The Liminal Spaces of Loss: An Interview with Eunice Hong

By Genevieve Hartman

Cover of Eunice Hong’s Memento Mori.

Image description: Book cover showing black and white figure of a woman on a stair against a red background (top half); flipped image against a blue background (bottom half).

Eunice Hong’s debut novel, Memento Mori, selected by Aimee Liu as a Red Hen Press Fiction Award Winner, follows an unnamed Korean narrator through mythology, memory loss, and numerous personal tragedies. Traversing past lives in North Korea and imagined existences in Hades, this book probes family histories and the varied ways to process grief with rawness, gentleness, and surprise.

At bedtime, the narrator tells her younger brother the Greek myth of Eurydice and Orpheus, wondering what Eurydice might have felt—after losing her entire family, and then her own life, did she even want Orpheus to bring her back from the dead? Through this lens, Hong leads us to question our mortality, and the many difficult decisions that we face because of it: How can we find peace in spite of our traumas? What mysteries of brain chemistry, stardust, and varied human experiences make us the unique individuals that we are? How do we consider the needs of our ailing loved ones in a way that extends them dignity and grace? How do we move forward when the heaviness of the past threatens to overwhelm us?

I had the privilege of discussing these questions and more with Eunice Hong in November 2024. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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Genevieve Hartman (GH): What sparked the idea of this book, which juxtaposes very different ideas and themes—ancient Greek mythology with a modern-day Korean family. What made you wonder about Eurydice’s perspective; what prompted you to connect it to your modern characters?

Eunice Hong (EH): I have always been interested in Greek mythology. I don't remember when I first read the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, but I was quite young. It always seemed so unfair to me that Orpheus was so close to having everything and then he turned around. That always stuck with me, because I think the stories where you are convinced you could change the ending with just a little bit of effort are the ones that really stay with you. As I grew older, I started reading more of the ancient source texts. Much of the traditional story of Orpheus and Eurydice comes from Virgil's Georgics and Ovid's Metamorphoses. In Plato’s Symposium, Eurydice is actually not named. At the same time I was reading those, I was also realizing that my grandmother, who had a huge hand in raising me, was beginning to forget things. She developed dementia.

A lot of what happens to the narrator’s grandmother in Memento Mori is based on my grandmother. I could see her slipping away. I could see when she would realize that she’d forgotten something, but she couldn't remember what it was that she forgot. She constantly talked about how she wanted to die—that’s something that she talked about even when I was growing up. She was very religious and believed God would call her, and she would be very happy to die. The more I thought about that, and the more I watched her slip away, I started to wonder why we only have Orpheus’ perspective, why Eurydice, in most sources, has either no speech at all or only one line? We never hear her perspective: did she want to be “rescued” from the underworld? Was she happy to be in the underworld? What was her take on all this? That was the seed that kicked off Memento Mori.

GH: Your depiction of the narrator’s halmeoni (grandmother) felt so true to life, sometimes mirroring experiences I’ve had with my own halmeoni. And as someone who has lived with a person with Alzheimer’s, I found the questions raised in this book about how we return agency to the people we love as they approach death to be very moving. The book disrupts the erasure of people who are approaching death. Halmeoni becomes a shade like Eurydice, and she’s not the only one—the narrator goes through shade-like depressive states, and M., too, becomes a shade of himself. What do you think these people-as-shades, stuck in liminal spaces, can teach us about grief and moving on?

EH: I think there are a few things. One is that we can never know what another person wants and what is best for them. We can only make decisions based on what we know about them and how much we love them and what we think is best—but what we think is best is not always going to be “true” for them. Throughout the book, the narrator and their family try to keep both the grandmother and later M. alive, but you never quite know whether either of them even are alive, or if they are alive, if it's a life worth living. Some of this is imposing a living person's fear of death and loss on someone who's maybe already gone, without regard for what their needs are.

And I think another part of it is that the grief of losing someone is so tremendous in somebody's life that you will inevitably always, despite what might be best for that person, want to bring them back. There's really no fighting against that. But you can’t bring people back from the dead. So it's a bit of a paradox: that you have to move on, and at the same time you can't.

The main thing that I wanted to convey to anyone reading the book is they're not alone in what they're feeling. It's normal, and it's not an isolated experience for grief to take a long time to heal or to endure forever. There are lots of types of grief that, in fact, never subside; you just have to learn how to live around it.

GH: The book’s tagline is “Don’t look back,” the instructions Orpheus received from Hades and Persephone in order to (potentially) resurrect Eurydice. Orpheus’s failure to follow this advice ends with him losing his beloved a second time. You also reference Lot's wife from the Bible, who looks back while fleeing her home and turns into a pillar of salt. Despite these two negative examples, your main character is always looking back, sifting through personal and family histories, feeling stuck in the past. Can you talk a bit about this decision to have your narrator refuse this advice?

EH: As you say, the narrator is stuck for a lot of the book, as she continues to be mired in the trauma of her past, as well as the ongoing losses that she's experiencing. She keeps replaying these things over and over in her head, as if she could find some way to undo them. And that prevents her not only from looking forward, but just living her life in the present. I think you can draw some parallels between the narrator and Orpheus—she knows intellectually that looking back is harming herself and the people around her, who have to watch her suffer, and at the same time, she has a really hard time bringing herself out of it. It's understandable that you can't bring yourself to do it. You want to stop, but you cannot.

Orpheus and Lot’s wife give you these examples of why you actually do have to stop looking back at some point, of the consequences that could happen. Like the brother says when the narrator is telling him Orpheus and Eurydice’s story: “‘He had ONE job.’” Orpheus is a particularly interesting character, because you can read his character as imposing his will on Eurydice, not really asking or taking into account what she might want.

Yet in another sense, it's unreasonable to expect Orpheus to understand. We the audience know that Orpheus and Lot's wife are characters in a tragedy; we know what's happened to them, and we've been forewarned about the consequences. But it's not reasonable to expect that these characters understand in the moment. They're not thinking, “I'm living in a tragedy.” They're simply trying to move forward in the best way they can. In Orpheus’ case, he’s trying whatever is within his power to bring back the love of his life.

GH: Each chapter title has a double meaning—it serves as both a numerical marker and holds some other significance in the text. (For example, the first chapter heading is “Once upon a time…” and opens on a retelling of Persephone’s kidnapping) How did this idea strike you, and was it difficult to sustain throughout the book?

EH: That was the hardest part of writing this book. As I was reorganizing and starting to think about these chapter titles, I kept repeating to myself, This is so difficult. What was I thinking? But I wanted everything within the text to be integrated into the story in some way; I didn't just want it to have Chapter One, Chapter Two, and so on. I wanted there to be a cohesive thread throughout, a code to discover at the end. Some of the chapter titles came really easily—“Once upon a time” was an easy one—but some were really difficult. I wanted them to feel organic. That meant a lot of research and rewriting. The glossary at the back explaining the chapter titles was a way for me to show all the research I did.

GH: I love your cover art! I recognize the color scheme—the colors of the South Korean flag—but I am curious about your involvement in its creation, and what some of the cover details can tell us about the book.

EH: I was lucky enough to be quite involved in the concept of the cover design. The first cover art was very different. It was colorful, and featured a night sky and the constellation Lyra, and there was an apartment with some stairs. It was pretty but to me, it seemed like somebody might pick that up and expect a contemporary story or even a rom-com. So I asked whether the cover could be redesigned to show Eurydice and Orpheus. I wanted the split lives of the overworld and the underworld to almost mirror each other. And so they came back with a few options, with the characters in the style of black-figure pottery, a famous style in classical Greece, and a few color schemes. We ultimately went with the colors of the South Korean flag because I wanted the cover to be explicitly Korean. This is not a straight retelling of Greek myth; the narrator’s Korean heritage is important to the story as well.

The advanced reader copies have Orpheus on top because the sky is blue, and that's where the sky goes, obviously but in the final version, it was switched so that Eurydice would be on top. It more directly related to how the Korean flag is arranged, with the red on top and the blue on the bottom.

GH: I like that. Eurydice has her place on top, and has finally been given agency on the cover.

EH: Finally, exactly.

GH: What are your favorite mythological texts to read? Are you team ancient classics all the way, or do you like a modern retelling?

EH: I primarily focus on ancient texts. A lot of times, I will read a more modern retelling and I'll think, that just makes me want to reread the Iliad. I love the Iliad so very much. I love all the tragedies, especially of Euripides, but Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus are big favorites of mine as well.  I have read some modern retellings that I think are really great. Probably the most recent retellings that come to mind are Country: A Novel by Michael Hughes, which sets the events of the Iliad in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, which is a retelling of a tragedy that I won't give away for anyone who hasn't read it.

GH: You named the book Memento Mori, which is Latin for “remember you will die.” A memento mori is an art device, typically skulls or dying flowers or fruits, which signifies that life is short. If you could choose an item or object that would serve as a memento mori for the book, what would you choose?

EH: There is a moment in the book, about halfway through, when the narrator is walking through this man-made park, and she notices this bright tree whose leaves have changed color:

In the planned chaos, one life strikes me. A slender trunk, a mess of branches reaching no higher than my head, an elegant disorder. The leaves are magenta and they flutter everywhere. They carpet the base of the tree in a perfect circle. A pond of vivid, rosy petals creating the illusion of reflection. An earthly mirror. It does not belong here, this tree. I cannot help reaching out to pluck a leaf from the disarray, but in my hand, the glimmer disappears. (147-148)

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Memento Mori, by Eunice Hong, may be purchased from Red Hen Press and Bookshop.

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Genevieve Hartman is a Korean American writer based in Rochester, New York. She is the publicist for Alice James Books and the managing editor for Adi Magazine. Her poems and reviews appear or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Rain Taxi Review of Books, The Margins, and others. Follow her on Instagram at @gena_hartman or find her at genahartman.com.

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