Patty Yumi Cottrell Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Patty Yumi Cottrell is an Asian American author that writes contemporary fiction. The author initially started her career working with stories that have been compared to fables. However, it wasn’t until she produced ‘Sorry to Disrupt the Peace’, a grounded tale about suicide and grief, that she truly found her stride.

+Biography

Patty Yumi Cottrell was born in Korea in 1981. She was adopted by a couple from the American Midwest. The same couple decided to bring two Korean boys into the family, boys that were not related but who Patty came to regard as her brothers.

One of the most significant moments in the author’s life was the suicide of one of her brothers. Yumi doesn’t like to talk about the incident. In fact, the author is very private. She likes to keep her life and her background to herself.

When pressed, she might reveal to you that her real parents are divorced. She might also tell you that she knows her parents were a discordant couple. Her father, who went on to live in the suburbs, was pretty harsh while Yumi’s mother, who initially lived on a farm and then moved to a monastery, was always the simple, innocent one.

Yumi doesn’t know whether she will ever take that extra step of reaching out to her biological parents and possibly even meeting them face to face. She isn’t sure they will recognize her or even like her, not after all the years that she has been apart from them.

The English major would like to think that she has been writing since the beginning. And she believes that her interest in writing is rooted in the art itself. Patty Yumi Cottrell’s friends will tell you that she was always a little reserved in college.

While her classmates made an effort to stand out by showing off their abilities in the classroom, Yumi was content to simply sit back, watch and learn. Her entrance into the publishing landscape wasn’t without its challenges.

As with most authors, Patty Yumi Cottrell had to struggle through a couple of uninspiring day jobs to make ends meet while she experimented with her writing. Her hold to fame is ‘Sorry to Disturb the Peace’, a 2017 release that saw the author’s star skyrocket.

Yumi started writing the masterpiece in 2014. She had undergone a number of transformations by this point. While her reading tastes and preferences had been pretty wide at the start, encompassing numerous contemporary fiction American authors, Yumi’s years in college nurtured an arrogant spirit in her.

She became rather distinct in her choice of literature. She garnered an affinity for books with concepts grounded in real life. By the time she left university and explored the world, Yumi’s arrogance had fallen away, and she had begun opening up herself to less artsy fictional creations.

It has been argued that Patty Yumi Cottrell’s ‘Sorry to Disturb the Peace’ is the sort of artsy book that can appeal to fans of contemporary fiction.

The author didn’t get the book written all at once. She only put a few chapters down at the start. She was living in New York at the time. A job at a charter school dragged her to Los Angeles and she put the project on hold.

It wasn’t until Spring Vacation in 2016 that Yumi finally sat down to complete the first draft. And this time it only took her two weeks to finish it. While the book has attracted a varied number of descriptors since its release, Patty Yumi Cottrell believes that ‘Sorry to Disturb the Peace’ is a dark comedy.

That is what she set out to write in the beginning. She had no idea what the book would look like. She just knows that she was obsessed with the possibility of producing a dark comedy. The time between moving to Los Angeles and finally sitting down to write the book was what the author needed to ruminate over her idea and to bring her concept together.

Yumi prefers writing in the first person because it traps her in the mind of her characters. She is able to experience every single emotion alongside her protagonist.

It is worth noting that some of the hype that surrounded ‘Sorry to Disturb the Peace’ has been imputed to the fact that the story told in the book bears similarities with Patty Yumi Cottrell’s own life.

The novel follows the exploits of a woman named Helen who was adopted by parents from the Midwest. When Helen’s adopted brother dies, she begins to spiral.

Yumi has denied claims that ‘Sorry to Disturb the Peace’ is autobiographical in any way. Even as an aspiring author, people were constantly encouraging Yumi to write a memoir of her experiences as an Asian American woman whose brother committed suicide.

Yumi refused to give into these suggestions, and she has vehemently pushed back against similar suggestions that her novel is telling her story. For that reason, Yumi keeps encouraging new readers to ignore her life as an author because she believes that an understanding of where she came from and what she went through might color one’s perception of the book.

Yumi doesn’t want people to get so caught up in trying to determine which aspects of the book actually happened and which ones are complete fiction. She would rather her readers simply enjoyed the story for what it is.

+Sorry to Disturb the Peace

At 32-years of age, some people might think that Helen Moran is a little strange because she is single and childless. However, the college educated Helen is seemingly content to spend her days helping troubled boys and girls.

Helen’s world takes an unexpected turn when she receives news that her brother committed suicide. The news is so sudden that she doesn’t know how to process it. No one seems to know what caused the suicide.

And theories seem to abound wherever Helen looks. However, none of them sit right with her. So she decides to do some investigating of her own. She goes back to her home town and begins to follow the trail down memory lane through both of their childhoods, determined to figure out what would cause someone like her brother to kill himself.