Baek Sehee and Anton Hur on mental health, collaboration and finding perspective.

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NADIA SAEED: Hi Sehee, Hi Anton – thank you for speaking with me! I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki – part self-help book, part memoir – is a beautiful exploration of the complexities of mental health. I was hooked by your candour, by the moments of dark humour, and by the way the transcript style gives intimate insight into the therapy sessions. Sehee, what inspired you to turn your experience of the vulnerable space of therapy into a book?

BAEK SEHEE: The concept of dysthymia had been so unfamiliar to me. I’d never heard of it before my therapy sessions. I had a strong feeling this should be my story to tell, something that would benefit others who were unsure whether they were depressed or not. I started posting my therapy notes in a blog, and someone left a long comment saying that their symptoms were identical to mine and that it was a relief to know there was another person in the world who was going through what they were. When they said it was like a light was shining into the darkness of their life, I was so surprised; all I’d done was be honest in public, but here was someone comforted by that. And writing a book was a bucket-list item for me. I was having trouble finding the right theme, but I realised something I could write about with some authority was depression. I wrote this book because I wanted to meet people who were like me, because I thought it might help others, and because writing a book was on my bucket list.

NS: Anton, I remember you saying – during your conversation with Ellah Wakatama and the other translators shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize – that, when you translate, ‘I just get very, very quiet, and I listen very, very carefully, and my subconscious pushes it up into the conscious.’ How did this work, after sitting with Sehee’s thoughts and experiences?

ANTON HUR: Sehee is so candid and so honest on the page that it was very easy to imagine her in the room with me as she talked, to imagine her voice speaking English words to me as I wrote down what she was saying. There were a few artefacts of transcription but not too many puzzling points in the writing. Once you have the voice down, you know how that voice would say something, and translation just becomes a very pleasant kind of secretarial work where you write down what the voice inside your head is saying.

NS: As a reader, I felt myself becoming more introspective as the book progresses, and a sense of self-awareness develops; I don’t think anyone who reads it could come away and not relate to at least one thing you felt. In the UK, the idea of mental health as a spectrum rather than a binary has become more prevalent. How do you think attitudes to mental health have changed since the original publication in South Korea?

BS: I wouldn’t dare to definitively claim there have been changes. But, just from my personal perception, I think there have been more “confessional essays” that discuss personal experiences relating to mental health – not just on my issue, but with panic attacks, adult ADHD, or bipolar disorder – and it makes me glad that we are at least talking about it more. A psychiatrist I was on a panel with on a TV show told me that many first-time patients had said to them, ‘I read this book and it gave me the courage to get help’. I think psychiatry and ideas about mental health have become more mainstream and accessible.

NS: Throughout the book, there are quick asides that disrupt the transcripts. In chapter nine, when you’re speaking about the pressures and anxieties around being beautiful, you say ‘wow, this is painful for me to write. I really sound like a crazy person here’ – which made me think about a comment from your psychiatrist, ‘writing can be a way of regarding yourself three-dimensionally.’ The moments of reflection between the sessions do feel like you’re making room for this. After coming through the writing process, do you feel this statement holds true?

BS: Yes. My thoughts are so stuck to my perception that it’s difficult to see myself objectively. But if you write about yourself, you can read about yourself. It’s almost like reading someone else’s thoughts. How shall I put this – it’s not totally the same thing, but I guess it’s like seeing photos or videos that someone else has taken of me. It’s a little foreign, a little unfamiliar, and I see things about myself I hadn’t been aware of. That’s what it feels like to write about myself. My perspective changes as time goes on. I might think, Wow, this was so extreme, why did I think that? or That’s not a bad idea. Writing can help you see yourself from different angles, which I agree can be a way of regarding yourself three-dimensionally.

NS: Sticking with changing perspectives – which is an overarching theme in the book – how did working together on the translation change how you viewed the original text? Anton – what were the knottiest things to translate?

AH:  Something I am always at pains to clarify when I discuss this book is that, while it may look like very little writing went into its creation, even the transcripts are more than just transcripts, because quite a lot of writing and thinking went into them, and that feeling of effortlessness in the text is very much thanks to Sehee’s considerable talent as a writer. I don’t really have knotty issues when it comes to translating good writing; it’s with bad writers that I’m constantly having to talk to whoever produced the text. I had no knotty issues at all with this book, it slipped into English like a fish meeting water.

NS: In chapter three, I particularly related to the idea of thinking about how your younger and older selves would feel about where you were, and where you were going. Sehee – what would your younger self think of this book?

BS: My younger self would be astonished! I was so small, weak, a coward (not that I’ve totally moved on from being any of those things), and she would really be amazed that I wrote such a book and sent it out into the world. Maybe she would even think it was cool. I’ve never thought of myself as cool, but thinking back to my younger mind makes me think I would use the word here. It feels great!

Baek Sehee was born in 1990 and studied creative writing before working at a publishing house. For ten years, she received psychiatric treatment for dysthymia (persistent mild depression), which became the subject of I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki. Her favourite food is tteokbokki and she lives with her rescue dog Jaram.

Anton Hur was born in Stockholm and currently resides in Seoul. A graduate of the Korean University College of Law and Seoul National University Graduate School, he works as a writer and translator and has won PEN translation grants transatlantically and was double-longlisted and shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. He resides in Seoul.

I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee, translated by Anton Hur, is published by Bloomsbury and is out now in paperback (£9.99). The edition comes in three different colours.

Interview by Nadia Saeed, Co-editor.

Photo credit: Hanjungku Studio and Anton Hur.

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