Baek Se-hee, author of the popular self-help memoir I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, has died at the age of 35.Baek donated her heart, lungs, liver and both kidneys, saving five lives, BBC reported, citing the Korean organ donation agency.
“But her readers will know she touched yet millions of lives more with her writing,” said Anton Hur, who translated her works into English. The cause of her death is not yet known.Published in 2018 in Korea, I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki records Baek’s conversations with her psychiatrist about dysthymia, a form of persistent depression, along with short essays.Tteokbokki, her favourite food, is a Korean dish made of rice cakes cooked in spicy sauce.The book was noted for bringing mental health issues into public discussion and exploring the author’s conflict between depressive thoughts and moments of simple joy.“The human heart, even when it wants to die, quite often wants at the same time to eat some tteokbokki, too,” reads one of its best-known lines.“Even across different languages and cultures, I realized that the feeling of a ‘wounded heart’ is the same everywhere. It still amazes me that my story has touched someone else’s heart. At the same time, it’s sobering to think that so many people carry deep inner pain and that it takes great courage just to say, ‘I’m not okay,’” Baek had said in an interview with The Korea Herald.Born in 1990, Baek studied creative writing at university and later worked for five years at a publishing house.
