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.
Kim stylises dramatic moments so that characters move from freeze-frame to freeze-frame, like dancers: “In a fit of rage, my grandfather grabbed a broom and was about to strike his daughter with all his might when he paused, trembling, the broom hovering in the air. Anger and sorrow had overcome him, observing his youngest child crouched over, shielding not her head but her belly.”
The novel starts with love, lovemaking, humour and birth, but Areum’s life was driving him much too fast towards tragedy. He was living with progeria, an extremely rare and incurable disease of rapid and premature ageing – it affects about one in four million children. At 16, Areaum was physically already like an 80-year-old: he was undersized, he suffered seizures and his organs and vision were failing.
Emotional life was impossibly hard. Prevented by his illness from attending school and forming ordinary teen relationships, Areum was lonely, friendless, guilty for the pain he caused his parents, and although time was spinning (palpitating) at a different rate, he experienced its every slow and painful second.
In telling this story of fate and fatalism, the narrator doesn’t spend the book grumbling. The reader must do the work of imagining Areum’s resilience. In Tom Wolfe’s space-race book The Right Stuff (1979), bravery was knowing that the rocket under you might explode; here, though, no one was making choices about which seat was safe to sit in: all were pre-allocated.
Instead of complaining, Areum researched the book of his and his parents’ lives, reflecting on writing and storytelling: “I wanted to write a stylish and engaging tale. Writing demanded decisions and choices at every moment. Was I making the right ones?” We do receive an answer to this question.
Poet Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”. Areum could have done with plenty of it: his underqualified, underpaid, underworked parents were unable to pay for his needed hospitalisation and improved pain management. He overhears their whispered arguments about what to do: Mira had a contact in television, but should they?
They do, and gaudily feathered hope arrives in the form of reality TV and its flow-on of funding, fame and correspondence from empathetic admirers and internet trolls.
My Brilliant Life presents a harder-edged aesthetic than Green’s book, and its (teen) moments of relationship-building are not so leavening. Kim shows us (through the veil of Areum’s desperate positivity) all of this: his yearning even in the face of unmitigated bad news, his love for his unreliable father, care for his mother, desire to learn, capacity to ask the Big Questions about growing up and being a grown-up, about parenthood: “Why do parents always look like parents, no matter how young they are?”
But this is all set up for the novel’s central heartbreak, the coming-of-age narrative where the protagonist cannot come of age.
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