All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir

Nicole Chung

Oct 2018 · Catapult

About this ebook

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

This beloved memoir "is an extraordinary, honest, nuanced and compassionate look at adoption, race in America and families in general" (Jasmine Guillory, Code Switch, NPR)

What does it means to lose your roots—within your culture, within your family—and what happens when you find them?

Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as Nicole grew up—facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from—she wondered if the story she’d been told was the whole truth.

With warmth, candor, and startling insight, Nicole Chung tells of her search for the people who gave her up, which coincided with the birth of her own child. All You Can Ever Know is a profound, moving chronicle of surprising connections and the repercussions of unearthing painful family secrets—vital reading for anyone who has ever struggled to figure out where they belong.

Ratings and reviews

I loved this book, and anyone thinking of adopting.

About the author

Nicole Chung is the author of the national bestseller All You Can Ever Know. Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Time, Library Journal, and many other outlets, All You Can Ever Know was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a semifinalist for the PEN Open Book Award, an Indies Choice Honor Book, and an official Junior Library Guild selection. Chung is a contributing writer and editor at The Atlantic, and her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Time, The Guardian, and Vulture, among others. In 2021, she was named to the Good Morning America AAPI Inspiration List honoring those “making Asian American history right now.”