An author who earned her MFA at the University of Iowa will be returning to the state next week to promote her new book, “The Obsessed.”
Lizzie Buehler says it’s a tale about the trials of modern dating as a brilliant and obsessive college student who studies languages finds herself reenacting the love plot of her favorite novel.
“It’s a story about art imitating life imitating art,” Buehler says, “and there’s sort of this endless kind of layering of the different ways that the two can influence each other.”
Buehler holds degrees from Iowa, Harvard and Princeton, and like her novel’s main character, has long been enthralled by languages. The Austin, Texas native spent her final year of high school in South Korea.
“I ended up graduating from my high school in Texas one year early and then I participated in an exchange program through the U.S. State Department,” Buehler says, “and they sent around 15 American high schoolers to live in Korea for a year and live with families and learn the language.”
Buehler’s MFA from Iowa was in literary translation and she’s been the translator of multiple books, including several in Korean.
“I really love languages, so I studied a lot,” Buehler says. “Definitely Korean is my best language, but I also studied Spanish, of course, growing up in Texas and I’m pretty proficient in Spanish, and then in undergrad, I also took Chinese and Japanese, and then at Iowa, I started learning German.”
While she’s already been pursuing careers in publishing and translating, Buehler is now in her third year of medical school at Temple University.
“I’m thinking that I would like to be a psychiatrist and I feel like there’s a lot to say about the overlap between the exploration of human emotions and the mind and also writing fiction,” Buehler says. “Fiction is trying to grapple with some of the same issues that psychiatry is, so I’m really looking forward to the two careers kind of continuing to influence each other.”
Buehler will be appearing at Prairie Lights in Iowa City to do a reading and take questions at 7 PM next Friday, September 11th.
Hear Matt Kelley’s full interview with Lizzie Buehler below: