By Anna Zhila

So the news came through about Baek Se-hee. And immediately, you think of the title of her book.

I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki.

Even now, it’s a perfect sentence. A perfect, heartbreaking, and darkly funny summary of a particular kind of modern despair. The kind where the existential dread is so vast, so overwhelming, that it can only be held in tension with a craving for something small, and warm, and ordinary. Like a bowl of spicy rice cakes.

She was 35.

Of course, the news reports are full of the usual details. The book was a bestseller in South Korea, then an international one. It was translated, it hit the lists, it was recommended by the right people. But that’s the ‘what’. It’s never the interesting part. The interesting part is the ‘why’.

Why this book? Why this one? What does that even mean, a bestseller about depression?

At first, I thought this was just another entry in the booming ‘sad girl’ genre that publishing has been so keen on lately. But that’s not it, is it? The title tells you it’s not. It’s not poetic or romantic. It’s blunt. It’s awkward. It’s real.

The book itself wasn’t a self-help manual. It wasn’t a guide to wellness with five easy steps to happiness. It wasn’t a triumphant story of overcoming adversity. It was just a transcript of her conversations with her psychiatrist. That’s it.

Think about that for a second. The sheer, terrifying honesty of it. Publishing a book that is, essentially, the raw material of you trying to figure out why you’re broken. No filter, no narrative arc, no neat conclusion where the author learns a valuable lesson and is healed.

It’s that feeling when you confess some small, ugly thought to a friend, a thought you’re sure makes you a monster. And they don’t try to fix you. They just nod and say, ‘God, me too.’ The relief of that. It’s not a solution. It’s a shared space. That’s what this book was. A shared space for millions of people.

I’ve seen publishing chase trends for decades. And for a long time, the trend in this area was all about inspiration. The brave survivor. The recovery narrative. A book like this, so raw, so unpolished, so resolutely un-inspirational… a few years ago, it would have been seen as too niche, too depressing, too much. But it turns out, people were starving for it.

They were starving for someone to admit that even when you change everything you’re supposed to change - lose the weight, get the education, find the partner - you can still feel that inevitable funk rolling in, like bad weather you can’t do anything about.

And the thing is, she didn’t just write one. She wrote a second. I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki. The title alone is a quiet tragedy. It tells you the fight wasn’t over. There was no cure. The struggle was chronic. That, in its own way, is an even braver thing to admit than the initial problem. That this might just be the weather, forever.

Look, she wasn’t some outsider lobbing a grenade into the industry. She worked at a publishing house. She was inside the machine. She must have known the kind of polished, hopeful stories that usually get the green light. And she wrote the opposite.

And then you get to the final detail. The part of the story that just stops you in your tracks.

She donated her organs.

Her heart, her lungs, her liver, her kidneys. Five people are alive today because of her.

A woman who wrote, with unflinching honesty, about her desire to end her own life, ends up physically saving five others. You can’t write that. It’s too much. It’s a paradox so profound that it almost feels like a piece of fiction itself.

The hunger for tteokbokki, it seems, won in the end. A strange, heartbreaking, and beautiful kind of victory.