All You Can Ever Know

Reviews / Votes

This book moved me to my very core. . . . [All You Can Ever Know] should be required reading for anyone who has ever had, wanted, or found a family - which is to say, everyone -- Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere A devastating memoir... It is so unexpected and painful and brilliant. Highly recommended. -- Jamie Klinger * iPaper * Heartbreaking, profound, joyful -- Refinery 29 Tackles the most intricate questions of love, forgiveness, belonging, race, and family. This book is a powerful read for anyone considering what it means to be a mother, daughter, or sister and anyone who might have felt unanchored in the world. -- Rowan Hisayo Buchanan Nicole Chung's generous, wide-hearted adoption memoir is about a lot of things - writing and sisters and genes - but mostly it's about love: real love, messy, forgiving, difficult, complicit, complicated love. I loved it. * Ella Risbridger (author of Midnight Chicken and Set Me On Fire) * Chung's memoir is more than a thoughtful consideration of race and heritage in America. It is the story of sisters finding each other, overcoming bureaucracy, abuse, separation, and time -- The New Yorker One of this year's finest books, let alone memoirs . . . Chung has literary chops to spare and they're on full display in descriptions of her need, pain and bravery -- The Washington Post Chung writes her memoir as a transracial adoptee with honesty, wisdom, and love. Her search and what she discovers offer us life's meaning and purpose of the very highest order. -- Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko An urgent, incandescent exploration of what it can mean to love, and of who gets to belong, in an increasingly divided country. Nicole Chung's powerful All You Can Ever Know is necessary reading, a dazzling light to help lead the way during these times. -- R. O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries This book will break your heart in all the best ways. Nicole Chung's intimate exploration of motherhood, race, and identity is a beautiful personal story that also reveals something profound about our culture and country. I didn't want it to end. -- Jessica Valenti, author of Sex Object Chung reveals a family story of heartbreaking truth - personal in its detail, universal in its complexity. -- Entertainment Weekly Warm, candid, and full of insights on race, heritage, family and motherhood. -- Frances Kai-Hwa, NBC News All You Can Ever Know is partially about Chung's search as an adult for her birth family, and who she found. But it's also a thoughtful look at transracial adoption and a meditation on identity and culture... Her memoir is a sometimes heartbreaking, always unflinching look at what it means to feel rootless. -- Samantha Balaban, NPR In her memoir, All You Can Ever Know, Chung writes with an empathy that's careful to consider the perspectives of everyone involved in her adoption story: herself, her adoptive parents and her birth family... Though the story is intensely personal, it's never myopic and, ultimately, it's universal: a story about learning to grapple with our own identities, about learning where we belong, and about families. -- NPR Books The book is an extraordinary, honest, nuanced and compassionate look at adoption, race in America and families in general. It's also such an engaging read. I stayed up way too late one night reading it because the story just pulled me in. I read it months ago, and I still think about it and quote some of the lines in this book at least weekly. -- Jasmine Guillory, NPR Opening readers' eyes to the complexities of cross-cultural adoption, Chung makes a resounding case for empathy. -- Time Written with all the style and narrative of great fiction. -- Vanity Fair In this gorgeous memoir, Chung examines our ties to family and what it means to belong. -- Real Simple Nicole Chung's memoir stands out for its broadening of the discussion, exploring the complicated consequences of interracial adoption... All You Can Ever Know is the messy navigation of Chung's new reality - her working out the boundaries of these people who are both kin and strangers, her careful confrontation and reconciliation with her parents, and her exploration of the profound, ever-shifting meaning of family. -- Buzzfeed Nicole is an incredibly talented writer and All You Can Ever Know brims with her insight and thoughtful prose. -- Stassa Edwards, Jezebel With clarity, grace, and no small amount of courage, Chung has written a powerful memoir about her experience as an adoptee, an Asian-American, a daughter, a sister, and a mother. All You Can Ever Know is a candid and beautiful exploration of themes of identity, family, racism, and love. And while the answers Chung finds in her search for the birth family she never knew are fascinating, the power of this book lies in Chung's willingness to 'question the things [she'd] always been told,' even while knowing that she might find unsettling truths and an origin story unlike what she'd always thought had existed. Though this book is specific to Chung's experience and an important example of the complexities inherent to transracial adoption, its words will resonate deep within the core of anyone who has ever questioned their place in their family, their community, and the world. -- NYLON In All You Can Ever Know, Nicole Chung examines her family history with rigor and grace, which is the best possible way to set about the prospect of asking questions of the people who made you. The book is lovely, and loving, and committed to honesty and exploration. It never shies away from reality. Nicole's earnestness, her great capacity for affection, her commitment to dealing justly with others, her sense of humour are all vividly present here. -- Daniel Mallory Ortberg, author of The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror I've been waiting for this writer, and this book?and everything else she'll write?and now it is here. -- Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night [An] insightful memoir... Chung's clear, direct approach to her experience, which includes the birth of her daughter as well as her investigation of her family, reveals her sharp intelligence and willingness to examine difficult emotions. -- Booklist Highly compelling for its depiction of a woman's struggle to make peace with herself and her identity, the book offers a poignant depiction of the irreducibly complex nature of human motives and family ties. A profound, searching memoir about 'finding the courage to question what I'd always been told. -- Kirkus Reviews I read this book in big gulps, thirsty for more each time I had to set it down. Nicole was adopted at birth, and she tells the story of her childhood and later, her search for her birth family, in gorgeous and precise prose. Nicole honours her own experiences while also opening up, again and again, doors to universal truths. Truly, it is one of the most thoughtful and important memoirs I've ever read... All You Can Ever Know is a book that changed me, and that will stay with me. Nicole's writing on motherhood, intergenerational trauma, and race is nothing short of brilliant. -- The Rumpus All You Can Ever Know is yet another reminder of how important representation is, both as an exercise in empathy across cultural boundaries and as catharsis for those who have had undergone similar experiences. -- Chicago Review of Books Beautifully written... It's these universal themes of family, belonging and identity that make All You Can Ever Know such a compelling read. -- Hazlitt In All You Can Ever Know, Chung asks resonant questions about race, identity, family, adoption, and how we shape our very sense of self in clear-eyed, riveting prose. This immensely moving memoir will leave you changed. -- PopSugar As unique, affecting, heartstring-pulling as this debut is, Nicole Chung's All You Can Ever Know will resonate with any sensitive, thoughtful reader who has '[found] the courage to question what [they've] been told'?about family, history, their very selves... Raw, open, forthright, Chung's personal odyssey is an intimate journey toward self-understanding and acceptance. -- The Christian Science Monitor In her glistening debut, All You Can Ever Know, Nicole Chung delves into the knotty question of how to define what family means... What she learns upends the tidy story she grew up hearing about her adoption, but Chung, a truth-seeker, does not shy away from the messier reality she finds. All You Can Ever Know holds special resonance for fellow adoptees, especially those navigating transracial adoptions. Yet Chung achieves the goal of many memoirists: She renders the specifics of her story so precisely that it becomes universal. -- Portland Mercury In her memoir, All You Can Ever Know, Nicole Chung takes the qualities that make her writing sing - warmth, inquisitiveness, and deep personal investment in the words she types - and turns them inward. Her debut is an investigation into her past in which she aims to leave no stone - or emotion - unturned. -- Shondaland