The dedication at the front of this novel reads: For Namjoon and BTS, who made music a place to go when the world outside was too much.
I wrote that in 2025, in southeastern Pennsylvania. The music worked as it always had. Not by pretending the world was better than it was. By making it more bearable to be in. I found the words for it by writing a character who thought she was doing research.
Her name is Amaya. She’s a writer in Manayunk, Philadelphia. She covers culture for a magazine called Mosaic, and her editor sends her to write about a K-pop group called MYNX because MYNX is about to tour North America and Western audiences are finally paying attention. Amaya takes the assignment. She plans to stay at a comfortable journalistic distance from all of it.
She doesn’t.
Her sister Naila has been a MYNE for four years and meets Amaya’s new beat with the enthusiasm of someone who has been preparing for this her whole life. There is a glossary. FANCAM. PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIP. LIGHTSTICK. The Orbit, MYNX’s lightstick, is deep indigo, Bluetooth-enabled, syncs to the music during concerts. Naila’s annotation: Buy it before. Venue lines are long. You will want one.
Amaya reads it. Takes notes for her article. Plans to stay distant.
A few weeks into the research, having written her first piece and starting to feel something she didn’t predict, she hosts an audio session for her audience. Near the end, she says:
“It feels like belonging. And these fandoms, especially K-pop fandoms — they’re incredibly intentional about it. The fan chants, the lightsticks, the coordinated response — it’s not just enthusiasm, it’s a shared language. You walk into a concert knowing thousands of people around you speak the same language. When does that happen otherwise?”
A commenter replies: only at concerts and maybe church and sometimes neither.
If you have been to a BTS concert, you know what she means. The lightsticks sync. Sixty thousand people say the same words at the same moment. Amaya, who is a culture writer and has clinical names for most things, says it is what people are actually dismissing when they sneer at fandom. Not the enthusiasm. The need underneath it.
Near the end she says: part of why she responded to this music, she thinks, is the artists who trained internationally, who grew up between languages and cultures. There’s something in the sound that understands what it means to be assembled from more than one thing. To not have a single clean answer when someone asks where you’re from.
Her Amma is Tamil. She has had her own answers for that question for twenty-eight years.
The other half of this book belongs to Noah Park.
Main vocalist of MYNX. Grew up between Los Angeles and Seoul, speaks both languages without an accent in either, belongs fully to neither place. He has spent a decade learning to make that into music, and somewhere in it lost track of who made it. He sets up an account under a false name. Needs to be no one for a while.
He finds Amaya’s YouTube channel because one of his old songs is playing in the background of her cooking video. She doesn’t know who wrote it. She calls it Swiftesque. He comments.
Neither of them expects it to become anything.
They discover they have loved the same book since childhood. The Little Prince, their separate copies worn soft with the same kind of use. He has named the account after it: @_thelilprince. She talks about it in a makeup video, mid-mascara, like it isn’t strange to drop into a makeup tutorial: the idea that love is something you create through attention. It’s not found, it’s made. You make it by caring. Which sounds simple but I think it might be the hardest thing.
At 11:47pm, @_thelilprince comments: It’s my favorite book.
Just that.
She types back: Mine too. Since I was nine.
There’s a line I keep returning to. Amaya says that what people are dismissing when they sneer at fandom is the need for something beyond the private. For transcendence that doesn’t ask you to justify what moves you.
Noah is listening from his apartment window in Seoul. Every vehicle moving below looks like a twinkling star, briefly bright before disappearing.
She was describing why it mattered, he thinks. From the outside, without any of his reasons, she had arrived at what he had forgotten.
Two people very good at being fine. At moving through their lives a step removed from what they actually want. He had put it in a comment thread at midnight, without planning to: art is the only honest form of escape because it doesn’t pretend you’re somewhere else, it just makes the here feel more bearable.
She keeps it. Carries it into a conversation with strangers. Offers it as something true.
BTS opens their North America run in Tampa on April 25th. If you’re going, you know what these days before feel like. If you’re watching the fandom light up from wherever you are, I wrote this book inside it.
A Star Keeps Its Distance is available for purchase.