The Summer I Turned Pretty author Jenny Han is building an empire to tell stories of first loves, first heartbreaks – and with Asian representation

Jenny Han, author of The Summer I Turned Pretty and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, has more stories to tell – and she is growing a media empire to do so

Those who know Han say she is ‘uniquely qualified to speak on the behalf of teens’ thanks to her coming-of-age stories, and that ‘no detail is ever too small’

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Lana Condor in a still from “To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before”. Jenny Han, the author of the book that the film is based off, is building an empire to tell more stories of first loves, first heartbreaks. Photo: Netflix

Published: 7:15am, 14 Jul 2023

Jenny Han always knew that she wanted to tell stories. She would fill notebooks with them growing up the eldest daughter of Korean immigrant parents in suburban Richmond in the US state of Virginia.

Like Lara Jean Song Covey, the teen heroine of her 2014 novel To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, she liked baking and books and writing fanfiction. She considered being a librarian or a teacher before pursuing an MFA – a Master of Fine Arts – in creative writing with her parents’ blessing.

“I’ve always felt confident about being a writer, and the adults in my life have always really instilled that,” she says.

Han has a way of evoking nostalgia and loading big emotion into the smallest of totems: sharing Yakult drinks and Twizzler straws. A stuffed polar bear bringing the memory of a childhood crush flooding back. The meaning of infinity. The meaning of a hatbox. The meaning of forever.

Jenny Han at Variety’s 2023 Power of Women event in April, 2023, in New York. Photo: TNS

“No detail is ever too small for Jenny,” says her long-time literary agent, Emily van Beek. “Every detail really matters.”

“She has a clear creative vision and that’s articulated on the page in her novels, but she also has a very clear aesthetic understanding of the world of her characters,” says Han’s former editor Zareen Jaffery.