Kim Hye-jin

When a mother allows her thirty-something daughter to move into her apartment, she wants for her what many mothers might say they want for their child: a steady income, and, even better, a good husband with a good job with whom to start a family. But when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, in tow, her mother is unprepared and unwilling to welcome Lane into her home. In fact, she can barely bring herself to be civil. Having centred her life on her husband and child, her daughter’s definition of family is not one she can accept. Her daughter’s involvement in a case of unfair dismissal involving gay colleagues from the university where she works is similarly strange to her. And yet when the care home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for an elderly dementia patient who has no family, who travelled the world as a successful diplomat, who chose not to have children, Green’s mother cannot accept it. Why should not having chosen a traditional life mean that your life is worth nothing at all? In Concerning My Daughter, translated from Korean by Jamie Chang, Kim Hye-jin lays bare our most universal fears on ageing, death, and isolation, to offer finally a paean to love in all its forms.

Concerning My Daughter

Betty

Klara Hansen 

Lane only listens. Even so, I cannot bring myself to tell her that I'l try. I don't want to give her false hope. I still have inside me the person who doesn't want to understand anything, the one who wants to understand everything, the one who's watching this from a distance, and so many other versions of me locked in an endless, repetitive battle. I don't have the confidence, energy, or courage to explain it all to her.

Helen 

Will I be able to say that the very spot where these kids stand is at the center of a heartless world? 

Concerning My Daughter quotes

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