Giyeon is Park Doha’s full-length novel that portrays the process of discovering love and self for Giyeon, whose sense of self gradually wanes within the confines of the institutional system of marriage. Through sparkling prose, the author unfolds the narrative and psychology of a middle-aged woman navigating the complexities of self, life, and love while entangled in family ties like loose knots. The story follows the journey of a middle-aged woman, married for thirty years but yet to uncover the depths of her own life and love, as she encounters a new man.

Giyeon disapproves of her young daughter’s decision to get married. Exhausted from her own married life, devoid of love from a husband quick to place blame, Giyeon hopes her daughter won’t tread the same path. While shopping for her daughter Jaeyeon’s home furnishings, Giyeon enters a duvet shop named “Jaeyeon’s Bedding,” where she meets the owner, Chisu, and feels drawn to him. Confused by an unfamiliar emotion, she walks out, only to collapse on a nearby bench. It’s there that Chisu finds her. From that moment, their feelings for each other grow, but Giyeon is unsettled, sensing that something she held steady within herself is now shaken by her encounter with Chisu.

Giyeon explores the perspectives of various women who sense their diminishing presence within their families. Beyond Giyeon herself, her friend Juseon, a divorced painter living alone, Chisu’s wife Miok, who dutifully supported her family for a long time, and Hanseong’s daughter Yeri, who still feels a sense of deficiency even after her mother’s return, all experience a profound absence within their families. This pervasive feeling of loneliness and family inadequacy erodes their sense of self. Amidst the isolation and wounds from their relationships with husbands, children, and mothers, all that remains is a gaping hole in their chest.

Giyeon doesn’t leave her family, even though they make her presence fade and cultivate a sense of emptiness in her mind. Children are not the same individuals as their parents, but to Giyeon, her daughter Jaeyeon is a part of her and the very reason she chooses life over death. While Jaeyeon may see her mother as silly and lethargic, Giyeon remains by her side out of maternal love. Giyeon stays not because she can’t go anywhere else, but because there is a light of life she is determined to protect.

Through the novel Giyeon, readers can grasp the profound meaning of this love, born from a place of pain and inherently precarious, to an individual.

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