“The human heart, even when it wants to die, quite often wants at the same time to eat some tteokbokki, too,” goes the book’s most famous line.
Born in 1990, Baek Se-hee took creative writing in university and worked for five years at a publishing house, according to her short biography on Bloomsbury Publishing, which produced the English version of her 2018 memoir.
For a decade she received treatment for dysthymia, a mild but long-lasting type of depression, which formed the basis of her bestseller, said her Bloomsbury bio.
A sequel, I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki, was published in Korean in 2019. Its English translation was published in 2024.
A list of organisations in the UK offering support and information with some of the issues in this story is available at BBC Action Line. If you are outside of the UK, you can visit the Befrienders website., external