About I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

"Susan Kiyo Ito is like a surgeon operating on herself. She is delicate, precise, and at times cutting with her words. But it is all in service of her own healing and to encourage us all to be brave enough to do the same in our own stories." --W. Kamau Bell

Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father white. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early twenties was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother's desire for anonymity against Ito's need to know her origins, to see and be seen. Along the way, Ito grapples with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family. An account of love, what it's like to feel neither here nor there, and one writer's quest for the missing pieces that might make her feel whole, I Would Meet You Anywhere is the stirring culmination of Ito's decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story.

Susan Ito is the author of I Would Meet You Anywhere. She is a MacDowell colony Fellow, and has also been awarded residencies at The Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook and the Blue Mountain Center. She is a member of the Writers’ Grotto, and teaches at Mills College/Northeastern University and Bay Path University. She lives in Northern California.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean-American writer and author of the novel Somebody’s Daughter. Her next novel, The Evening Hero, on the future of medicine, immigration, North Korea, is forthcoming with Simon & Schuster. She graduated from Brown University and was a Writer in Residence there before she began teaching at Columbia University’s Writing Division.