After making a splash with her 2015 adult debut, Re Jane, Patricia Park returns with a novel for teens that draws on her family’s Korean Argentine heritage. The protagonist of the sharply observed, brilliantly characterized Imposter Syndrome and Other Confessions of Alejandra Kim (Crown, Feb. 21) negotiates the vast differences between her multicultural, working-class neighborhood in Queens and her predominantly White, socially progressive Manhattan prep school, Anne Austere (affectionately dubbed Quaker Oats Prep by students). Spanish-speaking Ale, whose parents grew up in Buenos Aires in a community of Korean immigrants, is mourning the untimely death of unconditionally supportive Papi; feels emotionally estranged from overworked Ma; and endures the stresses of living in poverty. At school, she’s uncomfortable with wealthy White best friend Laurel’s zealous, overbearing activism. Everywhere, she feels self-conscious about people’s responses to her complex identities. The fallout of a teacher’s racist comment brings matters to a head, forcing Ale to face uncomfortable truths. Park spoke with us over Zoom from her home in Brooklyn; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What led you to try writing YA?

I fell into YA thanks to my students at American University [where Park is an assistant professor of creative writing]. A lot of them were coming in wanting to tell YA stories, and as an educator, I needed to know what they were trying to do. I fell in love with the freshness of voice: These books are saying things that I’m not able to say in the adult world, tackling issues of social justice and feeling seen. After Re Jane, I was working on a novel about Alejandra’s father, Papi. I was writing his coming-of-age, his dealings with racial melancholia. He was coming from such a traumatic place. Suddenly this young voice came out, and it was Juan’s daughter. She asserted herself in this American kind of way, and then she just took over the page.

I really appreciated the way so many different elements ultimately fit together like a perfect puzzle.

I’m very meticulous, and that’s why I’m not a fast writer. Loose ends bother me—I feel like you owe it to the reader to tie things up or at least address things. I’ll go back through the manuscript multiple times: I read just for each character, to make sure that their storyline makes sense. I do that with setting [too]; Jackson Heights [in Queens] and Quaker Oats are characters in and of themselves.

How did you decide what elements to explicitly explain?

In my early drafts, I overexplained. What if the reader doesn’t understand what nunchi means or they don’t understand a Spanish word? I [had] to learn to trust the reader. This is where I get very encouraged by the way young adult literature is going. There’s more of this resistance where we don’t have to explain. With my first novel, I had italicized Korean terms, because that was the convention. The fact that Imposter Syndrome could be published without subordinating Spanish or Korean? This is such a joy. It’s such a giant step forward for literature, another step in making those who are underserved feel seen, heard, and included.

Your book shows how, with meaningful character development, writers can introduce complex themes, even through secondary characters.

I write about minorities within minorities—they’re all part of the Patricia Park multiverse. Papi is a stock boy in Re Jane, [working] in the grocery. Jane thinks he is Hwan, fresh off the boat from Korea, and at the very end Uncle Sang tells Jane, No, no, he’s Juan. He’s Korean from Argentina like you’re Korean from America, and Jane realizes that she has stereotyped Ale’s father in the same way she’s been stereotyped her whole life. I like rounded secondary and tertiary characters. I like this idea that someone who’s a stock boy in one story can go off and be the hero of their own adventure. And then the sandwich girl in Imposter Syndrome can go off and have her own story. Really the larger thesis statement is: We’re not all the same; we contain multitudes.

How do you respond to the tired critique that so-called “diverse books” often have leveled at them that there’s “too much going on”?

I’ve been told both in adult and YA spaces that I have too much going on, and my BIPOC writer friends have been told [that too]. The short answer is, especially when you’re a minority within a minority, when you’re trying to navigate certain spaces, it’s not a binary, it’s not simplistic: You got a lot going on! So even at the starting line, characters like Alejandra don’t know which way to go because they’re responding to the way the world sees them. Ale, like a lot of YA characters, is trying to find her way, and it takes 300 pages to figure out what that is.

On a craft level, I think what can happen are failures in mechanics. We talked earlier about so many threads: How do you keep them going? It takes extra work to go back through—multiple passes for each character, [even] each secondary and tertiary character, to make sure that their storylines make sense.

I appreciated that Laurel, who could easily have become a parody, was given her own backstory and grew in ways that felt respectful and authentic.

I think it’s just as important to get White characters right as it is for non-White characters. I had a lot of White women sensitivity readers. Laurel echoes a lot of concerns I hear murmured about [among] my White women colleagues as well as my students. How do you be a good person? How do you be an ally in an authentic way? To be honest, I feel for that struggle, that sense of confusion. I, myself, am trying to figure it all out as a BIPOC woman. I think we’ve all been a Laurel at some point, so showing her experience was important in all its three-dimensionality.

She has her arc, too—she’s cracking jokes at the end that I don’t think she would have made at the beginning. It’s like, oh my God, Laurel, did you really say that? In high school, you try things out, you might overcorrect, and then you undercorrect. It’s Goldilocks all the way through. Too hot. Too cold. When am I going to get it right?

One line in particular really resonated with me: “what I’m realizing is this: if you’re afraid of saying your truth, then that’s worse than supposedly ‘belonging.’ That’s the true definition of ‘imposter.’ ”

I think that phrase sums up the high school experience: Constantly trying to figure out, should I say the thing that makes me belong, or should I say the thing that feels true inside? It’s just one big swamp of cognitive dissonance. Even in moments where we think we are being authentic, five years later, looking back, we could say, I was an imposter then. For me, that definition of an imposter was a hard-won lesson, something I try to hold in my heart and use as my barometer. I don’t always get it right, but the fact that I could even come to this was part of my journey.

Laura Simeon is a young readers’ editor.