✪ Winner of Taipei Literature Award — Annuity Grant
✪ Winner of Taiwan Literature Award

There’s something about Liao Mi’s brother—nicknamed “Di.” A Hikikomori-like figure, he rarely leaves his room, hypersensitive to the world beyond its walls, and wholly dependent on his family. He rejects counseling and allows only the minimal exchanges with their parents. The only person who can still reach him is his sister.

So Liao Mi begins to knock on her reclusive brother’s door. Without clinical training, she wrestles with the blurred line between a family chat and something like therapy. She also struggles with the uneasy fact that her effort began as a grant-funded writing proposal.

What unfolds is neither sensational nor pitying but a painstakingly honest account of attempted dialogue, small interventions, and fragile repair.

With plain yet precise prose, THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MY BROTHER probes what happens to a family when one member withdraws from the world.

Blending reportage with reflexive, meta-narrative turns, the book is intimate, unsparing, and quietly transformative—a work praised for its sincerity and its therapeutic ambition.