Patty Yumi Cottrell Books in Order

Patty Yumi Cottrell is the name under which Patrick Cottrell published the first novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. Born in Korea in 1981, Cottrell was raised in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee after being adopted into a Midwestern family.

Those places matter in the work. City life, suburban family homes, estrangement, and difficult homecomings all show up again and again, usually with equal parts discomfort and dark humor.

Cottrell began as a poet. In the late twenties, he wrote short stories while applying to graduate school, and fiction soon became the main focus. He earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, where working with writer Jesse Ball helped him think less about outside approval and more about the pleasure of making something.

The path to a first novel was not especially tidy. Cottrell started writing Sorry to Disrupt the Peace while working in a coffee shop in New York City. After moving to Los Angeles for a job at a charter school, the draft sat unfinished for a while. During a spring break in 2016, the rest of the novel arrived quickly.

It was a book written from urgency.

Published in 2017, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace follows Helen Moran, a 32-year-old Korean adoptee living in New York who returns to Milwaukee after the death of her adoptive brother. Helen tries to turn shock into an investigation, looking for an explanation that may not exist. Cottrell has been clear that the novel is fiction, not a memoir, even though it shares broad circumstances with his own life.

The book is a good fit for readers who like close first-person narration, grim jokes, and stories that allow grief to be messy. Helen is observant, angry, funny, and often wrong, which gives the novel much of its uneasy energy.

Sorry to Disrupt the Peace won the 2017 Discover Award for Fiction and helped earn Cottrell a Whiting Award in 2018. Cottrell later began publishing as Patrick Cottrell. His second novel, Afternoon Hours of a Hermit, returns to related ground through Dan Moran, a trans writer who goes back to Milwaukee after an unexplained photograph of his dead brother arrives in the mail.

That later book keeps the mystery close to the surface, but its real concerns are memory, family stories, gender, adoption, and the gap between how people understand themselves and how others label them. Cottrell lives in Denver and teaches at the University of Denver.