This paper explores the characteristics of a male North Korean defector’s narratives in Dear Leader, one of a growing number of co-written memoirs by North Korean defectors. Because it was written by a high-level insider—one at the very top of the North Korean power structure—who also happens to be an articulate and sensitive writer, with a vastly different perspective from that of a Westerner or a common North Korean escapee, Jang Jin-sung’s narrative, interwoven with the political and economic history in the public sphere and the psychological transformation in the personal sphere, can be classified as a conspicuous historiographic life writing from North Korea. While reminding us to reflect on the complexity of what it meant to grow up in the brutally repressive dynamics of the North Korean system with no freedom, Dear Leader is prominently unique and valuable not only as an insider’s account of the North Korean government but as the story of one individual searching for the freedom possible both inside and outside of that system. Interestingly, his gender identity is more sharply awakened in the defecting process in China than in his time inside North Korea. In short, Dear Leader has contributed to help change and improve the public perceptions of North Korea in the global community, and to elicit sympathy for ordinary North Koreans living under the political oppression with no choice of their own.