For anyone who read Baek Se-hee’s uniquely revealing works of autobiography, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, and its sequel (which merely inserted a “still” into the original title), the news of her tragic and untimely death cannot have been a complete shock. Baek’s books don’t offer any cheap or easy answers to the pain and struggle of living with severe depression.
Nor, to the surprise of many readers, did her books dwell on the pleasures of eating tteokbokki — chewy and spicy rice cakes — or any other Korean dishes. As the BBC’s Julie Yoonnyung Lee put it in her recent appreciation of Baek, many readers picked up the book “wondering just how much you must love tteokbokki to write an entire book about it,” only to find that tteokbokki is barely mentioned. Nonetheless, Baek left few readers disappointed, as her honesty about her struggles with existence was so bracing and moving.
The book’s title promises a mix of good food and existential despair. What the pages actually offer is an account of an ongoing conversation – the one between Baek and her psychiatrist. They are almost entirely made up of transcripts of their sessions together. Thus I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki and its sequel offer two paradoxes: they are food books that barely appreciate food, and memoirs of profound loneliness that document an example of compassionate human connection.
Many readers related to Baek’s persistent depression, and some were inspired to seek therapy themselves. In her native Korea, her frank discussion of mental health seemed revolutionary. But countless other readers (her books sold millions of copies, and were translated into 25 languages) found insights and inspiration in Baek’s words — readers who related to her feelings of isolation and disconnection in our tech-saturated culture. The writer Claire Bushey has described the general mood: lonely as “a half carafe of wine…lonely as the body is hungry three times a day, hollowed again and again by an ache that does not ease except with the sustenance of connection.” Sustenance and human connection — these were Baek’s central themes and anxieties. Two of the most important lessons we can glean from Baek’s books are the value of reconfiguring our relationship to, and the relationship between, food and conversation.
Elusive ease
For Baek, food was more often a source of silent anguish than convivial pleasure — she described bingeing and dieting and her related self-disgust. And her conversations with her therapist — which were consistently thoughtful, tender and respectful — contrasted to most of the other conversations in her life. Outside the therapist’s office, Baek left most social interactions feeling neglected, manipulated or misunderstood — with the notable exception of the few people she loved and trusted, whom she worried she often took for granted or even bullied.
Baek once explained, “I was thinking of planning my own death, but I got hungry and ate tteokbokki.” That anecdote gave her books their titles, but in therapy Baek was more likely to cite moments of laughter, shared with a friend or a coworker, as evidence that there was some light amidst her darkness. She cherished these times when human connection became, even for a few seconds, less fraught and anxious. A feeling of ease and comfort in human connection was Baek’s dearest wish. She wanted “to love and be loved. Without suspicion, and with ease. That’s it.”
Human connection, especially with comfort and ease, is an elusive experience today. Sociologists report widespread anxiety regarding relationships, a crisis of trust and an avoidance of conversation. There is a fear of being fully present, of being engaged in something unpredictable, something that might tumble toward strong feelings, misunderstandings or unintended revelations. There is a preference for texting, where we have more control over what we express. Open conversation feels too risky. And yet, as we all sense, conversation — with other people rather than chat-bots — is central to human flourishing.
So we should preserve and revere those places where meaningful conversation is cultivated. The therapist’s office is one. The lure of tteokbokki hints at another: restaurants and other food spots. The two spaces share qualities that make them especially suited to cultivating meaningful conversation.
A conversational ambience
Over the course of Baek’s books, one can see how effectively her unnamed therapist was able to put her at ease. In doing so they accomplished what the therapist/theorist Christopher Bollas described as creating a “special ambience” in which the environment “is experienced as a maternal presence, an empathic response.” The resulting “idiom of care,” Bollas wrote, sets the stage for transformative conversation.
Now consider the restaurant. We also seek a special ambience there. The promise of nourishment and attention to our needs creates its own idiom of care. The restaurants we love most and return to have a knack for making us comfortable and setting us at ease — sensations that are at the essence of hospitality and also the basis for the best sort of conversation.
This can happen even at chain restaurants, with their deep familiarity, suggests the novelist Casey McQuiston. “You step into these spaces and something wraps around you and holds you close.” Then conversation can unfold — especially because eating out is an occasion where we are likely to put down our phones and talk to our companions. The New York Times critic Pete Wells suggests restaurants are “one of the few places left where our experiences were completely human.” We tap into some deep sapien tradition of gathering around food, which can lend conversation a special quality. As Roland Barthes noted, “food has a constant tendency to transform itself into a situation.”
The resulting effect on conversation has always been central to the restaurant. In 1838 a visitor to Paris noted the restaurants attracting “throngs” that were “differing in ten thousand points, and resembling in two;—they are all hungry and they are all conversational.” Two centuries later, we are still hungry. We crave nourishment, and our options for getting it have proliferated spectacularly. It offers us a valuable opportunity to allow ourselves to remember what it is to be conversational.
Baek needed the reminder more than most. Near the end of her second book, she offered one of her few earnest appreciations of food. She had gone to a restaurant. “I really like gnocchi. It tends to be a bit pricey, but I never regret paying for good food and a good restaurant.” One of the things that gave Baek the confidence to write her book was a restaurant conversation she had with a follower of her blog, who had been moved by Baek’s words and reached out to invite her to lunch. By contrast, Baek regretted many of her experiences at bars, indulging in Korean after-work drinking culture. She sometimes drank too much and regretted what she said. Once, when she had gotten “assertive and crazy” at a bar, a man slapped her face. That was a transformative moment — after which she was more “shy and careful” in conversation.
Entanglement and maternal presence
Baek had no similar traumatic experiences at a restaurant, nor anything like it in the therapist’s office, where the idiom of care allowed for a slower sort of transformation. One of the obstacles to transformation that Baek and her therapist encountered was the trauma in Baek’s own foundational idiom of care. Her father hit Baek, her mother and her sister. Her mother expressed disappointment that Baek had inherited her meekness, and that she was afflicted with eczema. Even her sister’s love felt conditional — especially on staying slim. It was territory Baek adroitly avoided in therapy. The therapist’s final words in the first book are “The next time we meet, I hope you tell me more about your older sister and parents, which we keep putting off talking about.” “I will,” Baek promised. But for the most part, she didn’t — at least not in the transcripts she included in the books.
But those formative insecurities did seep their way into the conversation. Though Baek rarely discusses her family, she is aware of her persistent need for a kind of maternal presence. She likes to be alone, she explains, “but only under one condition: I must have someone who loves me. Someone must want to know how I am every day for me to be happy alone.” Once when she was single, she had a “devastating moment” when she “realised that no one was looking out for me or loving me. I still think about that moment from time to time.” Her therapist, ungendered in the books, offers the maternal presence that lends safety to Baek’s self-exploration.
That self-exploration revealed to Baek that her longing for this sort of care might be undermining her relationships. She noticed that “my heart feels that if the other person seems very independent of me — as in, they don’t seem to be deeply affected or touched by my every word…there’s something wrong with me.” One of her goals was to convince “her heart” that “a strong relationship and an entangled one are different things,…that a good relationship is two people with a clear sense of individuality….” Entanglement, of course, is the hallmark of the maternal relationship. Even the therapist’s office, with its singular focus on the patient’s well-being, recreates it. So if Baek wanted a “strong” relationship — the sort that allows for some distance — both she and her therapist knew that the answer lay in the connections she crafted outside the therapist’s office.
Cultivating distance
Baek’s affection for restaurants and cuisine indicate a promising solution. A restaurant engages and assuages the need for nourishing care. The inner child placated, the adult self can find their way to a less entangled connection through conversation across the table. The political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote of how a table can “relate and separate” us at the same time. Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant considered the need to “create affective distance in order to make being in relation bearable, good, possible…” and of finding spaces for relationality that allow for “elbow room, breathing space, and patience.” The restaurant table is well suited to these requirements, especially because there needs to be space for the dishes, and time to eat them.
Over the course of the two books, Baek attempts to learn how to experience connection that allows for some distance, even in her relationship with herself and her own feelings. Initially she found transcribing her words from her therapy sessions to be unbearable. It filled her with self pity. By the end of the second book, she could listen to herself and think “how tedious she is. I could keep her at a distance, which was good.” After her first book was published, she fought off despair about negative comments by talking to herself. “I didn’t just imagine the conversation in my head; I actually had a talk with myself…I felt much calmer after having this ping-pong game of a dialogue. Not fake calm but really calm, too.”
Conversations with others, however, remained a struggle. She was tortured by obsessive thoughts over things people said to her. She ended one promising friendship over a simple disagreement about a book. She tried to be less hostile and controlling of her partner, but progress came slowly. On one occasion, Baek was initially proud of the way she handled a contentious interview with a journalist (“I thought my book wouldn’t be properly understood by a middle aged man. And I was right”). But afterward a friend offers a darker view of the exchange — suggesting the journalist will savage Baek all the more for having stood up for herself. Baek finds herself entangled in those fears and overwhelmed.
Or was it about the tteokbokki?
The most notable exceptions to Baek’s struggles with conversation seem to have happened at restaurants — perhaps over tteokbokki. She knew those were the kinds of conversations she needed in order to flourish. Therapy was a revelation to her, but only went so far. “I had thought I only needed one person to share things with, but I was wrong.” And she knew that in sharing with others, she had to learn to tolerate distance.
To learn about and imagine the emotions that I don’t understand or immediately empathize with…misunderstanding each other, sharing with each other, growing further apart from each other, all these things help us live out our present moment. I wonder if this is our way of comforting ourselves through the darkness that is our world.
It is tragic that, in one of those present moments, Baek could find no comfort, and seems to have decided the darkness was too much. Her true legacy will not be that moment, but will be her books. She hoped to console readers who also felt isolation and despair, and to inspire them to seek connection. And the hope to be found in her books speaks all the louder for having confronted the pull of darkness and the ache of loneliness.
Many readers came to Baek’s books to read about her love of tteokbokki, and got something stranger — more distant and harder to understand. That is the nature of engaging other people. We honor Baek’s legacy when we don’t avoid it — especially when we appreciate a good restaurant meal, and the conversation that crosses the food-laden table. Despite her struggles with food and conversation, hunger and laughter were what most reminded Baek that she had a taste for life.
