0302♡ _007
My Favorite Child _063
Mayumi _105
Escape from the Beach Map _173
Love of My Life _219
Angel and Stork _253
Apple and Ringo _285
Love, Do You Remember _337

Commentary│Oh Eun-kyo (literary critic)
Masochism Behind the Scenes _381

Author's Note _413

Friends, family, idols, online lovers, virtual humans… …
In Lee Hee-joo's novels, there is no one she cannot love.
An artist who draws the shape of the heart as it is
Eight beautiful and disturbing love letters that only Lee Hee-joo could write.

Lee Hee-joo's characters have extremely developed aesthetic sensibilities, and as a result, they gradually become worn out.
Because they themselves are not that beautiful by their standards, they pour out even the minimal amount of love that should be theirs onto beautiful others.
It is extremely rare to find someone who can satisfy that sensitive palate, and Lee Hee-joo's characters end up longing for even those who are considered unsuitable as objects of love by the public eye.
In this way, the novel rushes toward self-destruction and the destruction of the world, and the author's humanistic view of the work and his elegant and unique writing style combine to create explosive synergy.

The desire for beauty has been particularly expressed in Lee Hee-ju's novels as a fandom for idols.
Thus, 『Creamy Love』 opens with the short story "0302♡," which depicts the passion surrounding an idol, which can be said to be the author's representative seal.
This novel is a declaration that the author is announcing before fully unfolding the 'Lee Hee-joo World', and depicts the innocent and pure friendship and love between high school students 'Hee-joo' and 'Yuri'.
Yuri, who became a school idol after becoming beautiful due to her wish to be loved, is in a difficult situation due to the overly passionate affection of the female students. When Yuri is in a difficult situation, Hee-joo tries to protect her by debuting her as a real idol singer and making her everyone's lover.
In order to fulfill Yuri's wish and stay by his side forever, Hee-joo is prepared to give up not only her own life but also the real world she has lived in her entire life.
It is this pure energy that gives Hee-ju in the novel, and furthermore, author Lee Hee-ju outside the novel, the omnipotence to create the world she desires.

In this way, Lee Hee-joo's characters are people who can even give up themselves for love.
Because they do not consider themselves beautiful in the first place, they are willing to discard their own identity if it means becoming another being and achieving love.
This desperate passion continues and expands to a transgender who hides his identity in order to become a 'LAN lover' he met in an online game, while desperately chewing over his fixed biological identity that cannot deviate even by an inch of his body size ("Escape from the Beach Map"), a woman who assumes the role of a man in order to resolve the love and hate between female family members over a single patriarchal male ("Love of My Life"), and a surrogate mother who secretly dreams of filling the world with Yuri's children while serving in population reproduction in keeping with the beliefs of the man she loves, "Yuri" ("Angels and Storks"), in a world where a national survey on women's fertility has been conducted to address the serious low birth rate phenomenon and men have also become able to get pregnant.
The poignant relationship setting of a love that cannot be achieved by oneself as is, and the excellent sense of expression that maximizes the characters' desperate desires with just a little fantasy, evoke a complex emotion that is difficult to describe in a few words.

Madness is the ultimate in innocence
The tears that were shining and flowing down in my heart
Until I come back as an immortal firecracker

Of course, Lee Hee-joo's characters are not all innocent.
When we see them thoroughly pursuing their own aspirations without losing sight of them, we can confirm that for them, loving others is also an act of loving themselves.
They obtain the sperm of their favorite idol and perform pregnancy and childbirth to create a cost-effective "goods" and an alter ego they love more than themselves ("Favorite Child"), and they create a virtual human in the form of the most ideal woman they can think of as a woman and insert themselves into that shell ("Mayumi"). Sadly, the harder they try to satisfy their desires, the more cruelly they are betrayed by the logic of the world.
As long as there remains a fundamental lack of self-existence, desires remain unfulfilled, and their emotions, as pure as they were, erupt into intense madness.

A love that does not hesitate to use any means necessary to achieve its goal, and when frustrated, destroys life to the point where it cannot be restored.
A lot of the love Lee Hee-joo portrays feels criminal.
When she discovers the true identity of the child she believed was created from the cells of the man she desired and decides to become a “crazy bitch” who will hit the back of the head of the world that deceived her (“My Favorite Child”), when she becomes enraged at those who try to use the virtual human she created for other purposes, saying “My Mayumi is not like that” (“Mayumi”), when she becomes tired of her beautiful but economically incompetent younger sister who barely makes ends meet with irregular work and barely spends her money on the joys of life, going to musicals, and when she resolves to destroy the very thing that is the main culprit behind her sister’s poverty and the very thing she cherishes (“Apples and Ringo”), the dark and destructive side of love that is often omitted stickily seeps out from the parentheses, and Lee Hee-joo’s novels reach their climax.

In his most recent work, "Love, Do You Remember," Lee Hee-joo's characters, each with their own madness, gather in a square to get through the chaotic times of martial law.
Among them, idol fandoms and pseudo-religious groups are representative forms of the blind love and desire that Lee Hee-joo's novels have depicted.
Fans who spare no expense in spending time and money to spread their fandom and make their favorite idols superstars, as well as pseudo-religious fanatics who wage war to turn the world into a territory of faith for the god they worship as their idol, all react in their own way to the political event of martial law declaration.
And 'Woo-mi', who is both an idol fan and a reporter, feels a sense of distance in the middle of the crowd that gathers and divides countless times.
As I confronted the unity and violence of the fan community, the humanity shown by a pseudo-religious person I met by chance, and my own cowardice in turning a blind eye to violence for the sake of writing fan fiction, I realized once again that none of the people in the plaza were simple beings that could be captured in clear language.

It is significant that Lee Hee-joo, who often brings subcultures that were popular in an era into her novels to amplify the vague sense of longing, borrowed the title of her latest short story from the title of the movie version of [The Super Dimension Fortress Macross], the beginning of idol animation.
In this animation, galactic idol Lynn Minmay sings a song to two warring alien races, thus putting an end to their long-standing conflict.
Lee Hee-joo asks us through Lynn Minmay's song.
Is there really a way to save a life marked by catastrophe and conflict?
It is also interesting that the idol, who has been an object of persistent attachment and longing in Lee Hee-joo's novels, appears in this short story as a subject who betrays his fans with determination.
The perspective of Lee Hee-ju's novels, which began to observe not only individual humans but also idols from a distance, is expanding from human desires to the desires of society.
This collection of short stories, which will later be considered a compilation of Lee Hee-ju's early novels, contains the unparalleled era and unbridled innocence of a great writer who never rests on her laurels.

This book is dedicated to those who, at any moment in their lives, wish they were not themselves.
_Lee Hee-joo, from 'Author's Note'