A Secretive Author Revealed

Jenifer Nim (1990-2060) was born Jenifer Catherine Smith in Bangor, Wales (where her father was posted in the Air Force) to a family she would later describe as “mad as a box of frogs.” Being a military family, they relocated frequently and she spent her formative years moving around the UK and Germany. She would tell friends this was the reason why she could never stay still for too long, and indeed, the longest she ever lived in one place was 5 years in London in her mid-twenties.

She chose her penname after being hospitalized in South Korea on the verge of death, having neglected to take any medication for six months for a chronic autoimmune disease. She had misunderstood the diagnosing consultant back in London when he had said “Don’t worry, it’s a mild form of the disease”, believing that this meant medication was helpful but not altogether necessary.

“Nim” is the Korean version of Mr or Ms and is added to the end of a patient’s name. Korean names being much shorter than Western ones, just three syllables for the full name, “Jenifer” took up all available syllables and she became known for the next two years as “Jenifer Nim” until it just began to sound like her name. Until she died at the age of 70, she would still write Jenifer Nim in Hangeul on all her notebooks.

Smith was an avid reader since early childhood and developed the remarkable ability to tune out any form of background noise in order to focus on her book. Her prodigious talent for ignoring people proved extremely useful her whole life, particularly when strangers attempted small talk on public transport or chuggers accosted her on the high street; that is until she became a teacher and realised that steadfastly disregarding the loud, annoying and disruptive students in the room and ploughing through the lesson did not constitute effective classroom management.

Smith became a teacher after turning thirty, having a slightly early mid-life crisis and deciding she didn’t want to work in an office anymore. A few months of travelling were rudely interrupted by the worldwide coronavirus pandemic of 2020 and she was evacuated from a fully locked-down and army-patrolled Peru by the Foreign Office. After spending a glorious few months relaxing at her parents’ house in the countryside, she struck on the bright idea of teaching English abroad and never looked back.

Just like in her early years, she moved to a new place every two to three years and threw herself headfirst into countries such as South Korea (where she fully immersed herself in the health insurance and hospital system), Costa Rica, Japan, Poland, Mexico and Brazil.

It was while teaching that she began to write again. The strange little child who read like books were going out of style would also write stories for absolutely no one in her free time. A primary school teacher told her at ten years old that he was sure he would see the name Jenifer Catherine Smith in print one day, and eventually she decided to make that a reality. However, it wasn’t until after her death that her real name would be printed.

Smith achieved enormous success with The Wanderlust Diaries, an extremely low-brow romance series about a blogger travelling the world in search of adventures, content, and handsome men. It was one of those perfectly modern phenomenons that comes out of nowhere and takes everybody in the literary establishment by surprise.

I believe she credited BookTok with its incredible popularity, as the series quickly took over social media in the 2030s and women of all ages were seen devouring the books on trains, in cafes, on beaches and by poolsides. She managed to churn out endless variations on the theme, but kept it slightly fresh by setting the action in new countries and employing different tropes every time.  They were also very funny, I hate to admit.

Classics included titles such as “Baguettes and Bad Decisions”, “Tapas and Tears”, “My Caipirinha Crush” and “The Hongdae Heartbreaker.” Of course, the very Instagrammable covers were a work of AI-generated ‘genius’ that kept them on everyone’s social media feeds for months at a time. In the heady, hedonistic days of the 2030s, there was an almost obsessive interest in dating stories, foreign travel, and influencer life. Combining these (as well as the rather uninspired pun of the Wander-lust title) proved an unstoppable force, and Netflix soon picked them up for a long-running highly trashy but wildly popular series.

Although they were widely read and well-liked all over the globe, Smith used only her penname and never revealed her true identity or accepted interviews or profiles in relation to the series. I am quite sure, however, that she was eternally grateful for the infinite piles of money raked in from being on the bestseller list week after week, the Bank of Netflix, and the surprisingly robust sales of utterly ridiculous Wanderlust merchandise. When she died, she gave posthumous permission to her literary agent (who she also made scandalously rich and forever thankful) to reveal her identity and publish her “real writing” as she called it.

To my profound shock, the author of Sushi, Sake and Seduction and My Big Fat Greek Fling had written several sweeping historical epics on a par with towering figures of turn-of-the-century literature such as Isabel Allende and Pierre LeMaitre. It seems she had been meticulously researching and carefully refining these multi-generational chronicles for the last 40 years of her life, while keeping them secret from everyone she knew, including her agent.

Her magnum opus was Where the Pine Trees Bend, a sincerely moving novel about identity, citizenship, family, separation and belonging that spanned 20th-century Korean history, a fascinating, tumultuous and devastating era not well known outside the peninsula. She wrote in notes to her agent that she was not sure it was her story to tell, but she wrote it because it came to her and asked to be told. She would leave it up to the publishing house to decide whether this novel could be released under the name of a white woman, technically a citizen of the UK but who in reality belonged nowhere and everywhere and had spent a lifetime wandering the world.

She wrote novels based in all the main countries she had lived in, and her love for and dedication to these places shone through her work, both the trash and the treasures. After the water wars of the 2050s and subsequent reorganisation of many nation states which separated families, friends, and neighbours, The Wanderlust Diaries became a nostalgic reminder of a happier, bygone area, and stories such as Where the Pine Trees Bend became achingly relevant.

Her diaries and memoirs also revealed the full story of the life of this highly unusual woman. Written as if talking to a very good friend, they are replete with scandalous encounters that would make even the Wanderlust protagonist blush, astonishing adventures in every country that existed before the 2050s, and a fair few near-death experiences. She was the embodiment of the old adage that life is stranger than fiction. As she wrote in her final message to her agent, “Nobody ever truly knew me. Oh, they saw snippets, they heard tales, some of my experiences dressed up in comedy and delivered over late-night glasses of wine. But I was always afraid to let anyone know me fully. But now I’m dead, and I don’t care anymore.”