What truly matters? It’s a deceptively simple question, one with no uniform answer, that has served as a mantra of sorts for author Min Jin Lee. When we spoke by phone in July 2018, she didn’t say this outright, but over one year later, the question’s impact on her life still feels palpable to me.

Originally born in Seoul, Lee immigrated to Queens, New York, in 1976, when she was seven years old. A graduate of the Bronx High School of Science, she majored in history at Yale University, where she won the Henry P. Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction, before attending Georgetown Law. In 1995, Lee abandoned her law career—and with it security, health insurance, and a steady paycheck. Her risk assessment was simple. After chronic liver disease tested her mortality, she realized, “If I’m going to die, what do I want to leave behind?”