Kim Jiyoung lives in a small apartment on the outskirts of Seoul with her family. She is a thirty-year-old modern woman who recently quit her job to devote herself exclusively to raising her newborn daughter, making a choice that is considered socially obvious for many Korean women.

Soon, however, she begins to exhibit strange symptoms that alarm her husband, parents, and in-laws: she "transforms" by impersonating the lives of other women, both living and dead, known and unknown. As she sinks deeper into this psychosis, her husband sends her to a psychiatrist.

Jiyoung's entire life then begins to unfold through a cold, eerily fragmented third-person narrative, imbued with disparate elements of disappointment, persistence, and submission. Born in 1982 and having the most common girl's name in Korea, Jiyoung soon becomes the neglected older sister of a boy who is raised like a prince.

Her behavior is constantly policed by the male figures around her, and even her own father blames her when men harass her late at night.
A powerful international bestseller, which became the starting point for Korea's new feminist movement, follows the mental decline of a woman who confronts entrenched misogyny.