Ever joked with your best friend that life would be easier if you just moved in together? Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo actually did it.

Approaching their forties, after years of living alone and never quite meeting the right person to share their lives with, they decided to combine forces and their cats, buy an apartment, and move in together.

This book is a heart-warming celebration of platonic partnership and the everyday negotiations of building a life with someone. Written in a very matter-of-fact style, and in alternating chapters between Hana and Sunwoo, it is also refreshingly honest about the fact that regardless of who you live with, there are still the usual hurdles that come with entangled finances and shared living arrangements. One’s messy and one’s clean. One cooks and one cleans. They celebrate the wins together and support each other through the tough stuff. This book will resonate with anyone navigating life under the same roof as a long-term friend, family member or partner.

Two Women Living Together

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I loved the descriptions of South Korean food, the sharing of meals and many drinks, books, and discovering new hobbies together. These two women are resetting ideas about what adulthood, partnership and family can look like and proving that no two families look the same.

The book was first published in South Korea in 2019, where it became a bestseller during the height of the “4B” feminist movement, which rejects marriage, childbirth and relationships with men. It’s important to note that the book doesn’t mention 4B at all and isn’t positioned as a rejection of men, but it’s not hard to see why it became such a phenomenon. Instead, they speak candidly about the expectations placed on married women in South Korea, including the pressures of filial duty and traditional in-law responsibilities, and the freedom they’ve found in building a life together entirely on their own terms.

Now that the book has finally been translated into English and released globally, this edition includes a “five years later” chapter reflecting on how profoundly the original publication resonated with readers and how it reshaped their own lives and careers in return.

And while it might seem obvious that you don’t need a romantic relationship to build a meaningful, sustaining companionship, we rarely see stories that show us what that looks like in practice. I think they put it perfectly when they write, “The things I do alone, I remember. The things I do with others become memories.”