She began her literary career when her short story “Thirteen Years Old” won the Seoul Shinmun New Writer’s Contest in 2006. She published a short story collection, Things No One Says, Quiet Like Today and The Night No One Weeps. She has written novellas Bad Blood, The Spector, Seonhwa, Our Stop, and the Night of Transcription, While We Feel Relieved and a collection of short-stories To the Name Lost. She won the Hwang Sun-won Literary Award for New Literature, Munhakdongne Young Writer’s Award, and the Kim Hyun Literary Award.
1. Life
Kim Yi-seol’s works feature a lot of stories that have to do with the relationship between the mother and the child, such as childbirth and childcare. Kim Yi-seol has said that she wouldn’t be able to write such stories if she hadn’t had the experience of childbirth. She has expressed that through pregnancy and giving birth, she has experienced how children are weak and insecure, and how their bonds with their mothers should not be broken. Her experiences of childbirth and childcare has also affected her thoughts on writing fiction. It made her realize the anxiety for completing the draft as well as a sense of duty. When she was writing Bad Blood (나쁜 피), she had started writing only 3 days after her childbirth.
2. Writing
Kim Yi-seol’s works depict the violence of the lives of the lowest members of society, questioning our own deception of a peaceful life that we have kept while keeping ourselves away from such violence. Particularly, she descriptively shows the experience of violence that is done to a woman’s sex and body, displaying violence’s cycle of how a victim of violence becomes the perpetrator, and then becomes the victim again. By doing this, she subtlety implies that violence is an important factor in the structure of The Spector (환영) depicts the process of how a woman turns to selling all her labor as well as her sex for family, through which the author shows how the capitalistic system of value exchange and the patriarchy have reduced women to sex, and how they have consistently supported the commercialization of women’s bodies.
In Kim Yi-seol’s stories, the violence that is done to women’s bodies is depicted through women who belong to the lowest level of society in Korea. The protagonists of Kim Yi-seol’s stories are those who are exposed to the worst imaginable risks, and will be exposed to those risks, such as afemale homeless person, a surrogate mother, an abandoned girl, a uterine cancer patient, a mentally handicapped woman, and a prostitute.By showing the violence that is being done on such people, Kim Yi-seol’s stories depict how bad the ‘impoverishment of women’ has become since its progress after the IMF.
Kim Yi-seol’s stories show the darkest sides of reality. Particularly, her views on family is very harsh. Kim Yi-seol seems to consider that a blood relation does nothing but imprisoning each other, and is mutually meaningless outside of that. In “ The Obituary” (부고), the protagonist experiences a downward spiral situation, in which she constantly falls through: divorced parents, rape, death of her mother, parting from a lover, and abortion. The one who consoles is neither her father nor her big brother, but her stepmother, who has similar scars. In “A Cold Wave Warning” (한파 특보) the protagonist’s father constantly throws out verbal abuse for the sole reason of his pride for having worked for the family all his life. The protagonist can smile from time to time only when avoiding the father and cracking jokes with coworkers. This is a strict diagnosis that those we can receive consolation from are not our family, but others. However, it also paradoxically gives hope, in that it allows us to search for which direction we should go towards after violence has passed.
