The essay I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki records the author’s psychiatric sessions, capturing her experience with dysthymia and anxiety. It was published in 2018 and became a bestseller. I had kept it on my reading list for years and only picked it up after hearing of the author’s passing in late 2025.
Before reading, I was struck by how harsh the reviews were. At Kyobo Bookstore, comments like “The title doesn’t match the content,” “It’s depressing all the way through,” and “Hard to relate” dominated. After reading, I could see why.
The book presents the therapy transcripts with almost no polish. There is no theme or moral handed to the reader; you have to find it yourself. The author’s hypersensitivity, depression, and guilt land on you unfiltered. There is no essayistic arc toward insight or resolution. It can feel like listening to someone complain the whole way through.
On literary merit alone, it’s hard to rate the book highly. But it raises one question: what did publishing this book mean to the author?
On a second pass, I saw it differently. By releasing this book, the author exposes the very parts of herself she was most ashamed of: her mental illness, anxiety, vanity, and selfishness—“as is.” For someone who felt shame even about her own thoughts, putting those thoughts into a book could not have been an easy choice.
Autobiographies and essays are usually edited and polished. This one is not. It puts minimally processed therapy notes into the world. The book might have been both an act of exposure of what she most dreaded revealing and, at the same time, a way to satisfy ambition and vanity.
The author on the page is complicated. She wants to be loved while resenting others, wants to die while wanting to live. She feels shame and superiority at once, appears humble yet acts selfishly. Aside from matters of degree, we are not so different.
How generous has our society been to people who reveal their weakness and contradictions so frankly? Perhaps the news of her passing changed how I read this book. Even if it is flawed, I wonder what might have happened had we been a bit more generous. What if we had applauded a patient who exposed her scars?
In some parallel universe, I hope the author was met with grace despite her shortcomings, and that she grew to repay that grace with stronger work.
May she rest in peace.