Homesick and alone, a teenaged girl has just arrived in Seoul to work in a factory. Her family, still in the countryside, is too impoverished to keep sending her to school. So she works long days on a stereo-assembly line, struggling through night school every evening in order to achieve her dream of becoming a writer. THE GIRL WHO WROTE LONELINESS is set against the backdrop of Korea’s industrial sweatshops of the 1970s, and takes on the extreme exploitation, oppression and urbanization that helped catapult Korea’s economy out of the ashes of war.

Amid the tremors of political revolution, Jung Yoon, a highly literate, twenty-something woman, recounts her tragic personal history. When Yoon receives a distressing phone call from her ex-boyfriend after eight years of separation, memories of a tumultuous youth begin to resurface. She revisits the death of her beloved mother, the strong bond with her now-dying former college professor, the excitement of her first love, and the friendships forged out of a shared sense of isolation and grief.

When 69-year-old So-nyo is separated from her husband among the crowds of the Seoul subway station, her family begins a desperate search to find her. Yet as long-held secrets and private sorrows begin to reveal themselves, they are forced to wonder: how well did they actually know the woman they called Mom?