Widowed, working a low-paid job as a carer and surrounded by a run-down house, our narrator will do anything to stop the same fate for her own daughter. She did everything expected of her: marriage, a family, a career but still has almost nothing to show for it.

Kim’s narrator lives in a perpetual state of terror, unable to let go of her ingrained beliefs in the supremacy of conventional family. Why should not having chosen a traditional life mean that your life is worth nothing at all? Yet when the care home she works in instructs her to lower her standard of care for a dementia patient who chose her career over a husband and family, she begins to question everything. When Green loses her job teaching at the university in a case of unfair dismissal, her mother welcomes her into her home, but she never expected her daughter to turn up with her girlfriend, Lane, in tow. 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.All Green’s mother has ever wanted for her daughter is a steady income and a good husband. 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.

Her daughter's involvement in a case of unfair dismissal involving gay colleagues from the university where she works is similarly strange to her. Having centred her life on her husband and child, her daughter's definition of family is not one she can accept.

In fact, she can barely bring herself to be civil. But when Green turns up with her girlfriend, Lane, in tow, her mother is unprepared and unwilling to welcome Lane into her home. 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.

Kim hye jin about my daughter