Jessica Pan Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Jessica Pan
Jessica Pan is a features writer and she’s appeared in Lenny Letter, the Guardian Weekend Magazine, The Toast, Refinery29, The Cut (New York Magazine), the Daily Telegraph, The Hairpin, ELLE, and Jezebel. She is a regular contributor to Broadly (VICE).

Jessica has her Masters in Journalism from RMIT and a BA in Psychology and Literary Arts from Brown University. She’s also worked as a magazine editor and TV reporter in Beijing.

She took this class called “How to Be Sociable”, embarrassing name, yet an amazing evening. Her instructor explained to her the difference between Surface Talk and Deep Talk. Surface Talk is chat that is all about commutes, admin, the weather, and what we’re doing this weekend. Deep Talk, on the other hand, is about our fears, hopes, and dreams. To truly make meaningful connections with others, we must engage in Deep Talk. Then her instructor demonstrated this by pairing the class off with some stranger in the class and having everybody confess embarrassing things to each other.

Of course Jessica just had to be paired off with a handsome stranger, yet amazingly, it worked. They bonded over sharing their vulnerabilities, instead of acting like everything was great in their lives or boasting. Throughout her year of being an extrovert, she’d try diving into Deep Talk as much as possible with her new friends to truly form a connection with them.

Having the ability to morph and change, and not be the same person with the same anxieties forever offers her this feeling of freedom and is a source of hope.

Before the book, she had loved and celebrated being an introvert, however as she got older and more set in her ways, she started using the introvert label as this license to say no to absolutely anything which gave her even a whisper of anxiety.

She had spent much of her life telling herself she was one sort of person, not once believing she could do the things that she saw others doing. She spent an entire year doing all the things that petrified her.

She feels that “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come” is a sequel to “Graduates in Wonderland”. “Graduates” covered the time when Jessica was 22 to 25 and living in Beijing then Australia. “Sorry” picks up when she’s 32, ten years after the previous book started.

Jessica likes writing about things that are happening in her life, even if it’s just for herself, even getting it down into a journal. Because she believes for everybody it truly clarifies what you feel and what you think. And for her to even realize what she’s feeling and thinking, she must write it down.

As a writer, she is not the type of writer that thrives on forcing herself to eke out a quota of words each day. When she does, the work ends up being horrible. It’s obvious that she is dragging her feet and really only filling up the page with sub par working only trying to reach her quota.

She is more of a “make endless notes, consider it constantly, make more notes, go for long walks thinking about it, put off writing, put off writing, put it off some more, make more notes and then when it kills her to not write, pound out 6,000 words in a single go in manic burst” type of writer. Then she sleeps and won’t look at it for at least an entire day. Then the editing starts. It has taken her such a long time to not feel guilty about writing every single day, but that just is not how her creativity works.

Maybe she’ll write another book, or maybe not, but she will continue journaling and taking notes. This may be a part of her being an introvert. If she’s with people all the time, she doesn’t know what she is feeling, or even what she’s thinking, she doesn’t even understand who she is, so she must be alone to process it all and writing is the best way for her.

“Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2014. Two best friends document their post-college lives in a relatable, hilarious, and powerfully honest epistolary memoir.

Rachel Kapelke-Dale and Jessica Pan, fast friends ever since they met at Brown University during their freshman year, and vowed to keep in touch after they graduated through some in-depth, and brutally honest weekly emails. Jess, after graduation, packs everything up that she owns and moves to Beijing on a whim, as Rachel heads off to New York in order to work at an art gallery and figure her love life out.

Each one of them spends the next few years just tumbling through adulthood and reinventing themselves in various countries, which includes Australia, France, and China. Through their messages from all over the world, they swap their stories of teaching classes of military men, running a magazine, and flirting in foreign languages. But also some hard stuff: from breakups to harrowing accidents and breakdowns.

This is a no-holds-barred and intimate portrait of two young women while they embark on adulthood.

“Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously” is a non-fiction book that was released in 2019. An introvert spends one whole year attempting to live like an extrovert with hilarious advice and results for readers along the way.

What would happen if some shy introvert lived like some gregarious extrovert for an entire year? If she willingly and knowingly put herself in perilous social situations which she typically avoided at all costs? Jessica Pan intends to find that out. With help from some extrovert mentors, she sets up this series of personal challenges (perform stand up comedy, travel alone, talk to strangers, host a dinner party, make friends on the road, and much worse) to explore whether living like an extrovert is able to teach her lessons which may improve her quality of life.

Chronicling the writer’s painful and hilarious year of misadventures, this book explores what happens as one introvert fights against her natural tendencies, takes the plunge, and tries (and fails sometimes) to be just a little bit braver.