I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki records Baek Sehee’s conversations with her psychiatrist alongside her own reflections she has whilst being depressed back out in the world.

The book holds itself in this liminal state. A wanting of attention while fearing intimacy, feeling fraudulent in one’s unhappiness, envying apparently uncomplicated people, drinking too much, worrying about appearance, medication, work, boredom, friendship, self-esteem. The title gets at its entire operating principle — despair can coexist perfectly well with appetite, errands, jokes and the desire for dinner.

The therapy transcripts can be disarmingly mundane, occasionally uncomfortable, and sometimes funny; precisely what makes them useful is their refusal to turn treatment into a sequence of profound breakthroughs. A very readable book about ambivalence, self-surveillance and the strange distance between knowing why you behave a certain way and actually being able to stop.

Edition: Bloomsbury, 2022. English-language paperback edition, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur. First published in Korean in 2018; first published in Great Britain in 2022.