Episode #1
Author-Artist DAVID YOON (Frankly in Love, City of Orange) on Humor, Sense of Self and Creativity as a Habit
You can feel it when a writer has lived inside their questions, and David Yoon has. We sit down with the New York Times bestselling author of Frankly in Love, Super Fake Love Song, Version Zero, and City of Orange to talk about what happens when identity, family, and ambition all tug on you at once and why the “hard” work is often the honest work. We start with David’s origin story as a latchkey kid and immigrant son who writes to be heard, then jump into how Frankly in Love grew from a fake dating rom-com into a story shaped by fatherhood, grief, and the urgent need to understand your parents while you still can. David shares what it took to humanize characters with racist beliefs, how forgiveness can be complicated, and why flawed people on the page can create real empathy off the page. From there, we lean into performance and code switching through Super Fake Love Song, where personas collide, lies spiral, and comedy becomes a tool for telling the truth. We also go deep on technology ethics and data privacy with Version Zero, drawing on David’s years in the tech industry and the surveillance economy. The conversation turns to AI safety, groupthink, and the unsettling idea that the people shaping the internet may be improvising with everyone else’s lives. We close with City of Orange, online culture as apocalypse fuel, and Joy Revolution, the romance imprint David co-founded to publish love stories by and about people of color with joy at the center. If you like thoughtful conversations about writing craft, immigrant family dynamics, identity, representation in publishing, and the real-world cost of social media, subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a rating and review. Follow, subscribe and learn more about Stories Without Borders on: Instagram : @Stories_WithoutBorders YouTube : @Stories_WithoutBorders Website : StoriesWithoutBorders.org
