Concerning My Daughter

About

A retired professor allows her thirty-something daughter to move back in, hoping she'll finally settle down with a steady job and a husband. Instead, Green arrives with her girlfriend Lane. The mother can barely bring herself to be civil. She has given her life to doing things the right way, and this is not how daughters are supposed to live. Kim Hye-jin writes the mother's resistance with unflinching honesty — not as villainy but as the deep discomfort of a woman whose worldview cannot accommodate her daughter's reality. Meanwhile, at the nursing home where she volunteers, she watches elderly women abandoned by the families they sacrificed everything for. Slim and devastating, this novel asks what it means to love someone whose life you cannot understand — and whether understanding was ever the point.