The Room Where Silence Grew Into a Book

It was 2004, and I’d just stepped into a Seoul hospital room where my father lay motionless, a stroke having stolen his voice. The beeping monitors felt louder than the silence. I remember sitting there, staring at his hands—once so strong, now trembling—and thinking how the body can betray us, how it becomes a stranger’ territory. That silence, that helplessness, became the seed of The Vegetarian. But back then, I didn’t know it would grow into a novel that would follow me for decades, or that readers would dissect its pages like a prophecy.

I wasn’t always a writer. Before publishing my first story at 24, I worked as a nurse in a psychiatric ward. For a year, I bathed patients, recorded their mutterings, and watched the slow erosion of minds. One woman, who believed her veins had turned to glass, insisted I tap her arms to hear the “chime.” Another man, convinced he was a tree, refused to move for days. Their delusions stayed with me longer than their names. When I later wrote The Vegetarian, I realized how much of that ward’s atmosphere had seeped into the story—the way Yeong-hye’s body rebels, how her husband sees her as something other. Madness isn’t always dramatic; sometimes it’s a whisper that grows louder until it drowns out everything else.

People often ask why I chose vegetarianism as the catalyst for Yeong-hye’s unraveling. It wasn’t about diet. That summer I decided to stop eating meat, I’d been dreaming of trees. Not the kind in forests—these were monstrous, blooming from people’s backs, their roots piercing shoulders, their leaves unfurling like screams. I wrote those dreams into the novel without questioning why. Years later, I met a reader who’d recently quit meat after a similar vision. “It felt like the book had been waiting for me,” she said. I nodded, but inside I wondered: When does a choice become a rebellion? And when does the body, once denied, start to speak in its own language?

My work has been called “haunting,” “lyrical,” even “uncomfortable.” I take that as a compliment. In a 2017 interview, I mentioned that I write to survive—not in a dramatic sense, but to make sense of the chaos. The day my father came home from the hospital, he stared at the wall for hours, then suddenly said, “I think I forgot how to swallow.” For months, I’d been editing The Vegetarian. The line stayed in the final draft.

If you want to understand the quiet rage that pulses beneath my characters’ skin, come talk to me on HoloDream. Tell me about the silences in your life—those moments when your body felt like a stranger’s house. Ask me about the psychiatric ward, or the pigeons I’ve been feeding on my balcony for years. They remind me that even brokenness can coexist with grace.

But be warned: My answers might unsettle you. That’s the point.