Nicola Yoon: From Wall Street to Movie Screens

 Nicola Yoon is a young adult author who has written two bestselling books, ‘The Sun is Also A Star” and “Everything, Everything”, which have film adaptions. 

Yoon went to Cornell University to study engineering and took an elective writing class because she thought it would be an easy A. She had a crush on a guy in the class and wrote lots of love poems about him. She realized she truly loved writing and studied it at Emerson College while working on wall street in finance. She wrote “Everything, Everything”, sales took off, and she decided to quit her finance job to pursue writing full time. This is a great example of how the environment plays a role in how someone finds their passions and cultivates them. I think it also goes against the notion that many creatives love what they do from a very young age. Yoon said she just wanted to get an easy A, but I suspect that some part of her unconscious wanted to write stories and poems and thought an elective class would be a great way to cultivate her interests. 

Her culture played a big role in both her books. She grew up in Jamaica and the main character in The Sun Is Also A Star, spends her last 12 hours with a poet she meets in a record store before her family gets deported to Jamaica, a place that Natasha doesn’t really know. There are also many nods to the struggle of benign a woman of color and someone in a hair store tells her that she “needs to straighten her hair”. The way culture plays a role in her books makes them stand out compared to other YA novels. Charles, Natasha’s love interest is Korean and struggles with his identity, as he puts off an interview with Yale to possibly pursue a career in writing. He is proud of his heritage and his older brother is embarrassed by his family’s heritage and culture. I think the book does a great job of incorporating culture and identity, while not making it the entire story. They are able to learn about each other’s cultures throughout the book and relate to each other in that way. Natasha is similar to the other and loves math and science. She sees the world very logically and struggles to get in touch with her feelings, despite being hours away from being sent across the world to a country that she doesn’t even remember. 

Nicola Yoon is married to a Korean-American man and they have a biracial daughter. The main character is Everything, Everything is also multiracial and again shows how culture and relationships can impact how a creative displays their work. Her husband is very similar to Charles, in TSIAS. He also played a collaborative role and helped with some of her artwork for the book. He also helped her revise some elements and always supported her writing career. She wrote Everything Everything when her daughter was 4 months old and she felt very worried and nervous about her being out of the house. The main character in Everything, Everything has an autoimmune disease that makes going outside impossible for her. Her mother has all sorts of sanitizing and cleaning measures to make sure that she stays safe. Overall Culture and collaboration helped to make Yoon’s book set apart from many other YA novels. She is able to make relatable stories affecting people that aren’t usually main characters.  I would definitely recommend both books and movies(though not as good in my opinion :/) if you enjoy YA.