I couldn’t help myself.
This was different from anything I usually read.
Candid, intimate, and raw — I almost felt like I was sitting right there, in the room, and silently listening to the dialogues exchanged in this book.
Anyhow, book reviews were always something I had been meaning to do, I figured this would be a good first challenge.
So allow it.
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The book.
I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee.
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Brief summary and background.
This book is marketed as a part memoir and part self-help book — however, I didn’t approach it with the intention of getting any guidance when I picked it up.
I was just curious to read a different style of writing, wanted something new to think about, and thought I’d get a few ideas from it that I could expand on.
It mainly contains transcripts of conversations between the author and her psychiatrist over a 12-week long period of treatment.
These transcripts are stitched together with short paras of diary-esque personal musings and thoughts (almost like tiny personal essays or monologues, if you will) — which usually include the author’s key takeaway from the session.
After the prologue and the first note, the book starts with the author’s first visit to her psychiatrist.
Psychiatrist: So, how can I help you?
Author: Well, I think I’m slightly depressed. Should I go more into detail?
Psychiatrist: I’d appreciate that.
The author is a young woman in her 20s, working in Marketing at a publishing house in South Korea.
She struggles with navigating through modern life, relationships, friendships and finds herself battling with an endlessly swinging pendulum of contradictory feelings — low self-esteem, anxiousness, self-doubt and judgementalism.
She becomes a master at masking her true feelings from others and putting up an act that her lifestyle demands. But, this eventually backfires and becomes a mentally exhausting charade.
She decides to take herself to see a psychiatrist for dysthymia (which is described as a “persistent mild depression”).
As she continues with these weekly sessions, she starts to disentangle, confront, realise and confess a jumbled mess of feelings, woes, worries, harmful behaviours, inner thoughts and distorted perspectives.
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The author’s reasons for writing the book.
She says:
“This book is full of personal and sometimes pathetic details, but I’ve tried to make it more than just a venting of my dark emotions. I explore specific situations in my life, searching for the fundamental causes of my feelings so I can move in a healthier direction”.
She also mentions that she hopes to reach anyone in the world who feels the same as she does, and wants them to understand that they’re not alone. Hoping also, that they might be able to find words of help and consolation from the pages of her book.
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Thoughts on the unignorable title.
This is what initially piqued my interest and made me instantly grab the book.
The title.
I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. (‘Tteokbokki’, by the way, is a popular Korean dish that consists of tender, chewy, cylindrical-shaped rice cakes dipped in a hot and sweet chilli garlic sauce.)
It almost has a tinge of dark humour attached to it (in my perception, at least). And it works very well with the contents of the book.
Just like the extreme, black-or-white, feelings that the author goes through, the title aptly captures that emotion.
One minute she may feel consumed by the emptiness in her heart. And the next minute, she’ll feel the calling of the emptiness in her stomach and would want to indulge in eating her favourite food, tteokbokki.
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What I liked most.
First of all, let me just say:
If I had to objectively review this book, I’d talk about how some people in the world would probably resonate with what the author wrote, how they would feel as if their inner voice has been given words, or how it could act as a beginner’s guide to understanding therapy, blah blah blah. BUT. I couldn’t relate to a lot of things the author experienced, and so, I don’t think it’s right for me to talk about all of that as if I totally get it.
So, I’ll be writing a subjective review, also keeping in line with the main themes of my newsletter-
Here are two interesting and relatable thoughts that I came across in this book and couldn’t get out of my head:
1/
This hit me hard.
It is only now, when I started writing stories, that I’m focusing more on the fulfilling and happy experiences of my life. I subconsciously decided that those were the ones I wanted to write more about. But even then, my writing still has an element of the “negative”, aka the ‘Red Pills’ in Red Pills & Doughnuts.
Earlier though, a big majority of my writing stemmed from feelings of negativity, anger and hatred. I ended up filling three of my grandfather’s thick, musty-smelling, leather-bound journals with my written rants. These pieces of writing, needless to say, were only for my eyes and I kept them to myself.
I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts, and I didn’t really have anyone to share them with — so, I wrote. I wrote about boredom, I wrote about loneliness, I wrote about sexuality, I wrote about people, I wrote about college, I wrote about my family, I wrote about my friends, I wrote about mundane, everyday happenings. Everything. But all of it was born out of some deep-rooted negative feeling.
It felt shitty and spiteful, to write like that. I wanted to write something light and cheery, but I found that I had to desperately and forcibly search for the positives in the depths of my mind, like trying to find that one favourite t-shirt in a hopelessly messy cupboard — whereas the negatives flowed effortlessly, they were always there, waiting to be spilled.
I guess it does come with practice, being able to write positive stuff, all that journaling is probably why I am able to write my stories now.
2/
I agree so damn much.
You may have heard this before, but for the sake of emphasis, I’ll say it again: reality is not black or white, but many different shades of grey. We see it everyday, we hear it everyday, heck, we experience it everyday. Someone you admire does a crappy thing, someone you dislike says a sensible thing. Good and bad. Bad and good. No, we’re all just okay, and that’s okay.
However, this is easier to accept when you’re talking about someone else, you forgive people’s mistakes and even embrace their flaws. But when it comes to your own self, oh no, you’re as critical as critical can be. Whipping and shattering your own confidence at the tiniest mistake, being disgusted by the tiniest flaw.
But that’s where writing helped me. It allowed me to try to understand myself better, by detaching from my person and putting her in a three-dimensional light (or ‘third-person perspective’) — almost like how you can rotate your video game characters in a 360° angle, read their stats, analyse their strengths and weaknesses, view their best moves, as you navigate your way through the game. This might sound like an impersonal and cold approach, but hear me out: you start to realise, there’s not a single character who’s the best or without flaws. In fact, it’s not about the character at all, it’s about how you play.
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Finally.
This book has a ton of mixed reviews (and understandably so, seeing as the reception of such a topic and style of writing would obviously be highly subjective in terms of likeability), which are super intriguing to read.
One thing’s for sure, the author has got mighty guts to publish things that many of us would be ashamed to admit that we think of, even fleetingly. That’s probably why some of her words trigger, annoy or infuriate readers.
But if you want a different sort of read and enjoy books on mental health, you could certainly give this book a try.
It’s a short book. A soothing, yet cathartic read. The tone of voice in the book is chatty and human, which makes it engaging as well. Nothing too thrilling, sometimes repetitive, but not without substance — and that makes it all the more realistic for me — a representative of what life in general and mental health battles look like. Tiny steps forward, a tumble backward, a few more steps forward, a little push backward, another few steps forward, and… well, you get the idea.
There’s always at least one sentence in every book that attaches itself inside our minds, and we find ourselves thinking about it even long after the book is finished.
Maybe you’ll find one, or more, such sentences in this book.
I know I did.
P.S. Like what you read?
An unsolicited book review.
Arya, this review is sooo good! The writing, the analysis! Amazing! <3
Sounds like a unique book. Love me some solid juxtaposition 😆