Writer, Speaker, Traveler.
In my work, I explore how our personal histories and cultural roots shape us and how we find meaning in a world where everything—including we ourselves—changes and ends. My new book, Traveling in Bardo: The Art of Living in an Impermanent World (Sept. 2025, Balance/Hachette), interweaves explorations of impermanence in relation to marriage and friendship, parents and children, and work and creativity with stories of my Tibetan ancestors and Buddhist perspectives on the fleeting nature of existence, offering a new way to navigate change and live life fully.
With a foreword by NYT best-selling author Dani Shapiro and praise from Elizabeth Gilbert, Melissa Febos, Sharon Salzberg, and others, my book has been named a Next Big Idea Club “Must-Read” for September. Publishers Weekly calls it a “rich and freewheeling meditation on life, death, and impermanence.”
My fiction, essays, and interviews have been published by The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Oprah Daily, Catapult, Guernica, Tin House, AGNI, Narrative, and Granta, among others, and I’m a contributing editor at Tricycle. My writing also appears in The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult), Women in Clothes (Riverhead), and American Dragons (HarperCollins), and has been included in The Best American Essays.
I speak and teach workshops in the U.S., Asia, and Europe, at The Rubin Museum of Art, Asia Society, Princeton, Columbia, Oxford, and The American University of Paris, among others. I studied Comparative Literature at Princeton and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. My travels and work have taken me around the world, to India, Tibet, France, Spain, Cuba, Thailand, Bali, and many other countries. I’m a longtime resident of Tokyo.