Meet Annie Choi. She fears cable cars and refuses to eat anything that casts a shadow. Her brother thinks chicken is a vegetable. Her father occasionally starts fires at work. Her mother collects Jesus trading cards and wears plaid like it's a job. No matter how hard Annie and her family try to understand one another, they often come up hilariously short.

But in the midst of a family crisis, Annie comes to realize that the only way to survive one another is to stick together . . . as difficult as that might be.

Cara Seitchek: Why did you decide to write a memoir rather than a fictionalized version of your experiences?

Annie Choi: It never occurred to me to write a fictionalized version. This whole writing thing is relatively new to me. I was editing textbooks for K-12 students about seven years ago and my boss said, hey, you know what? It’s not that you totally suck at writing, but you can be a lot better. Why don’t you take a class? So I did. I took a memoir writing class because it fit into my work schedule. That’s when I first started this project. So, fiction never even came into it. I can’t really imagine fictionalizing my experiences and my family. I wouldn’t even know how to begin. They are who they are. Which is to say, annoying and nuts.

CS: Did you write the chapters as separate essays with a common theme or did you write them knowing that they would be compiled into a book?

AC: I started with separate essays. I wrote pieces that weren’t about family, but about other aspects of my life that irritated me, like my job. But then I sat down and looked at everything I had written for the past few months and thought, OK, where’s my book? It seemed more logical to put the ones that were about family together and then keep writing more pieces to flesh the book out.

CS: In your book, your mother comments on many aspects of your life, but she says little about your writing – what does your mother think of your writing and that you have published a book?

AC: I didn’t show anyone in my family a single word until the book was sold, mostly because I was scared. Writing about your family is like shitting where you eat, sorry to be so crass. I figured if the manuscript didn’t get sold then there was no harm done. Everyone could go on with their lives, and I could curl up in the corner with my unsold manuscript and weep. Burn it for heat maybe. But after it got sold, I realized everyone’s going to read this and then I curled up in the corner and wept. My mother read half of it and called my brother in a blind rage. “OH MY GOD! How Anne do this? How she such monster? I can’t believe she make us look crazy.” Then she read the other half and finally “got it” and she called me up, “I think maybe you OK at writing. Maybe. Maybe not.” I tried to get the publisher to use that as a blurb on the back cover.

CS: How and why did you choose this title for your book?

AC: “Happy Birthday or Whatever” is the title of the first essay, and it also happens to be the first essay I wrote for the book. In a way it sums up the tone of the book, which is a bit sarcastic: “Oh don’t think you’re special or anything just because you were born today. There were millions of people born today.” But the subtitle was probably the hardest part of the book for me. It’s really difficult to sum up an entire book in a few words and also hint at the tone and humor. It took months for me to find the subtitle and I’m still not completely pleased. To be fair, I don’t think I can ever be pleased by any subtitle. My friend suggested I use “A Treatise on Fifteenth-Century Dutch Epic Poetry.” I thought that was pretty close.

CS: Your mother is one of the main characters of the book – was this intentional or did this evolve as you wrote the essays?

AC: It wasn’t totally intentional. My mother and I have a very complex, infuriating relationship and out of everyone in the family I’d say we fight the most, but also get along the best. This dynamic really interested me and I wanted to explore it further, among other aspects of my life and family. But in the end, she is just a really big personality and very charming--when she wants to be—and demands attention, both in writing and in life.

CS: Dialogue is an integral part of this book, and you capture everyone’s speech patterns so that their voices are very distinctive and strong. Did you find it easy to capture these voices or were you so familiar with them that writing them was more difficult than you thought?

AC: Dialogue was the easiest part of writing the book. Everyone in my family says the same things over and over again until we make each other’s ears bleed. Everyone has their little phrases and I’ve heard the same lectures since I was little. I have a family of talkers for the most part. Or maybe it’s just me and my mother. We talk enough for everyone. When I was sitting down to write, I’d think about a conversation that happened between me and a family member, then write it out, and build a story around that.

CS: How did you choose the order of the chapters? Is there an order other than chronological?

AC: I skip around in time a lot in each essay. I’ll start as an adult and then flashback to when I was young, or vice versa. For the order of the chapters, I looked at the big event in each piece and then organized those chronologically and then edited and rewrote sections so that each essay built on themes in previous essays or mentioned incidents that happened in other essays.

CS: The relationship between mother and daughter is a universal one – was your intent to focus on this relationship or did this evolve as you wrote the essays?

AC: I have a lot of fun when I write about my mother (as fun as writing can be), so it seemed natural to focus on that relationship because I was interested and wanted to explore it. But there were definitely moments while I was writing when I felt that my dad and my brother seemed like ghosts. Then I started to feel guilty. I wanted to develop their characters in the book. But I don’t think it’s a surprise that I focused on my relationship with my mother. She is a piece of work, that woman.

Annie Choi was born and raised in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University, she lives in New York City.

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