![]() It is not for nothing that the advice Lee most valued was: ‘“Choose the important over the urgent.”’ It should not be so surprising to discover that one of the bestselling novelists today can be better appreciated if you have at least a passing knowledge of the Bible. In fact, it’s quite easy to dodge politics if you’re a skilled writer.’ And boy is she skilled. How Biblical! How very Gospel of Matthew! How un-ironic! As she said, ‘Not all writing is political. Nobody’s actually poor if you really know what your gifts are, and that’s a life’s journey, right? So every character has a kind of extraordinary gift. I was making the ironic comment, “Why do we give millionaires free food? Why do the rich get all the goodies?” But the real thing that I was trying to argue was that we’re all really millionaires because we are given this grace, this unmerited favor of gifts and talents. That title, in the context of the modern arts scene, sounds like the usual left-wing stuff. Her first novel, Free Food for Millionaires, was published when she was thirty-six. She’s a church-going, Bible-reading, Korean-American Christian, who was a corporate lawyer before she quit to spend eleven years learning how to write fiction while living with chronic liver disease. ![]() Alas, novelists so often have predictable beliefs. Their work would be called urgent, relevant, and, God bless them, important. ![]() So many novelists who work on Min Jin Lee’s themes would be making a comment - social or political - often a very predictable comment. ![]()
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