TWO WOMEN LIVING TOGETHER, by Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo
In late 2016, a friend who oversees the construction of Manhattan skyscrapers told me about her fantasy project: a woman-only apartment complex. This conversation wasn’t apropos of the election, though the atmosphere in those days was thick with female solidarity. No, we’d been talking about dating in New York and all the women we knew who’d given up on it. My friend saw a housing problem. So many single women — single by happenstance, single by choice. Becoming mothers on their own. What if they lived in a place where they could share one another’s burdens, enjoy companionship, be less alone?
Around this very time, in Seoul, the pals Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo bought a home. What happened next is recounted in their joint memoir, “Two Women Living Together.” Trading off chapters, Hwang and Kim offer overlapping accounts of obtaining a mortgage, settling into their apartment and, among other adjustments, accommodating their very different perspectives on tidiness. “Sunwoo was the type to leave traces of herself,” recalls Kim, the neat freak, who traipsed after her roommate picking up clutter, shoring up resentments as she went. The resolution? “I downloaded an app and booked a cleaning service,” explains Sunwoo.
Turns out, living with a friend you love in a home you jointly own is much like marriage or any other form of settled domestic arrangement in which finances are entangled and a future together is envisioned. You sort out your squabbles; take care of each other when sick or grieving; enjoy common friends and favorite haunts; worry about money and spend a vast quantity of time just hanging out — i.e., sharing a life. The best way I can describe the content of this book is that it is JD Vance’s actual living nightmare. Did I mention the cats? There are four.
“Two Women Living Together” was a best seller when it was published in South Korea in 2019, at the height of the country’s “4B” feminist movement, which rejects marriage, childbirth, dating and sex with men. There was a built-in market for a book about women hovering around age 40 who had decided to turn their backs on the patriarchy and create a “D.I.Y. family,” as Hwang and Kim think of their union.
But they never mention 4B, and neither Kim nor Hwang claims to have rejected anything; indeed, Hwang raises marriage as a potential eventual cause for a household breakup, though her speculation is odd, given the notable absence, in “Two Women,” of any dating or romance. (Or of men, for that matter, besides the authors’ fathers.)
Reading between the lines, it’s clear that both Hwang and Kim were career-focused young women disinclined to give up their independence for the sake of building a family — the traditional kind South Korea recognizes in its tax code. Hwang wound up the globe-trotting former editor of the fashion magazine W Korea; Kim became a successful copywriter turned author and radio personality. In other words, they are rather glamorous exemplars of a type. “I’m just a woman who’s gone through some relationships that didn’t work out,” Hwang writes. “After all is said and done, I remain unmarried, and I’m doing just fine.”
Part primer, part pep talk, “Two Women Living Together” is for others like them, “fully fledged singletons,” in Kim’s phrase, coming to understand that this phase of their life is in fact not a phase. The book has a friendly, confiding tone — Hwang and Kim have gone on to host a successful podcast addressing its themes, and they write in a similar chatty vernacular. This, and lashings of cutesiness — like referring to themselves as “pawrents” (Gene Png’s translation) — almost disguise the radicalism of the book’s project. Almost.
It’s not a “you” problem, they tell readers. It’s a housing problem. The infrastructure itself hasn’t caught up with the changes to society over the past half century, with the effect that single people are being compelled to live atomized lives, in small homes, where they must shoulder all the attendant cares and expenses. “What’s stopping the individual atoms from joining forces to form a molecule?” Kim asks.
As their time cohabiting wore on, they would come to see other problems. Who is considered “family” matters for insurance purposes, in hospital emergency rooms or when you want access to the same corporate discounts available to married couples.
As of August 2025, 42% of households in South Korea consist of one person. Hwang and Kim, at least, are staring this reality in the face. They would like to see South Korea institute a system along the lines of the French PACS, a civil union that can be entered into platonically, which confers all the official benefits of wedlock.
For the most part the politics are smuggled in; the authors treat their frontal challenge to society’s foundational norms as self-evident. As they tell it, it’s simple: They were sick of living alone. They bought an apartment they both liked — and moved in.
TWO WOMEN LIVING TOGETHER | By Kim Hana and Hwang Sunwoo | Ecco | 246 pp. | $28
The post 2 Women, 4 Cats and 1 Home in a Best-Selling Korean Memoir appeared first on New York Times.
