About
I'm a 31-year-old Korean-American writer based in Los Angeles. I write personal essays and short fiction about shame, grief, ambition, family, and what it costs to be honest with yourself.
At 27, I quit a six-year engineering career to build a beauty products business. Later I earned a master's from MIT. I write about ambition, failure, and what it costs to start over.
Themes
- Shame
- Grief and guilt
- Aging as a woman
- Books and literature
- Despair
Style
Honest, economical, unsentimental. Short declarative sentences, white space, the telling detail. Influenced by Raymond Carver, Sylvia Plath, Tolstoy, and Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Key Essays
- On Living With Your Mom
- My Top 10 Books: The Ones That Changed My Life
- My Best 10 Books: The Most Beautifully Written
- My List of Overrated Books
- A Friend I Abandoned
- His Last Good Fight
- The Weight of Her Confessions
- Sick Once More
- Beware of Despair
- What I Started Noticing After Hundreds of Novels
- The Writing I Aspire to
- I Opened a Beauty Shop in California
Contact
Email me at hi@sandrarhee.com.