David Yoo

"I write stories because I’m a compulsive liar, and I like to type." — David Yoo

David Yoo lives in the Boston area. Girls for Breakfast is his first novel.

From the Author

One of the big ironies about writing for me is that in trying to capture life on the page I’ve ended up turning myself into a hermit, since writing’s such a solitary pursuit. I suppose there are any number of ways to write, but in my case I simply can’t do it unless I have total isolation. So much so that on the rare occasion when I do venture outside, my voice sounds funny to me, and I walk weird, as if I’m 14 again and paranoid that everyone’s watching me. Actually, this hermit-lifestyle has helped me write about teens, because in regressing I get to re-experience how I used to function back then. Any trip out of the apartment these days is a major event for me. At night I assess the progress of my workday in my journal. I end up listing things that to anyone else are utterly trivial, but since I’m a writer I have so few tangible ways of measuring my accomplishments so these meaningless events gain importance for me and add structure to my life. Today was a successful workday because I called the eye doctor…or, bought some gas today, or…3 fire trucks passed by my window this morning.

As a writer, it’s a daily struggle to feel good about myself and my work. It doesn’t help that my girlfriend’s one of those altruists. You know the type: feels bad when others feel bad…gets more satisfaction from helping strangers then helping herself…is going to heaven, etc. She’s a clinical social worker, and spends her days as an advocate for the poor, the mentally ill, and young mothers. She’ll come home from work having spent the bulk of her day trying to get one of her mentally ill clients to go to school, or restraining another client who skipped taking his meds. She’ll open the door to the apartment at night physically and mentally sapped, and here I am still in my pajamas, drawing cartoons of animals using Crayolas because I’m trying to kickstart my epic anthropomorphic novel that I’ve had on the backburner for years. On days when she has to go to the welfare office, I spend my afternoon trapped in a hellish sort of Middle-Earth, that fuzzy realm that lies somewhere between consciousness and sleep, immobile on my couch because I can’t bear to face the blank computer screen.

In effort to rekindle my memories of growing up in Avon, Connecticut, I often go home on “business trips” to try to revive dusty memories of being a teenager. My mom’s a registered nurse (I’m surrounded by altruists), and she comes home after midnight from her late shift at the convalescent home. She’ll just stand there in the doorway of my old bedroom watching me with this look of semi-revulsion, as I’m wearing a faded, florescent pair of Jams I found in my drawers (because I’m doing all my laundry), poring through tattered middle school yearbooks for “research.”

Despite my insecurities, I feel that I love writing, that it’s akin to breathing blah blah blah, but I have to admit, when I stop to really think about it, I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever actually enjoyed a single moment writing. It’s by far the most frustrating thing I’ve ever done. It’s a state of perpetual disappointment, a portal to a rage I used to only experience while driving in Boston. On top of this I feel a deep guilt (that I’d mentioned at the beginning) coursing through me, especially on those days when the writing isn’t coming out smoothly, that I’m not doing enough with my life, or rather, that I’ve ceased actually ‘living’ and instead spend my days ‘writing about living.’ So why do I do it, then? In my writing I tend to explore the negative moments from my life, the uncomfortable feelings that are perpetually bubbling under the surface. Guilt. Shame. Regret. Self-sabotage. Hatred. Self-loathing. Why do I willingly subject myself to opening these terrible veins? Why do I choose to focus on the most painful topics? Why do I write? My answer is that I write because it’s the one thing that makes me feel truly alive.

Plus, I’m not really good at anything else.