Thank you to Netgalley and Bloomsbury for the e-arc in return for an honest review.

I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a essentially comprised of dialogues between the author and her therapist, and her reflections on what she has learned from those conversations. I found the dialogues to be very long and tedious, as well as very personal to the author. The things she talked about, the ideas provided to her, and her reflections did not seem very applicable to other people. While some of the reflections I felt provided an interesting or different perspective that I could apply to my own life, most did not seem very helpful. By the end of the memoir, when there were no longer any more dialogues between her and her therapist, I started to enjoy it more. I found the things the author was saying to much more engaging and impactful and therefore think this could have been better had the dialogues been omitted or at least shortened, seeing as they were about 10 pages each, which is much longer than they needed to be.

I did appreciate how open and vulnerable the author was, providing all the negative thoughts and the struggles she went through in detail. A lot of struggles did feel very relatable to me as someone who also struggles with my mental health. I also really appreciated that instead of ending it with saying she’s all better and now the depression is completely gone, she explained how there are periods of feeling bad and periods of feeling good, and there will continue to always be periods of good and bad. Rather than having it go away, she learned to live with it and how to continue to live during bad periods. 

While there were definitely some good qualities to this and the author is clearly a talented writer, I just found that I had to force myself to continue reading this. I unfortunately found it very dull and I don’t feel that I gained anything from this. I really wanted to like this but I ended up being very disappointed. Overall, I gave this 2.75 stars (rounded up to 3).