Concerning My Daughter

Award-winning Korean novelist Kim Hye-jin's Concerning My Daughter is a clear-eyed character study of the fraught relations among biological and found families alike. When an unnamed, widowed narrator agrees to let her adult daughter, Green, move in with her, she's already wary of how their lives will cohere. And that's before Green reveals that her girlfriend, Lane, will be joining her.

While Green's mother resists accepting her daughter's partner, she is simultaneously thrown into chaos at work as her managers at the nursing home conspire to provide a lower quality of life for the patient she feels most intimate with, a once-successful diplomat named Jen, now suffering from dementia. As the narrator struggles with how to articulate the ways in which she cares for Jen, Green becomes involved in a campus protest against her employer's discrimination toward gay colleagues, leading Green's mother to reconsider what "family" might mean in the context of her own heart.

In Jamie Chang's translation from the Korean, Green's mother's voice guides Concerning My Daughter with a no-nonsense approach. Kim captures the raw details of cleaning the bodies of dementia patients as well as the immovable "dark silence" that "flows" between mothers and daughters when communication changes nothing. This unflinching perspective illuminates the extraordinary power of tenderness in such a context. Kim's keen attention to character reveals the nuances of her narrator's pragmatic brand of compassion. In this way, Concerning My Daughter manages to capture a societal need for both accepting collective complicity and practicing enduring empathy. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor

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