{"id":2451626,"date":"2026-06-09T16:23:34","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T16:23:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2451626"},"modified":"2026-06-09T16:23:34","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T16:23:34","slug":"mary-h-k-choi-on-pool-house-motherhood-writing-and-the-celebrity-industrial-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/mary-h-k-choi-on-pool-house-motherhood-writing-and-the-celebrity-industrial-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"Mary H.K. Choi on ‘Pool House,’ Motherhood, Writing, and the Celebrity Industrial Complex"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Some spoilers below.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m obsessed with my mother,\u201d says the author Mary H.K. Choi, her deadpan tone projecting both wry self-awareness and utter seriousness. She blinks at me through a Zoom camera, smiling as if to say, It\u2019s just the truth<\/em>. And it is<\/em> the truth: As Choi wrote in a 2013 essay<\/a> published in Aeon<\/em>, \u201cThese days I don\u2019t love money how I used to. My mom though, I\u2019m crazy about. I think about her all the time and can\u2019t stand it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, on a late afternoon in early May 13 years later, Choi tells me that obsession has proved chronic. \u201cI write about her quite a bit,\u201d Choi continues. \u201cThere\u2019s always a very intense, fraught, weighty mother-child relationship in all my books.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s certainly true of Choi\u2019s latest, Pool House<\/em>\u2014her first adult novel after three young-adult releases, Emergency Contact<\/em>, Permanent Record<\/em>, and Yolk<\/em>\u2014in which the nuclear relationship centers on mother-and-daughter pair Moon and Stevie. Moon is a recovering alcoholic and a former B-list Hollywood star, having come up in the \u201990s and enjoyed a period of success on a mid-2010s family sitcom called Wabi-Sabi<\/em>, named on account of the blended Korean-American military family formed by its main cast. More recently, Moon is \u201cburnishing,\u201d as Choi herself puts it, out of work while Stevie tries to pull herself out of Los Angeles via a promotion at a restaurant chain called Pee Wee\u2019s. But ultimately untethering herself from her mother seems, to Stevie, almost fatally impossible. As Choi was brainstorming ideas for the novel, she realized she wanted to understand what would happen if and when this daughter, \u201cwho has never wanted [celebrity], comes into her own in terms of the power of her appearance.\u201d What might that do to her? What would it do to her relationship with her mother?<\/p>\n

Stevie\u2019s 20-something coming-of-age becomes a lot more complicated thanks, in part, to the men around them. First, there\u2019s Arthur \u201cMac\u201d Maclean, Moon\u2019s former sitcom husband and Stevie\u2019s pseudo-father figure; he dies at the beginning of Pool House<\/em>, sending Moon and Stevie into separate but orbiting portals of grief. Then there\u2019s Adam Dano, Moon\u2019s former sitcom son and Stevie\u2019s old crush. Now based in Hong Kong, he answers when Moon calls, and in the wake of Mac\u2019s death he flies to her and Stevie\u2019s rescue. The two Korean-American women live together in their property\u2019s filthy pool house\u2014they rent out the so-called \u201cBig House\u201d to pay their bills\u2014but by the time Adam arrives, the tenants have vacated the premises, allowing Moon, Stevie, and Adam to move in together and pantomime a healthy family.<\/p>\n

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It was during the peak of the COVID pandemic that Choi first pitched a rough concept for Pool House<\/em> to her publishers at Flatiron Books. They were curious if she had an idea for an adult novel; as it turns out, she did have something<\/em>. Choi has long explored the terrain of a woman\u2019s early twenties in her fiction, in part because it had been \u201csuch a ripe time for me,\u201d she says. Born in South Korea and raised in Hong Kong and Texas, she moved to New York in 2002 after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin<\/u><\/a> with a degree in textiles and apparel. \u201cIt was that fascinating thing where I was expected to be an adult, and I felt like an adult, and in many ways I looked like an adult,\u201d she says now. \u201cBut I was also completely disembodied and disassociated and full of so much fear. There was that schism that I find really interesting at that age.\u201d<\/p>\n

In writing Pool House<\/em>, she knew she wanted to examine that schism again, \u201cthat feeling of coming into power, that first blush of feeling ripe for a kind of agency that makes you feel a little dizzy.\u201d But she didn\u2019t only<\/em> want to explore that dynamic from the vantage point of her 20-something self. \u201cI am a woman of a certain age,\u201d says Choi, who published her first novel in her late thirties and is now in her mid-forties. \u201cThere is a whole slew of lighting conditions under which I don\u2019t love my neck.\u201d She wanted to write about that, too.<\/p>\n

And<\/em> she wanted to write about the power of celebrity. Similar to her \u201cobsession\u201d with her mother, Choi has spent years \u201cfixated,\u201d she says, on the allure and ouroboros of celebrity. After college, she became not a fashion designer or retailer but a journalist, flying to New York to chase a lifelong love for magazines. She started as an intern at the Red Hook-based indie publication Mass Appeal<\/em>, and in the years since has launched and folded her own magazine (the alt Missbehave<\/em><\/u><\/a>) and worked for outlets including The Cut<\/em>, The New York Times<\/em>, GQ<\/em>, Wired<\/em>, Allure<\/em>, and more. \u201cI\u2019ve profiled everyone from Rihanna to, like, James McAvoy,\u201d Choi says. \u201cI ghostwrote DJ Khaled\u2019s first book, and I also was on Rihanna\u2019s 777 Tour, where she had a plane full of journalists and fans. We went to seven countries to see seven Rihanna shows in seven consecutive days, and we all promptly lost our minds.\u201d She was an early Belieber; she met the up-and-coming Justin Bieber when he was still \u201can actual child.\u201d To this day, she finds it \u201castonishing\u201d that someone like him \u201ccould feel like he walked into YouTube as a regular kid and walked out of YouTube an absolute pop culture juggernaut.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing of Moon\u2019s aching relationship with her own celebrity status allowed Choi to probe how, as she\u2019d already discovered in her work as a journalist, \u201cthe celebrity industrial complex is one thing, but each particular celebrity is a very specific startup fiefdom of their own.\u201d No one seems to recognize this more than Stevie, who oscillates between roles as her mother\u2019s friend, her mother\u2019s caretaker, her mother\u2019s manager, her mother\u2019s nemesis, and her mother\u2019s daughter, especially when she would prefer to not be thinking about her mother at all. Meanwhile, Moon attempts to remain<\/em> a celebrity: She\u2019s no Oscar winner, it\u2019s true, but she still chafes at her real manager\u2019s pitying looks; she still hopes her collection of vintage clothing\u2014the \u201ccanny little suits, wasp-waisted Mugler, Ghesqui\u00e8re shoulders, Stella McCartney satin bustiers\u201d\u2014will \u201cincrease in cultural value once her own stock rises.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe celebrity industrial complex is one thing, but each particular celebrity is a very specific startup fiefdom of their own.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Choi has observed enough A-listers in action to recognize that \u201cthe way they present to you is either persona the whole time, or they go into character; they\u2019ve decided that the moment they sit across the table from you at the Sunset Marquis or whatever, that they\u2019re on,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd then, once you stop recording, they turn into a totally different person.\u201d She once shared an elevator with a \u201cvery, very famous person,\u201d who, once they\u2019d realized Choi was not there to interview them, \u201cturned their face off. They just switched everything. Powered down.\u201d<\/p>\n

This unapologetic performance, coupled with the choreography of stylists and publicists and \u201cheadset-ed worker bees\u201d in a celebrity\u2019s immediate vicinity, enraptures Choi even now. She finds it both depressing and delicious, which is perhaps exactly how Moon herself would characterize the charade. \u201cThere\u2019s just something about the whole boondoggle of it,\u201d Choi says, \u201cand the way that we\u2019ve collectively decided this is the absolute apex of human existence, that this is a level of importance that sort of borders on deification, is also super fascinating to me. I think about the cost of it a lot, too. I do wonder how you end up remembering your life at the end of it, and if it really will have felt like you touched the face of God.\u201d<\/p>\n

She continues, \u201cThis relationship we have with celebrity\u2026feels proximal in this really, really seductive way.\u201d<\/p>\n

This figurative seduction is threaded throughout Pool House<\/em>, as is much more literal sex, which further necessitates the book\u2019s adult designation. \u201cIt\u2019s a foundationally really horny book, and so that feels adult,\u201d Choi says. It\u2019s not that readers won\u2019t find sex in her young-adult literature\u2014they will\u2014\u201cbut I think the desire and the way it plays out [in Pool House<\/em>] is bizarre in the way that life is so bizarre.\u201d<\/p>\n

She adds, \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of brutality, I think, in this book. And not that I\u2019ve ever deliberately held punches or felt that I was punching down or anything for younger readers, but I did want everyone [in Pool House<\/em>] to have total agency. I wanted three people who, ultimately, are trying. Are they successfully doing their best at any point? Maybe not. Is their best even all that good? Is it completely at cross purposes to what another person wants? Yes, absolutely.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"mary<\/p>\n
Courtesy of Mary H.K. Choi\/Flatiron Books<\/span><\/figcaption>

Mary H.K. Choi.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Multiple seminal moments marked the stretch of time Choi spent writing Pool House<\/em>: She was diagnosed with ADHD; her father died in 2022; then, a year later, at 43, she was also diagnosed with autism<\/a>. She had not originally written a father-figure character for Pool House<\/em>, but in the wake of the loss of her own father, Mac appeared in Choi\u2019s drafts. \u201cWhen my dad died, there was suddenly a dad in this,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like I threw him in to figure out what the hell I was thinking about everything.\u201d Similarly, she was confused about the \u201cgrief\u201d and \u201cguilt\u201d she felt knowing that \u201conce I was done with this book, that the sort of biological window for having children\u2014at least for me, without a lot of very extensive medical intervention\u2014was going to close.\u201d She needed to write about the \u201cbifurcation\u201d happening within herself: a before and an after. \u201cI sort of dumped the steaming entrails of all of these thoughts onto the table and started working with the material,\u201d she says. She then compares editing a project like Pool House<\/em> to moving a futon mattress from room to room by herself: \u201cIt\u2019s like the most unwieldy, challenging thing, but that\u2019s the only way I understand how to live this one life, and to even have evidence that I lived it at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

I ask if there was ever a point in this process of dumping entrails and rearranging futons when she felt she had landed on the thing itself: that she knew exactly what she felt and thought; knew exactly what she would take away from writing about Stevie, Moon, and Adam; knew exactly what she wanted readers<\/em> to take away from the book themselves.<\/p>\n

Not quite, Choi says. Writing Pool House<\/em> was a useful tool for emotional processing, yes, \u201cbut it\u2019s not that I just use [the book as catharsis] and then discard it and then expect some\u2026feeling to graft onto whoever happens to read it. It\u2019s not like a symbiont suit that then has a new host or anything like that.\u201d (Our conversation is peppered with these superhero-adjacent references, a callback to Choi\u2019s time spent writing for comics.) \u201cIt\u2019s more that I do have this really lovely moment, usually in the editing, where [the book] is no longer mine,\u201d she continues. \u201cAt that point, yes, I\u2019ve processed things that I wanted to process, and even those things changed. They became this wholly distinct, discreet thing from me that then belongs to the characters. And then the characters also belong to themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Growing up, Choi wasn\u2019t always convinced she\u2019d become a writer. In her estimation, she \u201clacked the imagination to ever envision that an author wasn\u2019t always<\/em> an author.\u201d She thought of writers as if they\u2019d been born that way, fully formed and credentialed, predestined through some sort of literary primogeniture. \u201cIt\u2019s like that thing where a kid believes their teacher lives at school,\u201d she explains. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a job that I thought you could ever even earn. I thought it was like royalty where it was sort of handed down, I suppose, and it would always exclude me.\u201d She didn\u2019t particularly enjoy writing as a kid, and she definitely didn\u2019t enjoy the idea of making so little money doing it as an adult. But she was \u201cchatty,\u201d as her schoolteachers put it, and she loved magazines, and eventually she realized she could write in the same way she spoke. She could use that same voice to make sense of the way she saw the world.<\/p>\n

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\u201cGoing solo in this life is really hard. And I love writing because writing has always kept me company.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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She recognizes there\u2019s a dramatic cultural divide taking place over modern storytelling: At the same time that brands such as Miu Miu and Dior are proclaiming books \u201cfashionable,\u201d Choi says, AI and social media are threatening those books from without and within. \u201cIt sometimes feels, when I\u2019m in a really negative place, that everyone wants a book from everyone except authors,\u201d she says. A friend of hers recently told Choi that she\u2019d heard a content creator online calling a novel \u201clong-form content.\u201d \u201cAnd I laughed so hard,\u201d Choi says now. \u201cBecause, you know what? Fair enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

But none of this change threatens how Choi feels about the craft itself. Becoming a writer over the decades since she graduated from college has given Choi more than just a career; it\u2019s given her companionship. If Stevie, Moon, and Adam can be whittled down to any unified characteristic, it might be their shared loneliness; their desperate need for one another is as deep as their need to escape one another. Choi knows the feeling well.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt hurts my feelings that I am a person,\u201d she says. \u201cI would so much rather be completely attached to someone else. Just going solo in this life is really hard. And I love writing because writing has always kept me company. If I\u2019m not populating some sort of Sims<\/em> alternate universe or Animal Crossing<\/em> of a book, I don\u2019t know what I\u2019d be doing with my brain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Choi herself, Stevie, Moon, and Adam are each preoccupied with thoughts of their mothers; it would be fair to say they\u2019re \u201cobsessed\u201d with their mothers, women who are depicted as sharp-edged, often performative, perhaps unreachable in some fundamental way. But that does not stop their children from reaching, or the mothers themselves from attempting to shoulder the weight of that reach. Stevie, Moon, and Adam aren\u2019t particularly likable characters. In fact, there\u2019s much about Pool House<\/em> that is purposefully ugly, even painful, written as if poking a wound to see if it oozes. Choi\u2019s characters bear mother-sized wounds they cannot resist reopening. And yet, keeping their company for the duration of the novel is a powerful thing. By the final page, I felt an unexpected tenderness toward them. This, too, is a feeling Choi knows well.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like a spiritual practice,\u201d Choi says of writing these characters. \u201cIt puts me in a position of finding so much affection toward everyone else in the world.\u201d She concludes, \u201cIt really does speak to some sort of divine design, in some way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.elle.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some spoilers below. \u201cI\u2019m obsessed with my mother,\u201d says the author Mary H.K. Choi, her deadpan tone projecting both wry self-awareness and utter seriousness. She blinks at me through a Zoom camera, smiling as if to say, It\u2019s just the truth. And it is the truth: As Choi wrote in a 2013 essay published in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2451627,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25177],"tags":[310910,481647,285977,286903,466866,285684,454417,481646,455133],"class_list":["post-2451626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-celebrities","tag-content-type-feature","tag-contentid-893319e9-bc2c-43a6-af07-d7c2a7bacaf5","tag-displaytype-standard-article","tag-hasproduct-true","tag-issyndicated-false","tag-locale-us","tag-read_time-12","tag-shorttitle-mary-h-k-choi-tackles-celebrity-in-pool-house","tag-subsection-what-to-read"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Mary-HK-Choi-on-Pool-House-Motherhood-Writing-and-the.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2451626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2451628,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2451626\/revisions\/2451628"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2451627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2451626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2451626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2451626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}