Tangled Influences

The novelist and former CBC Radio columnist Jen Sookfong Lee once thought her love of pop culture would be a “passing phase, the sort of thing many sad teens use to distract themselves from the realities of their lives.” Now the divorced Gen-Xer from British Columbia concedes that hers is, in fact, “a forever relationship.” With Superfan — comprising eleven essays conceived as “a tribute to the longest commitment of my life”— Lee interweaves autobiographical narration with a thoughtful exploration of the ways mass entertainment shapes us, gives us stories, and fills voids, for better or for worse.

Lee grew up in Vancouver, the granddaughter of a man who “paid the five-hundred-dollar head tax upon his arrival in Canada at age seventeen.” Her grandfather listened to the CBC “all day long”; her father, who came to Vancouver after the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1947...