“I am someone who is completely unique in this world, someone I need to take care of for the rest of my life, and therefore someone I need to help take each step forwards, warmly and patiently, to allow to rest on some days and to encourage on others – I believe that the more I look into this strange being, myself, the more routes I will find to happiness.” – 4/5 stars!

Attention! This book contains: therapy sessions, recordings, transcripts, judgment, anxiety, and of course, a deep love for tteokbokki.

Baek Se-Hee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her–what to call it?–depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgemental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends, adept at performing the calmness, even ease, her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting and overwhelming and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can’t be normal. But if she’s so hopeless, why can she always summon a yen for her favourite street food, the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like? Recording her dialogues with her psychiatrist over a 12-week period, Baek begins to disentangle the feedback loops, knee-jerk reactions, and harmful behaviours that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse.

“I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki” is a very interesting book. I would describe this as a memoir (kind of?), but also as a self-development book because I believe you can take something from this book and apply it to your life.

So in case you don’t know, in this book the author Baek Sehee talks about her struggle with mental health issues. She is constantly anxious, is obsessed with her looks, doubts herself a lot, and she ruthlessly judges other people – in a nutshell, she feels miserable on a daily basis. Although she can hide it well from others, she finds herself overwhelmed and exhausted most of the time. She starts attending therapy with a psychiatrist and she records the sessions – which later become transcripts, and this book is born -, and together they analyze her behavior and thoughts. With professional help, she starts to unveil the root of the problem.

It’s a very intimate and raw book, and very different from everything I have ever read. Like I mentioned, it consists mostly of transcripts of the author’s recorded therapy sessions, but it also includes a few personal thoughts in short chapters – and for this reason, it’s a very easy book to digest. Personally, I wished this wasn’t mostly transcripts and had more original written content.

I liked a lot of things about this book, but what stood out to me was her raw honesty and vulnerability (even when it made her look really bad) and their conversations during the therapy sessions. It was very weird to see someone put in a book every honest thought they had about other people and be very judgemental so openly, but I respect her a lot for doing that. The truth is that a lot of people think and feel the same way (me included), but would never admit to that. The fact that she exposed herself that way to criticism was a very brave thing to do, and I applaud her for it! 

One thing that I was very curious about was to see how mental illness and therapy is dealt with in South Korea. Even though it was cool to see their conversations and how the author started to shift her perspective, I want to address something that may be a little controversial: I think the therapist wasn’t very helpful and was unprofessional at times. I’m obviously not an expert on the subject, but their advice felt very odd at times and there wasn’t any guidance – there were only quick fixes instead of trying to fix the problem from the root. And not only that, but it seemed to me that the therapist couldn’t be completely unbiased due to their culture. There were a lot of comments about looks and drinking that made me realize that she was judging the author during the therapy sessions. Fortunately, the psychiatrist writes a note in the end of the book and she comments on how after they read the entire book they saw how unprofessional they were at times – so it was nice they acknowledged some of it. I can’t imagine this is an easy topic to discuss there, so it was nice to get a better insight with this book.

I also really liked how it kind of feels you’re having your own therapy session. I can understand some of her struggles, so it was nice to see that other people feel the same way. I felt both validated and comforted while reading this book.

Also, as a side note, Namjoon read this book and talked greatly about it. Like Namjoon, I would also recommend this book! I definitely want to read this again in the future, so I’m planning on keeping my physical copy.