Baek Se-hee
Bloomsbury
2023
194
Paperback
Memoir
Xmas Gift
Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her - what to call it? - depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgmental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends, performing the calmness her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can't be normal. But if she's so hopeless, why can she always summon a yen for her favorite street food: the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like?
Recording her dialogues with her psychiatrist over a twelve-week period, and expanding on each session with her own reflective micro-essays, Baek begins to disentangle the feedback loops, knee-jerk reactions, and harmful behaviors that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse. Part memoir, part self-help book, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a book to keep close and to reach for in times of darkness. It will appeal to anyone who has ever felt alone or unjustified in their everyday despair.
I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a hard book to review because it is such a personal story from the author. It must have taken courage to share such an intimate experience with the public, and that in itself is worthy of praise. I could identify with the author's experiences to some extent, but at the same time, I found the book fairly repetitive, the same issues reviewed in every session without any real conclusions or closure. Some of the therapist's comments and advice, too, I found rather unhelpful, if not outright inappropriate, which was interesting and made me wonder if it was just this therapist or if there is a big divide between how therapy is conducted in Korea compared with other countries. Given all this, calling this work a self-help book is a bit of a stretch; memoir would be the more fitting genre. This book is not going to help anyone deal with similar issues, but perhaps its value is simply in highlighting them, as awareness would be the first step towards getting help. In Korea, mental health remains more of a taboo topic than it is in the West, so, on that front, this was probably quite an explosive publication when it first appeared on shelves there. In the end I will give this book 3 stars. It could be useful for younger people, to help them realise help is out there if they look for it, and for them to see experiences that reflect what they are going through, but it is not a riveting read and was far less interesting for me personally than I had expected it to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment