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oyceterThe short version: Too much metaphorical hunger, not enough actual hunger and food.
The long version: Kim Sunee was abandoned in South Korea by her mother when she was three and was adopted by a white American couple later on. Then she moved to France for ten years or so to live with her French lover. She's found comfort in food, though most of the time, she's felt uprooted and torn among her many identities.
I always find it hard to critique memoirs when I find myself disliking the character of the author. Sunee writes very well, but it's a literary fiction first-person-POV present-tense style that I tend to dislike, and that coupled with existential angst really threw me off. Despite some angst about her unknown Korean heritage and her distant adoptive family, most of the book is actually about Sunee's successive unsuccessful love affairs and her search to find a family for herself.
While I usually sympathize with the search for family, this one in particular irritated me because it wasn't about disparate people becoming a family; instead, it was about a very lost woman attempting to fit into pre-existing families by changing who she was. It also didn't help that Sunee in the book tends to be attracted by older married men. I think I winced through most of the book, and most of the time I was thinking, "NOOOO! Don't do it! BAD IDEA!"
Sunee writes a little about her depression, but it's in a form that I find very difficult to read about; in the book, she tends to latch on to people, have them define her, and feel uncomfortable with the definition. Ergo my discomfort with critiquing the memoir; my problems with it are personal ones, as Sunee's situations are ones that I would not touch with a ten-foot pole, and that includes when I was depressed (one lover keeps telling her he will provide her with everything, that she is his everything, that all she needs is what he'll give her to be happy, that she shouldn't have to think about getting a job or anything because he'll provide. Another keeps telling her he'll divorce his wife despite massive evidence to the contrary). Yet, I feel awkward judging her choices.
Also, I was very disgruntled because I picked this up for loving food descriptions and got very few.
Possibly this will work for people who do like stories about melancholy, doomed love affairs, but it's hard for me to tell, because to me, the love affairs are doomed in such horrific, unromantic ways that I cannot be impartial.
The long version: Kim Sunee was abandoned in South Korea by her mother when she was three and was adopted by a white American couple later on. Then she moved to France for ten years or so to live with her French lover. She's found comfort in food, though most of the time, she's felt uprooted and torn among her many identities.
I always find it hard to critique memoirs when I find myself disliking the character of the author. Sunee writes very well, but it's a literary fiction first-person-POV present-tense style that I tend to dislike, and that coupled with existential angst really threw me off. Despite some angst about her unknown Korean heritage and her distant adoptive family, most of the book is actually about Sunee's successive unsuccessful love affairs and her search to find a family for herself.
While I usually sympathize with the search for family, this one in particular irritated me because it wasn't about disparate people becoming a family; instead, it was about a very lost woman attempting to fit into pre-existing families by changing who she was. It also didn't help that Sunee in the book tends to be attracted by older married men. I think I winced through most of the book, and most of the time I was thinking, "NOOOO! Don't do it! BAD IDEA!"
Sunee writes a little about her depression, but it's in a form that I find very difficult to read about; in the book, she tends to latch on to people, have them define her, and feel uncomfortable with the definition. Ergo my discomfort with critiquing the memoir; my problems with it are personal ones, as Sunee's situations are ones that I would not touch with a ten-foot pole, and that includes when I was depressed (one lover keeps telling her he will provide her with everything, that she is his everything, that all she needs is what he'll give her to be happy, that she shouldn't have to think about getting a job or anything because he'll provide. Another keeps telling her he'll divorce his wife despite massive evidence to the contrary). Yet, I feel awkward judging her choices.
Also, I was very disgruntled because I picked this up for loving food descriptions and got very few.
Possibly this will work for people who do like stories about melancholy, doomed love affairs, but it's hard for me to tell, because to me, the love affairs are doomed in such horrific, unromantic ways that I cannot be impartial.
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