I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee
I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, written in 2017 by Korean author Baek Sehee and translated into English in 2022 by Anton Hur, is a collection of dialogues and essays about the author’s experiences dealing with depression, anxiety, and dysthymia. It is both a vulnerable opening up to the public’s view and judgement of Sehee’s problems as much as a resoundingly personal journey to the bottom of mental health issues that have kept the author captive for most of her life. Written with painstaking honesty and a desire to help others in the same boat, this book offers unfiltered insight into the everyday life of someone suffering from persistent mild depression.
The book is split up into two parts – the first consisting of transcribed dialogues between the author and a psychiatrist, occasionally intercepted by reiterations of a particular message within these conversations, and the second being made up of a handful of short essays focussing on specific building blocks of the author’s life.
While the dialogues span a 12-week period, there is no specific starting point nor a semblance of a conclusion. We are dropped right in the middle of therapy and are bid adieu without any significant breakthrough or tangible improvement. It is therefore up to the intercepting musings to provide a progressive framework, or at least the illusion of one. As Sehee’s own account proves, life isn’t always linear, and we are not always granted a grand finale. The most imperative thing, however – endorsed by the author’s psychiatrist herself – is that we face our own battles with honesty.
“The important question is not whether this is the right or wrong way to live, but whether it’s healthy for me to live like this.”
Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing the psychiatrist. At first, I found her experiences to be completely detached from my own – she describes in detail her childhood spent in the shadow of her older sister, her constant body image issues, her over-enjoyment of alcohol, and her chronic anxiety around her relationship with others and with herself. While her conversations with her psychiatrist are easily digestible, they aren’t exactly relatable.
However, around the halfway mark the dialogues took on the anxieties and preoccupations of my own life, so much so that I began to process her conversations with her psychiatrist as if they were my own. It was in these surprisingly familiar idiosyncrasies and obvious coincidences that the book took on a life of its own in my hands. In our similarities, the author and I became bound by a silent acknowledgement of our shared humanity, which is how the book delivers on its promise – by showing you an ordinary person’s ordinary struggles, and the ordinary ways in which life, rather than conforming to our glamorised expectations, continues to go on with or without us.
As such, where this book really shines, and where I found myself both understood and consoled by its words, is when it really digs into the ordinariness of life and the miniscule nature of our problems. Not belittling them, but simply readjusting the perspective.
“To me, solitude is my one-bedroom apartment, underneath the blanket that fits me perfectly, beneath the sky I find myself staring at while out on a walk, a feeling of alienation that comes over me in the middle of a party. It’s in my self-criticism, in moments when my hands fidget in my pockets, in the emptiness of my room after I’ve played back my voice on the recorder, when I’ve accidentally met eyes with someone staring off into space in a cafe – when despite my fear of the gaze of others, I find that no one is looking in the first place.”
At its very core and by its end, however, this book and its author is quietly optimistic. While she may not get her Hollywood cookie-cutter happy ending, life is real and raw within these pages, promising not only solidarity, but slivers of hopefulness too.
“I want to be the kind of person who can walk inside the vast darkness and find the one fragment of sunlight I can linger in for a long time.”
As Sehee posits, “it begins with me and ends with everyone” – and part memoir, part self-help book I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki proves that one ordinary human’s struggles and self-doubts, when amplified and laid bare, can become a compass for others struggling as well.
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer, born in Hungary but living in Australia. She has been a reader all her life, and her first short story, 'The Turul' was published in Griffith University's 2018 anthology, Talent Implied. Her writing is often focussed on identity and the effects of immigration on the self. You can find her online at www.fruzsinagal.com or @thenovelconversation.