Jo Yong, the writer of “It’s Okay to Not Be Okay,” has revealed that she will be publishing five children’s books from the drama.

“It’s Okay to Not Be Okay” is a romantic comedy about a psychiatric hospital caretaker named Moon Kang Tae (played by Kim Soo Hyun) and a children’s book author named Go Moon Young (played by Seo Ye Ji) who help heal each other’s wounds.

Talking about the significance of children’s books in the drama, writer Jo Yong said, “The stories in the children’s books have a deep connection to Moon Young. Moon Young, who develops antisocial personality disorder due to emotional abuse from her mother as a child, uses the books to tell the world, ‘Help me,’ ‘Save me,’ and ‘Help me so that other children don’t have to suffer as I did.'”

She added, “Though her modes of expression were at times harsh, they were a child’s desperate cries for help and protests against problematic adults. From when I first began creating the character, I wanted to use children’s books as Moon Young’s window of communication and her method of survival, and I wanted to show that only those with similar scars as Moon Young could discover the true meaning of the stories and begin to heal.”

She revealed that at first, she had no plans to publish the children’s books from the drama. “In the process of editing the scripts from episode 1 to 4, director Park Shin Woo suggested that I publish ‘Zombie Kid’ instead of just introducing the story in the drama.”

“Jam San, the illustrator of the books, did such an amazing job on the illustrations. For the illustrations alone, it would be worth having the books, so we decided to move forward with publishing them. A total of five children’s books will be released, and if it weren’t for director Park Shin Woo or illustrator Jam San, the books probably wouldn’t have been able to see the light of day.”

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