Nancy Jooyoun Kim Books in Order

If you want the best place to begin: The Last Story of Mina Lee → What We Kept to Ourselves
If you want a mother-daughter story with a mystery at the center: The Last Story of Mina Lee
If you want a bigger family saga with dual timelines: What We Kept to Ourselves
If you want to follow her themes in publication order: The Last Story of Mina Lee → What We Kept to Ourselves

Nancy Jooyoun Kim was born and raised in Los Angeles, and that city runs all through her work. She grew up near Koreatown, in neighborhoods where Korean and Latinx communities overlapped, raised by a single immigrant mother who spoke little English. As a kid she was bookish, shy, and observant. She has said that listening to the stories around her became part of how she learned to write.

She writes about people who are close to each other, but not always able to fully speak across that distance.

Kim studied at UCLA and later earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington in Seattle. During those years, writing moved from private habit to serious work. One early short story about a Korean American daughter, her immigrant mother, and the strain of trying to love someone you cannot easily talk to became the seed of her first novel. She kept following that thread for years, letting it grow into something larger and more layered.

Part of the emotional spark came from her own life. In her early twenties, just before moving from Los Angeles to Seattle for graduate school, her estranged father died in a car accident. She has spoken about the fear that followed, the worry that one day her mother might not answer the phone and she would be too far away to help. That feeling helped shape The Last Story of Mina Lee, even though the novel itself is not autobiographical.

She stayed with that feeling until it turned into a book.

The Last Story of Mina Lee, published in 2020, was Kim's debut novel, and it quickly found a wide audience as a Reese's Book Club pick and a New York Times bestseller. The book begins with a daughter returning to Los Angeles and discovering her mother's death, then opens into a deeper story about immigration, class, grief, and the long shadow of silence inside a family. Readers often come for the mystery, but stay for Mina and Margot, and for the way Kim makes Koreatown feel lived in, specific, and real.

Her second novel, What We Kept to Ourselves, published in 2023, broadens that same interest in family secrets and unanswered questions. Set in Los Angeles across 1977 and 1999, it follows the Kim family after the disappearance of their mother, Sunny, and uses that mystery to look at marriage, children, loneliness, art, war memory, and the cost of chasing stability in America. It was a finalist for the CALIBA Golden Poppy Award. Like her first book, it mixes suspense with a close look at everyday lives under pressure.

Across both novels, Kim returns to a few things again and again: mothers and daughters, Korean and Korean American families, outsiders trying to make room for themselves, and the gap between the story America tells about opportunity and the lives people actually live. Food, work, language, and city blocks matter in her fiction. So do the small misunderstandings that can shape a whole life.

She has also published essays and short fiction, and she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches at the University of San Francisco. That feels fitting. Her novels are full of questions, and teaching is another way of staying close to them. If you like family stories with secrets, strong sense of place, and characters trying to reach one another across years of silence, Kim is a writer worth spending time with.