Sulli, a former member of the K-pop girl group f(x), rose to stardom as an actress and a singer under leading K-pop agency SM Entertainment. She performed, and promoted, for years as her group’s fame increased with each number-one single.
But in 2015, a burnt-out Sulli left the group and began to hone an independent identity — one that tackled subjects taboo in Korean culture. She posted content braless, kissing her older boyfriend or discussing topics like menstruation.
As a result, a vicious wave of cyberbullying drowned her, and Sulli committed suicide at 25 years old.
Giaae Kwon recounts this and many more stories about Korean pop music (or K-pop) in “I’ll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan.” Her essay collection offers a deft portrait of this global cultural phenomenon, its parasocial fan culture, and the human issues at its center. But beyond K-pop, Kwon also paints an intimate self-portrait, complete with precise angularity and honest shadowing, albeit held together with sometimes tenuous seams.
Kwon writes with candor and writes unflinchingly — she admits that she dropped out of school twice, lied to her parents more than that, and struggles with both her body image and mental health. She’s vulnerable about having never been in a relationship and often feels lonely.
One of Kwon’s central motifs is her relationship to her body. Throughout her life, she has dealt with constant shame about not being perfect, exacerbated by one trip to Korea that made her feel ostracized from her own culture. The collection concludes with a heart-warming full circle moment when she returns to Korea in 2023 and finally feels at home.
One chapter explains how each K-pop group has a member referred to as “the visual,” the person valued for their appearance (the Posh Spice, if you will). Here, with writing that toggles between diaristic and more distantly analytical registers, Kwon explores her own relationship to feminism, which she eschewed into her 20s but embraced as she confronted her internal misogyny that biased her against certain female figures and groups.
Other K-pop stars act as prisms through which she explores particular issues in her life. In her examination of Tablo, a Stanford graduate and member of hip-hop group Epik High, Kwon dissects her own schooling and her fraught relationship with higher education. And in a chapter she begins effectively with, “This is an essay I do not want to write,” Kwon examines K-pop and Korean beauty standards as well as her experience undergoing surgery for her monolids in high school — and now rethinking it.
Kwon is an unapologetic bbasooni (K-pop stans), and her knowledge about and passion for the Korean music industry is evident. She writes on K-pop’s historical context: how American military bases dotted the Korean peninsula’s lower half in the postwar period, introducing nightclubs that exposed Koreans to Western-style music.
Kwon offers an education in the genre — a topic I admittedly knew little about previously — but also in the cultural underpinnings that underscore it: patriarchal structures, sentiments around sex, beauty standards and a cultural emphasis on academic advancement, for example.
Kwon’s writing style was not consistently fluid, and transitions sometimes felt woven half-heartedly. Kwon would return from a tangent often with, “But to go back to…” or repeat certain facts and phrases verbatim chapters apart. The book felt occasionally as if it wanted to escape the bounds of K-pop — a sign that Kwon certainly has more to say.
These hardly subtracted, however, from my appreciation for Kwon’s debut essay collection. The book is a considerable feat and emerges as a singular blend of personal essay and cultural criticism that is also a meaningful read. What does it mean, she asks, to live a life as a media consumer and as a creative?
Hudson Warm is a student journalist and critic at Yale University as well as the Scholastic and National Indie Excellence Award-winning author of two novels. She formerly interned at the Post-Gazette.
First Published: April 13, 2025, 8:30 a.m.
