Just a few days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Baltimore-based writer Jung Yun embarked on a family cruise aboard the real-life ship from The Love Boat.

“Until my feet were actually on the plank walking up to the ship, I was sure we were going to cancel,” recalls Yun, who has channeled the surreal dissonance of that experience into a sensitive and surprisingly funny new novel, All the World Can Hold—a 9/11 book that’s not about 9/11.

Aboard a fictionalized version of Yun’s own trip, three unrelated characters, each unhappy in their own way, experience a life-changing voyage. With no way off the boat and tragedy looming in the background, they are forced to reconsider what they can’t control, and what they must.

Yun, who was born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in North Dakota, has lived in Baltimore for the last decade, after accepting a job teaching creative writing at D.C.’s George Washington University. She is the author of two critically acclaimed previous novels—Shelter (2016) and O Beautiful (2021), but she says this is the book she’s been working on the longest.

After of its release via Simon & Schuster’s 37 Ink on March 10, we spoke with the Otterbein resident about how this story finally came to fruition.

9/11 is a fraught moment, both in the grand scheme of American history and on a personal level for those of us who lived through it. What made you want to write about it?
9/11 was a history-changing moment, but I think the reason why it has such personal significance to me is that it pushed me to make a lot of big changes in my own life. Witnessing so much destruction, so much loss of life, made me feel mortal for the first time. I was 29 years old and working all the time [in New York]. Not sleeping, not eating well, and smoking a bunch of cigarettes. I kind of thought I was immortal.

The events of 9/11 disabused me of that notion very quickly. Within nine months, I quit my [nonprofit] job, I sold my apartment, I went back to grad school to start a creative writing program in my 30s, which everyone thought was crazy. I’m not sure if I would be writing today if 9/11 hadn’t forced me to look inward and realize I didn’t like what I was doing with my life.

Despite the grave subject matter, I would say this is the funniest of your three novels. Do you agree?
I have been wanting to write about my experience of 9/11 for 25 years, but I couldn’t figure out a way to do that without becoming utterly grief-stricken. Leaning into the surreality of the cruise was, I think, the turning point when the book started to become a novel that I could see myself writing and finishing.

A lot of the humor is just straight realism about things that I remember from the ship, like the men’s sexy leg contest. Particularly in the early 2000s, when there were no smartphones, the cruise crew existed to entertain you, distract you, keep you busy, keep you happy, etc. And they went to great—sometimes hilarious or absurd—lengths to do that.

The image of the cruise ship also offers a powerful metaphor in this novel.
Yes. In the context of horrific tragedy, what can these people do except make choices about their own lives? When we first meet them, I think all three characters are kind of being carried along. And this event forces them to actually make some choices, which they haven’t been doing, and to be greater agents of their own future.

Do readers need to be familiar with The Love Boat to get the book?
You don’t need to know what The Love Boat was in order to appreciate this book, but I hope that it’s a fun Easter egg for people who do know the show, and know that there were always three main storylines that hit a landing point by the time the cruise ended. That said, I don’t necessarily consider this book to have a Love Boat-style happy ending. How the reader leaves each character and reads what happens to them next is largely dependent on the reader’s sense of optimism or pessimism in the world.

You’ve been thinking about this novel for decades. What was your practice when you finally sat down to write?
I’m an early morning writer, usually starting at 5 a.m., but I can only sit at my desk for about three or four hours before I need to leave the house. A big part of my writing process is thinking about scenes or sections that I still have to write, which I do while walking around the city. My favorite loop is the longest, hugging the harbor all way from our home in Otterbein to the waterfront park in Canton.

Last year, we adopted a dog. Buddy gets me out of the house even more, which is good for the brain and the lower back. We also like to hit the pocket parks in our neighborhood, walk up Howard Street, or out to Locust Point, and I always come back to my desk feeling ready to write again.