Seven Princesses

From Joanne Lee Molinaro, author of the New York Times bestselling and James Beard Award–winning The Korean Vegan Cookbook, a searing memoir about womanhood, intergenerational healing, and resilience

An immersive, honest, and deeply personal memoir, Seven Princesses is the culmination of generational storytelling helmed by a voice already trusted and beloved by millions. Renowned for her ability to share moving, intimate, and yet profoundly relatable accounts from her own life, Joanne finally lays bare the full story of that life, while weaving together the narratives of three women: her mother, her maternal grandmother, and herself.

From a small, sparkling fishing village in what is now known as North Korea–where her mother, her mother’s sisters, and her grandmother were derisively referred to as the “seven princesses”–to the bustling streets of Chicago’s Ktown, Joanne follows her family’s journey during the outbreak of the Korean War. She then traces her grandmother’s embattled path across a freshly divided peninsula, recounts her mother’s journey from Seoul to Chicago, where her mother and grandmother planted the seeds of their American life. Joanne also pulls back the curtain on her first marriage, including how she found the courage to leave it, and how she later embarked on her law career, connected with her second husband, and took the steps to becoming first a vegan and then a bestselling cookbook author.


Seven Princesses dares to redefine the boundaries of American identity through the stories of three American women, interrogating the conditions against which women have been forced to exist and the sacrifices they continue to make, all while sharing a tale that is at once familiar and heartbreaking, a story that keeps repeating itself—one about a mother who gives up nearly everything for her daughter and a daughter who spends the rest of her life trying to prove that she was worth it.