Author Biography

JEN SOOKFONG LEE was born and raised in Vancouver's East Side, and she now lives with her son in North Burnaby. Her books include The Conjoined, nominated for International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award, The End of East, The Shadow List, and Finding Home. Jen acquires and edits for ECW Press and co-hosts the literary podcast Can't Lit.

Review

Finalist for the 2024 Forest of Reading Evergreen Book Award
Named a Best Book of 2023 by the Globe and Mail and Apple Books Canada
A TODAY Show Recommended Read

"[Superfan] is a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir, written with a surprising candour and a stylistic looseness that allows the narrative to shift and change, often without warning, but never leaving the reader behind.[…]Superfan as a whole [is] a bravura performance: free-ranging and allusive, but tightly controlled; spanning multiple decades but firmly rooted in individual moments. It's heady, thought-provoking, and emotionally fraught stuff, and a singular reading experience."
—Toronto Star

"By peeling back the layers of her own life as a Chinese Canadian woman willing to defend the pleasures of watching the Kardashians, Lee reveals the complexities of our broader culture and its limitations. Expect that through this book Lee will find her own superfans."
—Quill and Quire

"What Lee is offering now is her heart-wrenching chronicle as a nearing-middle-age Chinese-Canadian woman, daughter, sister, lover, and mother. And she gracefully extends this personal offering in rich, beautiful, liquid prose that makes one guess (if one does not know already) that lurking here is not a memoirist, nor an essayist, nor a journalist, nor a non-fiction writer of any stripe. What lurks here is a poet. Now a narrative poet, now a lyric poet, now an elegiac poet, now an odic poet. Every word is so very obviously carefully chosen and precisely positioned. The assembled package stuns."
—Winnipeg Free Press

"Superfan is a book you will want to simultaneously hug close to your chest and press insistently into others' hands. There is such honesty, intelligence, warmth, and vulnerability to these essays that, when you finally put them down, you'll feel breathless—a little sad it's over, but ultimately full, invigorated, as if you've just ended an evening of deep, intimate conversation with your best friend. It takes a rare talent to pull this feat off—and Jen Sookfong Lee is that talent. I love this book." 
—Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

"Superfan is about how deeply and, sometimes, disappointingly personal pop culture can be, even and especially for those of us for whom it's not made. As she explores her identity through the books, movies, and movie stars who accompanied her along the path of self-discovery, Jen Sookfong Lee has written a memoir that is gorgeous and ugly, generous and petty, wild and self-conscious. In the process, she defiantly claims the right to be the good girl, the bad girl, and all the transitions in between. A thoughtful and exhilarating and brave self-portrait of a woman demanding to be seen and who, at long last, is able to see herself."  
—Elaine Lui, author of Lainey Gossip and Listen to the Squawking Chicken

"Superfan vividly brings to life the joys and despair of obsessing over pop culture—both, feeling seen by it and being deeply hurt by it. Lee's insights are devastating and tender, hilarious and profound. Superfan's introspective meditations on familiar pop culture moments effortlessly turn them into relatable and heartbreaking vignettes. You know that thing when a scene in a movie destroys you, and you have to spend a week reassembling your life, but you don't know why? Lee has done the work to figure out why, and her writing about it is so vulnerable it might destroy you too." 
—Elamin Abdelmahmoud, author of Son of Elsewhere
 
"Superfan is an extraordinary work of personal memoir and pop cultural criticism. Lee's exploration of pop culture's impact on her as a child of Chinese immigrants is brilliant, absurd, and heartbreaking, and she shares her stories with so much warmth and generosity that by the end you will feel like her best friend. Each chapter had me laughing out loud and underlining her provocative takes on subjects like 90s heartthrobs, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the Kardashians. Eye-opening and luminous and so much fun!" 
—Heather O'Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads
 
"Superfan is a fresh reclamation of pop culture from an unexpected and exciting perspective. By juxtaposing her everyday life as an Asian woman with those of iconic TV characters and popstars, Jen Sookfong Lee spotlights how pop culture can be a mirror in which to both see and not see yourself, a gateway to somewhere else and a reminder of how stuck you are. It's this complexity that makes Superfan a fantastic read!" 
—Vivek Shraya, author of How to Fail As a Popstar and People Change

Review Quote

" Superfan is a book you will want to simultaneously hug close to your chest and press insistently into others' hands. There is such honesty, intelligence, warmth, and vulnerability to these essays that, when you finally put them down, you'll feel breathless--a little sad it's over, but ultimately full, invigorated, as if you've just ended an evening of deep, intimate conversation with your best friend. It takes a rare talent to pull this feat off--and Jen Sookfong Lee is that talent. I love this book." -- Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground " Superfan vividly brings to life the joys and despair of obsessing over pop culture--both, feeling seen by it and being deeply hurt by it. Lee's insights are devastating and tender, hilarious and profound. Superfan 's introspective meditations on familiar pop culture moments effortlessly turn them into relatable and heartbreaking vignettes. You know that thing when a scene in a movie destroys you, and you have to spend a week reassembling your life, but you don't know why? Lee has done the work to figure out why, and her writing about it is so vulnerable it might destroy you too." --Elamin Abdelmahmoud, author of Son of Elsewhere " Superfan is an extraordinary work of personal memoir and pop cultural criticism. Lee's exploration of pop culture's impact on her as a child of Chinese immigrants is brilliant, absurd, and heartbreaking, and she shares her stories with so much warmth and generosity that by the end you will feel like her best friend. Each chapter had me laughing out loud and underlining her provocative takes on subjects like 90s heartthrobs, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the Kardashians. Eye-opening and luminous and so much fun!" -- Heather O'Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads " Superfan is a fresh reclamation of pop culture from an unexpected and exciting perspective. By juxtaposing her everyday life as an Asian woman with those of iconic TV characters and popstars, Jen Sookfong Lee spotlights how pop culture can be a mirror in which to both see and not see yourself, a gateway to somewhere else and a reminder of how stuck you are. It's this complexity that makes Superfan a fantastic read!" -- Vivek Shraya, author of How to Fail As a Popstar and People Change

Excerpt from Book

INTRODUCTION I was born in 1976, into a noisy house in East Vancouver where there were never enough bathrooms, privacy, or salt and vinegar chips to go around. By the time I arrived, my four older sisters were between the ages of seven and seventeen, and I would, for many years, remain the smallest and most observant member of the household. I would often hide in corners and behind doors, where I could listen to the conversations swirling around me, and watch the teens and adults rush through their lives, slamming doors as they ran out to waiting cars or to catch the bus downtown. I patched together bits and pieces of gossip, old memories, and confessions, and wrote and rewrote the story of my family in my head, a circular reimagining that became a comfort as I grew older. During the years when it seemed our family was falling apart, picturing my grandfather stepping off a boat in Victoria in 1913 with his one bag and one Western-style suit was a balm, a reminder that he had launched himself into the great unknown for the children and grandchildren who had not yet been born. That kind of love felt supernatural, like a genetic prescience. In our family, immigration from China was recent memory. My grandparents and parents spent much of their time outside the home using whatever tools they could to prove that they belonged in the country where they now lived. Popular culture--the soap operas, the fashion magazines, the celebrity gossip, and the hockey fandom-- was how they found a way in, studying, learning, and parroting what the white people around them were consuming. For my grandfather, who paid the five-hundred-dollar head tax upon his arrival in Canada at age seventeen, it meant listening to CBC Radio all day long. For my father, who joined my grandfather in Vancouver after the Chinese Exclusion Act was lifted in 1947, it meant listening to Chuck Berry and dropping his accent as soon as he could. For my mother, who married a man she had only met in letters and photographs for the opportunity to leave Hong Kong, it meant learning to bake the perfect sponge cake. For my older sisters, it meant perming their hair and never missing an episode of Dallas . And for me, it meant taping New Kids on the Block songs off the radio and, later, sending love letters to Beck. These were all ways that we engaged with popular culture. These were the things we talked about at school and at the office, and whenever we walked into new situations where we were visibly different. Maybe we were missing privilege and whiteness, but we could watch what everyone else was watching and try to close the distance between us and them . Pop culture also became the measure by which we judged ourselves, which was a relationship that was equal parts motivating and demoralizing. We might have worked hard to be as successful as Diane Keaton in Baby Boom , but we also had to contend with the growing realization that, while no one in the world was going to be as beautiful as Connie Sellecca on Hotel or Diane Lane in The Outsiders , my sisters and I were also never going to be as rich or as white. It didn''t matter if my hair was permed in spiral curls, or if my sisters got their makeup done at the Lanc

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