Isabel J. Kim is quite the overachiever. She has a lot of the credentials you’d expect for the top of the legal profession — Ivy League degrees (University of Pennsylvania) for both undergrad and law school and a Biglaw job at Dechert. But she’s also an award-winning author — she received the Shirley Jackson award for her short story “You’ll Understand When You’re a Mom Someday,” podcast host, and a soon-to-be television executive producer.
Kim’s writing put her in the middle of a bidding war between publishing houses. She wound up with a deal from Tor Publishing Group for the U.S rights to her debut novel, Sublimation, and two future novels. As she told Law.com, “It felt like everything was exploding at once,” Kim said. “It went from quietly editing my book in the background of my life to now everyone has read it and it has been leaked to scouts for TV and film.”
Sublimation is a speculative fiction book about the main character meeting an alternative version of herself created after moving from South Korea to the U.S.
“What made me interested in this was going back to Korea with my friends in my early 20s and feeling really culturally American rather than culturally Korean, despite spending a big chunk of my childhood in Korea,” she said.
“It gave me a sense of perspective that you can be culturally from one place but it takes you 14 hours to get from New York to Korea; that’s not a long time,” she continued. “Your cultural upbringing determines who you are. That goes into the larger question of how do we decide who we are based on what other people have decided for us.”
This work also got the attention of television producers. Universal International Studios will turn the book into a TV series — hence the new EP title. “Adding executive producer to my titles is fun,” Kim said. “I was not expecting it a few years ago, but I’m not mad about it.”
But the really wild part about this whole story is that she intends to stay in Biglaw.
“There are aspects of legal work I would really miss if I left it behind,” she said.
In writing, she said, “you’re alone, you’re in your room and writing and sometimes you send it to someone and they send you feedback, whereas working on deal teams is much more collaborative. There’s a sense of forward momentum there that you don’t get when writing a novel. … I don’t want to close off any pathways.”
What’s more, fiction writing has enhanced her skills as a lawyer (“I can write a really mean email. A lot of good lawyering is conveying a narrative,” she said) and vice versa (“Doing legal work has helped me get more concise, which I struggled with before,” she said).
I mean… more power to you, sis. Being a published author and a Hollywood producer is seen — to most people, anyway — as a way out of the Biglaw rat race. Trying to balance billable hours with creative pursuits seems like a giant task. But Kim is willing to tackle it all, at least for now.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Mastodon @[email protected].
