Counsel Culture

A gorgeous, contemporary novel by prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-jin about the effects of cancel culture on a person who has been canceled.

Haesoo is a successful therapist who regularly appears on a popular TV program. But when she makes a scripted negative comment about a public figure who later commits suicide, she is ostracized by friends, fired from her job, and her marriage begins to unravel. These details come to the reader gradually, in meditative prose, through bits and pieces of letters that Haesoo writes and finally abandons as she walks alone through her city.

One day, Haesoo has an unexpected encounter with Sei, a 10-year-old girl attempting to feed an orange street cat. Street cats seem to be everywhere; they have the concern of one other neighborhood woman and the ire of everyone else. The cats, like Haesoo and Sei, endure various insults and recover slowly. Haesoo, who would not otherwise care about cats or form relationships with children, now finds herself pulled back by degrees into the larger world.