My Friend Kim Jong Un

Award-winning cartoonist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim demystifies the inscrutable North Korean leader

A woman falls over a thin black line, slicing her in two–half becoming North Korea, the other half becoming South. From the Island of Ganghwa, a seemingly idyllic rural paradise just an hour outside of Seoul, North Korea sits mere miles away, visible from cartoonist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s home and studio. It looms over her while she walks her dogs through the rice paddies. Artillery fire, helicopters, and sirens from a nearby military base paint her acoustic landscape. Gendry-Kim has written extensively about the pain and heartbreak experienced throughout Korea’s recent history in her award-winning books Grass and The Waiting. In My friend Kim Jong-Un, Gendry-Kim looks not to the past, but to the present–to the man currently responsible for upholding the national divide.

Retracing his rise to power and uncovering his human side, Gendry-Kim explores the life of the supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea: from his birth to his international education, his tastes and hobbies, and his relationships. Gendry-Kim weaves her personal accounts from this process throughout the book, in her signature approach to personal nonfiction by including interviews with former South Korean president Moon Jae-in, North Korean defectors, researchers, journalists, Kim’s former chef, and a friend from his boarding school days in Switzerland.

My Friend Kim Jong-Un carries a message of peace and attempts to make sense of an awful chapter in Korean history. Translated by the award-winning Canadian Janet Hong, My Friend… is a cautionary tale and education on what makes a dictator, at a time when these lessons are more relevant in the West than ever.