Among the narrators in Cho Nam-joo’s astute short story collection, Miss Kim Knows, is a Seoul-based author who’s penned a #MeToo-era feminist sensation. As she confesses in Defiance: “The novel wasn’t especially progressive or radical, but it landed in the crosshairs of so many disputes,” a position that generated intense online trolling as well as enviable sales figures.
It’s an experience familiar to Cho. Her own internationally bestselling novel, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, highlighted pernicious gender inequality and misogyny in her native South Korea through an account of a young mother’s psychotic break, and proved so divisive that when a member of K-pop band Red Velvet revealed she’d read it, male music fans vowed to burn her photo.
