Kyung-sook Shin’s “The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness” begins with an unnamed novelist writing in isolation on Korea’s Jeju Island. She informs us of a recent call from an old friend, someone who has read her work and says, “You don’t write about us. . . . You seem to write quite a lot about your childhood, and also about college, and about love, but there was nothing about us.” Rattled, the novelist looks back on her teenage years. Why indeed hasn’t she written about her classmates and friends from that time?
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