A beginning without you
The black bird inside me
Why should I wear a bra?
My little darkness
Became a Novelist _ Essay
Recommendations _Yoon Seong-hee, Lee Gil-bo-ra

“If you eat pumpkin pancakes and make silly jokes,
“It seemed as if the darkness would remain ‘young’ forever.”_Yoon Seong-hee

“A girl who acts like a boss and a newlywed, and who feels the warmest in her mother’s arms
I'm really curious to see what happens next for the 10-year-old Jo Seung-ri." - Lee Gil-bo-ra

● From visually impaired essayist to novelist,
The birth of a world called Jo Seung-ri

“I tell the story of the darkest place with dark eyes
I promise to bring it to a bright world.”

Author Seungri Jo, who received attention as the '2024 Rookie of the Year' for her humorous yet poignant portrayal of disability and daily life in 'This Nonsense Will Accumulate to Become a Festival', has returned with her first short story collection, 'My Little Darkness'.
It is even more meaningful because it is based on the “experience of moving from the visible world to the invisible world,” which was intentionally left blank in the previous essay.
Beginning from the perspective of a teenager facing blindness, this collection of short stories explores the unique experience of visual impairment, unfolding through the lens of adolescence on the brink of independence and survival, while simultaneously transcending it to reveal universality and literary depth.
The author, who has maintained his own spark even while going through the 'young darkness', begins a new conversation with readers by looking back at life through the medium of novels.

"My Little Darkness" consists of four short stories and one essay.
The series of novels unfolds “moments that Jo Seung-ri might have experienced,” such as the first love of a middle school student facing blindness, dormitory life at a special school, conflict with his parents, and frustration in the face of a harsh society.
These stories are literary self-portraits created “at the moment when the external world surrounding the writer and the internal world crouching within the writer merge.”

● Nevertheless, we must live, and the reality is that we have no choice but to live.
The beautiful intersection of growth and loss

“Stop crying and let’s go over to my house and cut up some watermelon and eat it.
“I’ve drained all the moisture out, so I need to refill it to feel better.”

The novels in the series "My Little Darkness" depict the way characters embrace life when faced with a premonition of loss.
The speaker of "The Beginning Without You" falls in love with his senior, "You," before being judged for his real name, but that feeling is ultimately cut off by "You"'s avoidance of an unseen future.
In the confession where he mutters, “If you were as broken as I am, I would be able to stand by your side proudly,” one can feel the twist and despair of realizing that he is a ‘broken being’ as he loses his sight.
Loss does not remain solely at the level of sensation.
In "The Black Bird Inside Me," a father abandoning his child, the rejection of his career path and independence, and the frustrations of living in an unfamiliar city are all complexly revealed.
In a moment where he feels abandoned by both his family and society, the speaker feels “miserable, as if he has been kicked out.”
Blindness is not just a loss of senses, but a total experience that includes the rupture of relationships and an uncertain future.

However, despite all the losses, Jo Seung-ri's characters choose to 'live on'.
The will of the characters to turn the present into a new starting point, such as deciding to attend a special school or breaking up an abusive relationship and leaving Seoul, stands out.
The final scene of the title piece, “My Little Darkness,” sensitively captures the dynamic currents within the young character.
Even after blindness strikes unexpectedly like a downpour, the protagonist Seong-hee has a premonition that she will have to live like riding a bicycle in the rain.
Loss is not the end, but “the beginning of a new rainy season, one we have never experienced before.”

The characters in this collection are all in the midst of their growing up years.
Build yourself through wavering emotions and crossroads of choice.
The speaker of "Why Should I Be a Bra?" has a strong sense of responsibility to the point of being called "head teacher" at a special school, but feels ambivalent toward Buhee, the older sister he takes care of.
While experiencing a conflict with local elementary school students over a trampoline, he feels the gap between disabled and non-disabled people, but he also comes to the conclusion that “if you just look at the shadow, you can’t see the disability or the shabby poverty; they are all the same shadows.”
In this way, “My Little Darkness” is a story about growing through loss and rebuilding one’s own world.
This book, which shows how to love and how to reconnect with the world, ultimately poses questions to the reader.
What kind of loss am I enduring now?
How is the present being created within it?

Fiction extracted from life, life that becomes fiction
A story that becomes our biography

“Jisuk’s face was filled with fear, despair, and despair.

“Maybe my face looks like that to someone.”

Although the narrators of the serial novels all feel like 'Jo Seung-ri', they are not completely identical characters.
While they share common emotions and conditions, such as the impending loss of identity, rifts in relationships, and a sense of distance from society, they harbor emotions and desires from different times.
Rather than integrating the autobiographical narrative into a single, complete self, this is an attempt to reveal the truth by presenting multiple, fragmented, and even contradictory selves in parallel.

The works are fiction, essay-like, and sometimes vivid like reportage.
Although it is a novel with a fictional setting, the characters come across as having a real-life texture.
Because all of it comes from the times and feelings the writer has gone through.
The question of what separates novels from essays, autobiographies from creative writing, is rendered powerless in the face of this book.
The author bypasses these classifications and observes and remembers life within the space of the novel.
So the reader cannot just say, 'This is Jo Seung-ri's story.'
It is the story of “Jo Seung-ri” and, furthermore, it becomes the autobiography of each of us.

The essay “I Became a Novelist” at the end of the collection of short stories depicts the chronicle of Jo Seung-ri’s attempts to communicate with the world.
The first story was a sketch that began as a curse against the world.
As I went through the school for the disabled and society, I wrote down in a notebook the absurdities that caught my eye.
The author began working as a masseuse at the age of twenty and began writing using a Braille terminal.
After that, I went through a period where I couldn't write anything, and until my heart was completely empty, I poured out all the stories that had been pent up.
If the previous four novels were snapshots of the self from different perspectives, this essay is the author's present, gathering those fragments and responding with a single voice.
This composition allows the reader to experience the narrative boundary where ‘fiction extracted from life’ and ‘life that has become fiction’ meet.