Facial palsy threatened Yunjin Kim’s career as an actress but she overcame it to win her starring role on the hit U.S. TV show Lost, the actress writes in a soon-to-be-released memoir, according to a news report Monday.

Kim’s book, tentatively titled “Hollywood Story,” details the hardship she underwent after deciding to start anew as an unknown actress in Hollywood after giving up all the privileges she could have enjoyed in South Korea as a top actress, Yonhap news agency reported.

Kim wrote the Korean-language book by herself for about a year and its release is set for June 4, Yonhap said.

Kim, a South Korean who went to high school and college in the U.S., left her mark on South Korean cinema with “Swiri,” a 1998 movie considered the first South Korean blockbuster, where she played a North Korean spy who falls in love with a South Korean intelligence agent.

She was also named the best actress in South Korea’s Blue Dragon Film Awards in 2002 for her role in another drama, “Deep Loves.”

Then she disappeared from South Korean cinema when she decided to go to the U.S., thinking, “It would be impossible unless I do it now,” according to Yonhap.

Life in the U.S. was not easy. In addition to a series of audition failures, she also had to battle facial palsy that could have ended her career as an actress, the report said. Still, she overcame the disease and passed the audition for “Lost,” the report said.

The TV show made her an international star, playing a Korean marooned with her husband and other plane crash survivors on a mysterious tropical island.

“I will love with Hollywood with all my heart,” she wrote in the book, according to Yonhap.

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