Kim Jiyoung starts on a similar premise to Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Jiyoung has quit her job to take care of a newborn, and the pressures and isolation of early motherhood are unravelling her - she speaks to her husband in the voices of other women - her mother, a dead friend - with no recollection or awareness, as if possessed. After she behaves inappropriately at her husband’s family gathering, chastising them in the voice of her mother, he sends her into therapy where she begins to dissect her life. The book then turns into a narrative of Kim Jiyoung from birth to motherhood, riddled with enough misogyny to make anyone crazy. The examples are numerous (and footnoted, with academic papers on gender inequality in Korea referenced) - her brother receives the lion share of their parents’ affections and investments, and unlike his sisters is never expected to help out in the house; the arrival of her period is treated with a quiet joy amongst her mother and elder sister, but also treated as a hidden shame - she feels she has done something wrong when her pad overflows; a male classmate menacingly follows her home insisting she’d been flirting with him, after which her father lectures her for the length of her skirt; she struggles to find a job after university because the best jobs either explicitly ask for or implicitly prefer male graduates; at work, she gets sidelined and is not resourced on good projects because the company prefers to invest in employees who will be there for the long haul (i.e. men who won’t take maternity leave); her loving husband speaks of mutual sacrifice when his parents pressure them into having a child, shaming Jiyoung for her perceived infertility, yet the sacrifice is minimally his and mostly hers. It is an accurately told, exhausting and infuriating collection of wrongs over a woman’s life. I would have preferred the book to spend more time on Jiyoung’s bouts of madness - women made sick and crazy by misogyny is a long-standing phenomenon (e.g. witchcraft) of which Jiyoung’s post-natal depression is a part, and it felt like a dropped opportunity for a fuller book.

“... you may not get to see all of it, but I want you to know: it’s a wide world out there.” Whilst this is a novel (as far as I’m aware), I feel it could probably be autobiographical for many Korean women - I (probably a little naively) was shocked to hear about how they are treated in comparison to men. A quick read (less than 200 pages), and pretty different from my normal reads - but what is netgalley for, if not to try new things? I enjoyed this more than I originally thought I would