![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() We eventually learn about the event that triggered Jiyoung’s descent into madness. Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.” No matter how you looked at it, it wasn’t a joke or prank. Some of them were living, others were dead, all of them women she knew. As her psychiatrist later puts it: “Jiyoung became different people from time to time. ![]() Another day she claims to be a schoolmate who died in childbirth the previous year. One day she wakes up not as herself but, to her husband’s horror and confusion, as her mother - speaking and acting just as her mother would. The novel begins with Jiyoung having a dissociative episode. Upon its publication in South Korea in 2016, the book, which sold more than a million copies, had an “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” effect, propelling a feminist wave. This novel is about the banality of the evil that is systemic misogyny. But then, my experiences are ordinary, as ordinary as the everyday horrors suffered by the book’s protagonist, Jiyoung. The story of a young stay-at-home mother driven to a psychotic break, it laid bare my own Korean childhood - and, let’s face it, my Western adulthood too - forcing me to confront traumatic experiences that I’d tried to chalk up as nothing out of the ordinary. I hated reading “Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982,” the debut novel by Cho Nam-Joo, which is the opposite of saying that I hated the book itself. ![]()
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