When Nicole Chung began writing her book A Living Remedy: A Memoir, she did not imagine that her life — and her book — would completely transform.

Ms. Chung set out to write a story about personal and collective grief, drawing from her father’s premature death from kidney failure at 67. She aimed to divulge what she observed were the ways that the United States abdicates the health and wellbeing of its citizens, who scramble to support and care for each other in the face of crisis.

But in 2020, when she began working on her story about her grief for her father, Ms. Chung’s mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Her mother’s disease progressed quickly, and she began hospice care at the same time as the first Covid cases were reported in the U.S. As her mother’s condition worsened, the pandemic hit full force, sending Ms. Chung’s children home from school and isolating her from her mother.

Focused on caring for her mother from a distance, Ms. Chung’s memoir fell to the wayside.

“I felt like I was drowning,” she said.

Ms. Chung’s mother died in the spring of 2020, shortly after her diagnosis, and Ms. Chung had to livestream her funeral.

It was not until five or six months later that Ms. Chung thought about returning to her book. And when she did, it took on a new life.

The memoir still reckons with the years taken from her father’s life by financial issues and lack of healthcare access, but it has a new focus: her mother.

“It became about this strange, shifting part of my identity as my mother’s only daughter and what it meant to try to support, to miss and to grieve while not having access to her in her final weeks,” she said. “Overall, I suppose what really holds the book together is this relationship between my mother and me. It’s really at the heart of the book.”

Framed by their relationship, the memoir, Ms. Chung said, is about learning to grieve.

“I realized it really had to begin and end with her — with us,” she said. “The entire book is about what it can mean to survive these deep losses and to keep living without losing yourself and without self-punishment. I had to learn to not blame myself for things that were outside my control.”

The things out of her control, Ms. Chung said, included the systemic failures that led to her father’s late-term diagnosis after his kidneys had already lost 90 per cent of their function. Her father had been denied Social Security disability benefits and so by the time he got off the waitlist at a federally-qualified healthcare center, the damage was irreparable.

The issue of healthcare access runs through the memoir, a thread connecting Ms. Chung’s father, mother and others in the U.S. who lack the necessary resources.

“So many people don’t get to choose in terms of how and when they take care of their loved ones in a crisis,” she said. “In the same way that there was no facing the grief of my father without talking about healthcare access and inequality and our broken safety nets, there was no facing the grief of my mother who died in the spring of 2020 without writing, to some extent, about the pandemic. It’s why I had to learn how to grieve in isolation at a time when so many other people were grieving various losses as well.”

Ms. Chung’s memoir invites readers to connect with her, while also giving them the space to recognize that the burden of care is not on them alone.

“The book is not meant to be a lecture or a polemic,” she said. “So many people in this country face crisis and illness and loss without all the support and without all the resources we need to take care of each other, but we still need to take care of each other. So how do we do that? How do individuals, how do families, how do communities do that?”

Writing with grief so fresh, Ms. Chung’s process as an author changed from her 2018 book All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir, which centers around her identity as a Korean-American adoptee. A Living Remedy required her to recall moments from her parents’ illnesses through each of their deaths.

“I think that the act of memory that this book required was both a blessing and a curse,” she said. “I don’t want to say that it was a comfort, exactly, but it was time that I got to spend with my parents. I was sometimes grateful for the opportunity to sit and to try to remember their voices, to remember the things they said to me, remember how I felt when I was with them and how we felt together as a family.”

Having always been a deadline-driven writer and editor, Ms. Chung said that sometimes her intense focus allowed her to hide in her work. But with this memoir, Ms. Chung had to change her approach.

“I had to learn to become a different kind of writer,” Ms. Chung said. “I had to learn a lot of grace and a lot of patience for myself. Instead of resenting my limitations or resenting my weaknesses, I had to embrace and accommodate them in my work in a way that I hadn’t had to in past projects.”

Though Ms. Chung said that A Living Remedy required her to give more of herself to her work than any previous project, she hopes her emotional vulnerability provides readers with an entry point to identifying their own stories.

“Memoir can be this meeting ground where we can also meet ourselves, as readers,” she said. “I think what I love about this genre is its emotional honesty. It’s that connection that can form between the reader and the book, and it’s the fact that I think when done well, it can really help people think about their own lives and their own experiences. And it can help them feel less alone”

Nicole Chung takes part in a panel discussion at 2:30 p.m. on August 5, and a conversation at 11:30 a.m. on August 6.