[2] She also discovered that other students were sometimes reading her diary, and for this reason she began to intersperse into it made up stories or lines aimed at specific readers.

[2] Eun left for middle school in Seoul, where she was an average student and entered Sookmyung University in 1977, a time of tremendous political tumult.

Since childhood Eun had desired to be a writer, but upon her graduation from Sookmyung she took jobs as a high school teacher, editor, and reporter.

In 1994 she took a leave of absence from her work and went to a temple armed with a laptop computer, nearly a dozen books, and a decades' worth of diaries.

The next year won the Munhakdongne Fiction Award for her novel A Gift From a Bird[3] which portrayed the world of adults through the skeptical eyes of a twelve-year-old narrator.

In the beginning of the novel, she declares: “When I turned twelve, there was no need for me to grow.” In order to survive her troubled life, the young Jinhee learns to detach herself from her emotions.

Regardless of their present circumstances, the characters who populate Eun's fiction observe themselves and the world around them in a cold, unforgiving light; their only means of protection is through self-disparagement.

Her characters seem to be contemptuous of everything around them, striving to think about events in a cold and clinical way, yet this kind of behavior perhaps arises from the fact that they yearn for connection.