No one would envy Baek Sehee’s mental health issues. This is the 34-year-old South Korean writer’s second memoir recounting her treatment for dysthymia, or persistent depressive disorder. The first was called I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. In other words, she feels a bit sad nearly all the time. It is a sadness that sometimes stops her from wanting to live, but that doesn’t affect her appetite for tteokbokki (rice cakes in spicy sauce).
You might, however, be a tiny bit jealous of her timing. Her first book was published in South Korea in 2018 and became a bestseller. The English translation came out in 2022, when, thanks to Covid and lockdown, almost everyone was feeling a bit sad at least some of the time. It made Baek a phenomenon. Her debut sold 100,000 copies in English. The sequel was inevitable.
And if you are an author, you could definitely covet her marketing. For one thing, there’s that title ― enticingly exotic to western Western eyes (would South Korean readers be similarly beguiled by a British book called I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Chips and Curry Sauce?) and charmingly self-deprecating. Then there’s the cover: an illustration of a winsome woman, toying with her tteokbokki, against a tasteful pastel background.
Actually, that’s covers, plural. I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is available in three colourways to match your interior decor, all equally instagrammable. (The sequel, so far, comes in only one look, but the publisher Bloomsbury must surely be planning to repeat the trick.) It is the kind of book that was missed by the literary pages, but was piled high in the Gen Z emporium Urban Outfitters.
It seems likely that Baek means different things in different markets. Of the 38 countries that make up the wealthy Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, South Korea has the highest suicide rate. In 2017 one in four South Koreans was suffering from mental illness, but only one in ten was receiving treatment. In an intensely competitive society (think Squid Game) shaped by a Confucian belief in self-discipline, mental health is a taboo subject.
That arguably makes Baek’s book radical in her mother tongue. She not only admits to her depression, she also transcribes her therapy sessions, with seemingly little attempt to make herself appear insightful or interesting. (Here is a typically riveting exchange. Psychiatrist: “Do you often suffer privately in your own thoughts?” Baek: “Yes. I get all stewed up in my own negative emotions and then feel the urge to break away from them.”)
Her struggles can sound petty — sometimes so petty that it is hard to imagine discussing them with a psychiatrist. In I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki, she worries about getting fat (“Everyone I know says I’ve gained weight, which makes me hate going out and meeting people”) and feels stressed about her job at a publishing house (a situation exacerbated by the fact that her first book is about to come out on a rival press).
Some of her angst is near-comical. When she goes to an astrologer with her partner and her friend, she becomes upset because the fortune teller declares her the least smart. (Her psychiatrist talks her out of her doom spiral by asking her whether three triplets would all be identically intelligent.) She gets depressed about her crush on a pop star when she realises “this love was the kind that could never come true”.
Yet her misery is obviously profound, even more so in Still than in its predecessor. In the new volume she self-harms and she scopes out places to kill herself rather than merely daydreaming about death. (Another cultural difference: these things are described with shocking plainness in Anton Hur’s translation, as is her calorie intake and weight. Apparently, the trigger warning has failed to cross the Pacific.)
Baek’s volumes are concise and spend less time excavating her past than students of therapy might expect. Her father was violent to Baek and her mother and sisters, but this trauma seems to carry no more weight than Baek’s memories of being rejected by her romantic interests or teased for being chubby at school.
Western readers have been raised on stronger stuff. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar remains a teenage girl classic, 60 years after its publication, with its lurid descriptions of the heroine’s overdose and electroconvulsive therapy. Or there is its 1990s inheritor, Girl, Interrupted, a memoir of Susanna Kaysen’s stay in a psychiatric hospital. More recently, the sad girlies have been reading Sally Rooney, whose heroines use sexual masochism to mitigate the stresses of late-stage capitalism.
Against that lineage, Baek loses her bite. I Want to Die, parts one and two, are presented and packaged as lifestyle accessories. Stripped of their context and dressed up for social media, they turn psychological malady into a commodity. They are perfectly calibrated to appeal to young women who yearn to have their low-level discontent validated, who are unsatisfied in their jobs, insecure in their relationships, anxious about their looks.
They offer the solace of understanding. “I love and cherish your story. And I am your friend,” Baek writes in the introduction, suggesting that a woman once driven to despair by being a fan is now navigating having fans of her own. The books are also aspirational. Baek has spun her sadness into gold, which is every frustrated creative’s ultimate dream.
But should they be? Writing a book about her mental health doesn’t seem to have made Baek any better. Based on the second volume, if anything, it has left her feeling worse. Achieving success as a mental health influencer turns getting better into professional failure. It’s hard to imagine a literary future for Baek that doesn’t consist of wanting to die and eating tteokbokki.