8 Lives in 1: Author Interview with Mirinae Lee
J.G.P. MacAdam talks to Mirinae Lee about her debut novel — 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster
In 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster, the main character, Mrs. Mook, proclaims she’s lived eight lives in one: as a slave, an escape artist, a murderer, a terrorist, a spy, a lover, and a mother. The story of her life spans the Japanese colonization of Korea, the Pacific War, the division of Korea into North and South, the Cold War, as well as the transition into modern Korea.
Mirinae Lee was born and raised in South Korea. Her first work of fiction appeared in The Antioch Review and was listed as Notable Nonrequired Reading of 2018 in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. Her second short story won the 2018 Editors' Prize in Fiction and appeared in Meridian. 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster was recently long-listed for the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction, one of the most honorable literary prizes in the UK.
JGP: 8 Lives opens in the Golden Sunset retirement home. I love that this novel begins in an old folk’s home. So many of the stories which inform our present come from previous generations. Mrs. Mook’s stories—all seven of them—are framed within the eighth story, the story of her telling her story. How did that idea come about?
ML: I started to write the chapter “Virgin Ghost on North Korean Border” as a short story, but then I realized I could expand the story to know more about the mysterious female character. I always wanted to write a novel inspired by my great-aunt’s life, and I began to imagine the protagonist as this unique, crafty female character who lives through some of the most tumultuous events in modern Korean history. The unusual narrative structure came into being in this way, a hybrid of a short-story collection and a novel. The final chapter was my effort to bring all the stories together, to make a closure that was at least to me gratifying. I thought it was a nice way to wrap up, like the shape of number 8, where the end is connected to the beginning. Although the final chapter shows the end of Trickster’s life, it also shows how the story of her life gets born.
JGP: It seems like we’re all in a rush these days. We probably don’t stop and listen to other people nearly as much as we should. What is it about sitting with someone who’s lived a long and varied life (or in Mrs. Mook’s case, lives) and just listening to them?
ML: Not long ago, I read What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez and came across this passage that deeply resonated with me. In the passage, the narrator speaks about how people, especially when they are young, tend to find the lives of the elderly boring and insignificant. As teenagers, we care so much about every word our peers say but we don’t pay enough attention to the stories of our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. But if you listened to them, you would realize that those generations of people are the ones who survived wars, lived through dictatorship, and faced untimely losses of their loved ones. The narrator points out the irony: the youth consume enthusiastically those dramatic stories when they are shown on TV as films or series, but they are often blind to the fact that many of the old people around them are often the living witnesses of those events described on screen. Only if they sat down and listened.
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