first time since the pandemic, I took the second of three required board exams for becoming a doctor, I finished a month of working in the ICU, taking care of critically ill patients. And yet, despite all of this being not writing, it doesn’t feel all that far away—these months have been full of big emotions, of ups and downs, of me thinking, yeah, this is worth holding onto.

As usual, I’ve been working on my second book. Much has been said about the challenges of tackling a sophomore novel—expectations! deadlines! that voice in the back of your head that sounds like a book critic, now that you know exactly what book critics sound like!—and so I won’t go on at length, only that I have been trying to find my way back to the feeling of drafting for the sake of drafting, back when my only target audience was myself. It is a joy and a privilege to publish a book, yes, and it is also an enormous, irrevocable change to one’s relationship with writing. I’m definitely still adjusting, which for me means reading lots, and watching lots (Barbenheimer, of course, plus Past Lives, Joy Ride, and more to come), and remembering what good storytelling feels like.

The usual housekeeping: I have one event coming (very) soon, specifically for the Stanford community. It’s this Thursday at the Anderson Collection, and I still can’t believe that an art museum is letting me talk about my book on art crime, lol. Details here! I’ll also be heading to NYC for the month (!!) of September, so be on the lookout for either an event or some bookstore hopping + signed copies. More events to come later in the fall, and hopefully I’ll send out another newsletter before then too, but…you know. Life, etc. Very fulfilling and also very, very busy.

What I’ve been reading:

• ALL THE YELLOW SUNS by Malavika Kannan, about an Indian American girl growing up in Florida and grappling with her identity, queerness, and a bit of self-destruction.

• MAMMOTH AT THE GATES by Nghi Vo, a perfect gem of a novella that somehow, still had me sobbing. About all-knowing birds and the loss of a grandparent, both of which are my weaknesses, tbh.

• EVEN THOUGH I KNEW THE END by C.L. Polk, which has one of my favorite covers ever and is about a detective who makes a deal with the devil + the inevitability of love, all set in a magical 1940s Chicago.

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading, and see you next time,

Grace

Happy spring! My latest update: the paperback for PORTRAIT OF A THIEF is now out! You can find it at all bookstores and also at airports (!!), which still doesn’t feel real to me. Paperbacks usually come out one year after hardcover release, and it’s hard to imagine that it’s been one year since my book first came out, one year since becoming a published author, one year since all these dreams have come true. The paperback also comes with some fun bonus content (an author letter, the first chapter of my next book, book club questions…), which is always neat.

Lately, life has been busy with all sorts of non-writing related things. I recently finished six weeks of OBGYN, where I delivered babies and also experienced lots of big emotional highs and lows. I’m now on neurosurgery, which involves a lot of early mornings and those same big emotions. I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship to writing, to medicine, to life, especially as I head into my last year of medical school. Balance, as ever, is hard to come by, and one of my biggest lessons of the past few years has been that it never gets easy; all we can do is cultivate balance as habit, as routine, as necessity. Life only gets busier, and many fields will demand everything of you if you let it. And so here I am, doing a little bit of writing every evening, waking up at 5 am to sprint to the hospital, trying to create the life I want to lead.

Whew. Anyway. Some housekeeping: I’m heading to New York at the end of the month for the Edgar Allen Poe Awards (my book was nominated for Best First Novel, eek!), and will be participating in the Edgars Zoom panel on April 19th! I also have an event coming up on May 4th at Santa Clara Library, so if you’re local, definitely come say hi! I’ll have some postcards and yet-to-be-revealed stickers, which I am super excited about. If you’re not local, stay tuned for some social media giveaways! You can also find news, event info, etc. on my website always.

A couple of book recs for the month:

• NATURAL BEAUTY by Ling Ling Huang, a novel that came out this week (and I blurbed!), read it for a searing critique of the beauty industry and also lots of feelings about Asian American identity, parent-child relationships, and what we sacrifice in pursuit of perfection

• EVERY VERSION OF YOU by Grace Chan, a gorgeous sci-fi that asks “What if the Metaverse actually became a thing, and your aging immigrant parent did not want to join but the love of your life does, and also, you may have to die in real life for it?”

• I WANT TO DIE BUT I WANT TO EAT TTEOKBOKKI by Se-hee Bae, a memoir which is exactly as the title says, following a writer and her therapist and the kind of book I found perfect for reading just a chapter or so right before bed

That’s everything! Thanks for reading, and take it easy,

Grace

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