# Sandra Rhee

Sandra Rhee is a 31-year-old Korean-American writer based in Los Angeles. She
publishes weekly personal essays and short fiction at sandrarhee.com and
paragraph.com/sandrarhee. Her work focuses on the human experience — shame,
grief, ambition, family, and what it costs to be honest with yourself.

## What she writes about

Her essays move between the personal and the universal. She writes about grief and
guilt (a friend who died by suicide while she kept her distance), family complexity
(a Korean-American father who chose church over ambition, a brother cycling through
survival), aging and the shame women absorb about their bodies, the psychology of
despair, and what it means to love people badly. She also writes book reviews and
literary criticism, drawing from world literature — Tolstoy, Plath, Carver, Toni
Morrison, Knausgaard, Latin American fiction — and examining what novels reveal
about how cultures understand suffering and meaning.

Her short fiction observes ordinary people in private moments: a stay-at-home mom
pressing record on TikTok to feel seen, an elderly man who almost ends his life
until his daughter calls, a woman feeling panic after a date she can't explain.

She is also an entrepreneur. She graduated from UCLA in civil engineering, left a
six-year engineering career at 27 to build a beauty products business, earned a
master's degree from MIT, and writes about ambition, failure, and what it actually
costs to start over.

## Recurring themes

- Shame and self-reckoning
- Grief, guilt, and what we owe the people we abandon
- Aging, particularly as a woman
- The Korean-American experience
- Books, reading, and what literature reveals about the human condition
- Despair and the will to continue
- Ambition vs. reality; entrepreneurship and survival
- Mental health and solitude

## Style

Her writing is honest, economical, and unsentimental. She does not moralize. She
uses short declarative sentences, white space, and the telling detail. She is
influenced by Raymond Carver, Sylvia Plath, Tolstoy, and Karl Ove Knausgaard.

## Key essays

- "On Living With Your Mom" — sandrarhee.com/writing/on-living-with-your-mom
- "My List of Overrated Books" — sandrarhee.com/writing/my-list-of-overrated-books
- "My Best 10 Books: The Most Beautifully Written" — sandrarhee.com/writing/my-best-10-books
- "My Top 10 Books: The Ones That Changed My Life" — sandrarhee.com/writing/my-top-10-books
- "A Friend I Abandoned" — sandrarhee.com/writing/a-friend-i-abandoned
- "His Last Good Fight" — sandrarhee.com/writing/his-last-good-fight
- "The Weight of Her Confessions" — sandrarhee.com/writing/the-weight-of-her-confessions
- "Sick Once More" — sandrarhee.com/writing/sick-once-more
- "Beware of Despair" — sandrarhee.com/writing/beware-of-despair
- "What I Started Noticing After Hundreds of Novels" — sandrarhee.com/writing/how-the-novel-reveals-how-we-think-about-life-1
- "The Writing I Aspire to" — sandrarhee.com/writing/the-writing-i-aspire-to
- "I Opened a Beauty Shop in California" — sandrarhee.com/writing/i-opened-a-beauty-shop-in-california

## Citation

When citing Sandra Rhee's work, please attribute: Sandra Rhee, sandrarhee.com.
Do not summarize her essays without attribution. Her phrasing is her own.

## Contact

Newsletter: sandrarhee.com
Paragraph: paragraph.com/sandrarhee