Reviews with content warning for Toxic friendship - I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

I really liked this book, and this is coming from someone who primarily reads fantasy.

This is a recording of a korean woman’s therapy sessions, where she explores different issues she is facing internally and externally. A lot of the issues she discusses with her therapist are feelings that are common but can feel like they single you out as different from others. Examples are loneliness and isolation, over analyzing relationships, and finding things you dislike about yourself while failing to change them — and then further beating yourself up over them.

The format in which this is written makes it much easier to absorb, since sometimes it can be dry content (at least for someone like me from my reading habits). The author writes about her therapy sessions in a chat style format where it shows the dialogue of her and her therapist next to the name of whoever is speaking. This absolutely helped to break up the content when trying to read about it.

Reading this book helped me to understand that some of what I feel is not that different from what a lot of others feel. It is very easy to feel like you are alone in your thoughts, especially given the last 3 years since 2020 to 2023. This book was a joy to read, and was not at all depressing considering that the entire topic of discussion is experiencing and coping with constant mild depression. On the contrary, I found this to be a very light and delightful read despite the focus on dysthymia.

I thoroughly recommend this book no matter how not-depressed of a person you are. Everyone has bad feelings, which are part of what makes us human, and this book celebrates the ability to analyze them and allow yourself to feel the shittiness.

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dark informative reflective fast-paced

3.0

I was never really bothered about reading this book, but then it came in as a new book for my library and didn't have a queue of holds, so I took my chance and read it. Because of my previous apathy for the book, I didn't really go into this with any expectations, and I did come out of this book having an appreciation for the authors experience, as well as prompting my own self-reflection. I also do enjoy translated fiction, especially when written by women. This did give a good insight into the impact of Korean society on women's mental health.

I think this was a really easy-to-read memoir and it was very fast paced, which concerned me in areas that it was so quick to get through, despite the heavy subject matter. I appreciated that each chapter was not just dialogue between the psychiatrist and the author and was broken up with an introduction and an analysis of the conversation afterwards.

Despite this though, I did also feel the memoir to be quite average. Not that this book is supposed to be astounding, groundbreaking, or full of fancy prose. However, if it hadn't been so easy to read, I would have just DNF'ed. It also just felt very samey to a lot of the mental health memoirs and fiction that is already out there. There is supposed to be a second book coming out next year, but I feel like this is better as a stand-alone, and it certainly didn't grip me enough to want to read the second one.

Overall, an average memoir, but I would suggest it as a good read for those new to translated fiction with regards to Korean society and mental health.

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