My mother had been born, raised, and married before she moved to the United States from Korea at the age of twenty-eight with my father. She rarely talked about her past, but that night she shared with me how Korean women were still not afforded the same status in society that men were given. I asked if this made her angry, and she said no, because she had been raised to believe that women were valued for their roles as wives and mothers, which was why she couldn’t reconcile with my choice to leave my marriage over something as seemingly unimportant in her eyes as my career. I was disturbed to hear that there clearly hadn’t been much progress for women in Korea in the 150 years since Anna Karenina was published. I, in turn, shared with her that I would be forever grateful to be born and raised in the United States, where as a woman I was afforded the right to live my life however I chose. To me, this meant that if I wanted to leave my marriage and pursue my own career ambitions, then it was my prerogative to leave.

That night, I woke up at three in the morning and headed down to the lobby with my laptop. Sitting in the quiet, next to a gorgeously decorated hotel Christmas tree, I had one of those amazing light bulb moments: what would Anna Karenina look like as a young adult novel? Excited by the idea, I emailed Sally, my book agent, and then went back upstairs to bed. My last thought before falling asleep was that in my teen version, Anna would be half-Korean, in honor of my mother’s heritage and my brother’s half-Korean children. I woke up to an email from Sally saying, “Love the idea! Write it now!”

I made a few attempts, but I always hit a wall and eventually got busy with whatever TV show I was working on at the time. Then, a couple of years later, I met my soon-to-be second husband, John, on a book tour in Naperville in February 2014. (Our meet-cute, like Anna and Vronsky’s, also occurred during a snowy winter). When we met, I lived in LA and he lived in Brooklyn. I thought it was a fling, but he claims he knew immediately we were fated for much more. (How very Vronsky of him!) We embarked on a cross-country, long-distance love affair, and even though I said I’d never marry again (being a “wife” didn’t seem like my kinda thing), we eloped in Vegas the next year and have been extremely happy ever since.