[1] She is best known for writing Free Food for Millionaires (2007) and Pachinko (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award, and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

[6] After attending the Bronx High School of Science, Lee studied history and was a resident of Trumbull at Yale College in Connecticut.

[5] She quit law due to the extreme working hours and her chronic liver disease, deciding to focus on her writing instead.

[13] In 2018, Lee stated that the works that most influence her as a writer are Middlemarch by George Eliot, Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac, and the Bible.

[27] It was announced in January 2021 that Lee and screenwriter Alan Yang had teamed up to bring Free Food for Millionaires to Netflix as a TV series.

For three consecutive seasons, Lee was an English-language columnist of South Korea's newspaper Chosun Ilbo's "Morning Forum" feature.

In 2012 she wrote a review of Toni Morrison's Home in The Times of London,[61] and also a review in The Times of March Was Made of Yarn, edited by David Karashima and Elmer Luke, a collection of essays, stories, poems and manga made by Japanese artists and citizens in the wake of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

[62] She also wrote The Times reviews of Cynthia Ozick's Foreign Bodies[63] and Jodi Picoult's Wonder Woman: Love and Murder.

[64] In 2018, Lee wrote a The New York Review of Books for Hang Kang's Human Acts, the essay is titled Korean Souls.

In her interview with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lee said part of her intention with her writing is to create a sense of directed thinking out of chaos and develop some form of a unified order.

[68] Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) released a documentary in August 2023 on Lee that covered biographical details and the inspiration for Pachinko.

Lee also published a piece in the New York Times Magazine entitled "Low Tide", about her observations of the survivors of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

[73] She has also written a piece for the Barnes & Noble review entitled Sex, Debt, and Revenge: Balzac’s Cousin Bette.

[74] Her interviews and essays have also been profiled in online periodicals such as Chekhov's Mistress ("My Other Village: Middlemarch by George Eliot"),[75] Moleskinerie ("Pay Yourself First"),[76] and ABC News ("Biblical Illiteracy or Reading the Bestseller").

[78][79] When Lee was a Fiction Fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she gave the 2018–2019 Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in the Arts and Humanities.