She spoke about her desire to breathe life into the stories of famine and starvation through the voices of ordinary North Koreans. As an American, her access to the reclusive realm was limited, so she relied on the accounts of people who had left North Korea to craft her story. She fielded questions about the difficulty of interviewing defectors, who are outliers by definition, to write about ordinary lives. In fact, many of her subjects are older women who may be loyalists, but they leave to seek work in China with the intention of returning to North Korea. Demick believes that China has a unique opportunity to open up the North Korean economy, but there are, of course, a multitude of hurdles to reunification. She is cautiously optimistic about the recent leadership change as people become more hopeful and gradually more aware of the world outside their borders.