This is not exactly memoir, but from all of my research I believe it is autofiction--though I have never found it called that.

This book is about the lives of those who were working in Seoul in the 1970s/80s as Korea rocketed into a technological/manufacturing world power. TVs, stereos, and other consumer goods were made in large factories, staffed by undereducated workers from the countryside, who struggled to find proper housing and to afford proper food. The main character seems to be based on herself.

This book is certainly interesting, covering some of the history of Korea's success that I certainly wasn't aware of--yet it also fits in well with the Korean/Korean American literature I have read over the last couple of year.

It is hard to read though--I listened, and it was not an easy listen. The main characters do not have names (cousin, eldest brother, third brother, etc)--only co-workers and teachers have names. It is also told nearly entirely in the first person present tense. The author also repeats phrases, over and over ("I, 16 years old"). I think this is to emphasize to the reader--and possibly to herself--just how young they all were.

Shin follows her protagonist for about 4 years--and then a later year. At the age of 16 she is sent from her rural village to Seoul with her 3-years-older female cousin. They are to live with her eldest brother and be factory girls. Eldest brother is trying to work and attend school, and then has to do his compulsory military service. It is about 1979. They all live in 1 room in a 37-room boarding house, with a shared bathroom and their own kerosene stove. The protagonist and her cousin work on a stereo assembly line. There is a union forming, and the protagonist is in over her head--she does not know what is going on. She just wants to be a writer. The union and factory agree to allow night school (high school) for a select number of students, and both girls get in. Soon her third brother joins them in their cramped room. Money is a struggle, they are constantly jockeying for more hours and cheaper food. The later year she in her early 30s, is a writer, and is clearly traumatized by how she lived ages 16-20, and the things she saw and experienced. ( )

This was an interesting read. The book is fiction, but highly autobiographical, as the narrator reminds us several times. It tells the story of a young woman who leaves rural Korea to attend school in Seoul. The only way to achieve this is through a program that allows factory workers to attend school at night, so she works on an assembly line. She lives in a single room with two of her brothers and a female cousin, who is working and attending night school as well. Through the story, we watch the young woman struggle to find her way. She wants to be a writer, which means attending college, but is unsure she can afford it; and worries she cannot work full time and achieve the academic standard required for college. She is also learning how the world works (she is 16 when she moves to Seoul). We see, through her eyes, the development of unionization, political activism, state crack-downs on dissidents. We see her forming friendships with people her family don't approve of. As the story moves between her teen-aged years and her life as a successful author in her early 30s, we watch her struggle to come to grips with her past. My one complaint is that the transitions between the two time periods are not smooth. But still, this is a writer with something to say and the book provides a glimpse into life in Korea during 1970s. ( )

The Girl Who Wrote Lonliness by Kyung-Sook Shin, translated by Ha-Yun Jung It's not very often that a work of fiction gets to me as much as this one did. It was beautiful and haunting and familiar and foreign all at the same time.
The book is written as a sort of memoir. The protagonist reminds the reader several times that it is both fiction and memoir. She goes travels between the present and the past and doesn't always let us know and that can be confusing at times. It lends to the feeling that the protagonist is haunted by her past, that she can so easily drift into memories and stop seeing the world as it is around her in that moment. I loved that it gave a bigger picture of the protagonist as a person, that these events of her past still had a hold of her, but that she was working to let them go.
There is something very powerful about taking deliberate time to work through what haunts us, to let go of the shame we feel in our past, to stop letting it hurt us.
I'll be honest, I listened to the audiobook, which was 13 hours long and read by Emily Woo Zeller. Zeller is amazing, giving the book a full performance, complete with the reverie that really let me know when she was drifting between times. Fortunately, having listened instead of read the book, I could hear the pronunciations of the beautiful names that I would have otherwise just butchered.
As far as the feminist side of things go, this is definitely one of those books that I picked it solely because of Women In Translation month and would not have found any other way. It's proof that setting out to find diverse books to read on purpose allows me to find books that would not have otherwise been in my path and to appreciate stories that I would not otherwise have the opportunity to hear/read. It lets me step into places and history that I was never aware of, such as a sweatshop in Korea during the last century. In that same vein, it's great to read the stories of ordinary women. I know we get caught up in the women breaking barriers and starting revolutions, but we need to remember the ordinary women too. We need to remember the ones who join unions and those who don't, the ones who can only go to school because of work programs, the ones who finish and those who don't, the ones who find their dreams and those who don't.
While the content keeps this from being the kind of story that I could recommend to anyone, this is the kind of book I wish they would include in curriculum for world or Eastern literature. To use her own words to explain the importance of this:

History is in charge of putting things in order and society is in charge of defining them. The more order we achieve, the more truth is hidden behind that neat surface... Perhaps literature is about throwing into disarray what has been defined... About making a mess of things, all over again.

If diversity or feminism or women's lives are among the things you like to read about, this is definitely a book for you. Also, check out the rest of Shin's books here. ( )