I’ll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan

Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror meets Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings in a meditation that blends memoir and cultural criticism to explore how the author’s love affair with K-pop has shaped her sense of self, charting K-pop’s complex coming-of-age through some of its biggest idols.

I’ll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan is a smart, poignant, constantly surprising essay collection that considers the collision between stratospherically popular music and our inescapably personal selves. Giaae Kwon delves into the global impact of K-pop artists, from H.O.T. to Taeyeon to IU to Suga of BTS, and reveals how each illuminated and shaped her own life.

In using intimate experiences to examine larger cultural topics, this singular work breaks new ground in its consideration of K-pop. Written from the perspective of a bilingual and bicultural Korean American, I’ll Love You Forever blends the critical with the personal. Kwon interweaves profiles of different K-pop idols with ruminations on various aspects of Korean culture, from the country’s attitude toward plastic surgery and female sexuality to its obsession with academia. Combining insightful critique and adoring analysis, I’ll Love You Forever provides readers with a fuller picture of a culturally and socially complex industry and the machine and heart behind its popularity. Above all, Kwon offers up the passion of a superfan, finding joy in K-pop along the way.

Giaae Kwon is a food and culture writer whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, Electric Literature, BuzzFeed Reader, and Taste. She wrote a column about K-Pop for Catapult. She attended the Tin House Summer Workshop, and her essay on Momofuku Kāwi was a Notable Mention in Best American Food Writing 2020. She writes the newsletter, I Love You, Egg, and lives in Brooklyn, where she’s working on her next project, which explores Korean food through the lens of the diaspora.