When her husband books a session with a psychiatrist, she agrees to go. Her age and her sex should have prohibited this. She speaks out against her father-in-law during a family dinner. She adopts the persona of a women who died a year before. The novel begins in the Autumn of 2015 when Kim Jiyoung’s behaviour appears to be becoming irrational. In Korean, the protagonists name is akin to ‘Jane Doe’ in Western culture.

Nam-Joo’s treatment is not only a personal account – she has admitted that much of the inspiration for the story rests on her personal experiences – but sociological. Nam-Joo achieves this with factual digressions in the middle of Kim Jiyoung’s personal account, which are further supported by footnotes that cite sources. This is not a complaining memoir of a woman in South Korea: rather, it represents the ingrained structural and social barriers against South Korean women. Nam-Joo provides factual context to many scenes within the story. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is more than just a novel with certain themes. As Jones’s downfall became a story about interrogating and undermining abusive patriarchal power, Nam-Joo’s novel self-consciously exists within that paradigm, too. And while some men are beginning to understand there is an issue of inequality, many still don’t understand the impact of their own innate assumptions and prejudices.

One senses from the last chapter of the novel, which acts as a coda, that the author consciously understands that her story is part of an emerging feminist push-back in South Korea. It's the first Korean novel to break one million sales and it has been translated into eighteen languages. KKim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is about misogyny, the roles allocated women and the culture of sexism in South Korean society.

Kim ji young book review