Min Jin Lee was born in South Korea in 1968; she and her family immigrated to the United States in 1976. Like the fictional Han family, Lee’s family settled in Queens, New York; she eventually studied at Yale University. Lee then went on to study law at Georgetown University before working as a corporate lawyer in New York City in the 1990s. In 1995, Lee stopped practicing law, partly due to health problems; she hoped to pursue writing as a new career path. These experiences and choices may be reflected in some of the struggles that Lee’s protagonist experiences: Casey grapples with the possibility of law as a career path, torn between a desire for stability and a desire for creative fulfilment.

Between 1995 and 2006, Lee honed her writing abilities, often by studying writers she admired. Though she encountered further health challenges, she was able to research and draft the manuscript that would become her first novel. Lee has commented that her protagonist in Free Food for Millionaires, which she began writing shortly after the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, is named after a Korean American woman named Casey who died in the attack.