Review | Ae-ran Kim’s My Brilliant Life is a heart-rending story of a coming-of-age curtailed
- Much like John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, the novel narrates the story of a hopeful child asking end-of-life questions
- The desires and desperation of a child with a rapid-ageing disease are peppered with bursts of humour
My Brilliant Life
by Ae-ran Kim
Forge Books
Areum, narrator of Ae-ran Kim’s wistful, funny-sad novel, warns that the book we are about to read “is the story of the youngest parents with the oldest child”.
Now available in English for the first time, My Brilliant Life was first published in Korea in 2011 as My Palpitating Life. The 2014 film version starred Song Hye-kyo as Areum’s young mother, Mira.
Also published in 2011 was John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, and these two belong not too far from each other on the shelves. Each sits on the border between adult and young adult fiction. Both share heart-rending, curtailed coming-of-age narratives, insights from the mouths of babes and bursts of stick-it-to-you humour.
This is in evidence from My Brilliant Life’s first page: “My mom was the baby of the family and was known in her childhood as Princess F***; having grown up around foulmouthed men, she dropped curse words at every opportunity. I feel close to my mom when I think about the small, adorable girl she would have been, wandering around the village, swearing.”
At 16, Areum’s parents were up to their necks in youthful scandal. Mira was pregnant and her unambitious lover, Daesu, was dropping out of school. Areum confidently narrates this from the womb, continuing as the mother-to-be’s school friends repeat every inaccurate piece of prenatal information they’ve ever heard.
