Best-selling author Min Jin Lee is finishing her trilogy at Radcliffe
When she was young, long before she became a best-selling author, Min Jin Lee wanted to become an architect. “I am very visual,” said Lee on a fall afternoon in her Harvard office, where she is completing the final book in her trilogy, which already includes “Free Food for Millionaires” (2007), and a sweeping tale of four generations of Koreans in Japan titled “Pachinko” (2017). Today, instead of designing homes or office towers, Lee, a National Book Award finalist for “Pachinko” and the Catherine A. and Mary C. Gellert Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, builds narratives rooted in history and informed by years of research. The rigorous prep work helps her craft her novels from the ground up as the words take shape on the page. “Most of writing is like plumbing, and laying the floor, and digging the basement, and then layering it brick by brick by brick...