Eun was born in Gochang, Jeollabuk-do in 1959. She did her undergraduate degree in literature at Sookmyung Women's University, and her graduate degree in the same field at Yonsei University, both in Seoul.[1] Her childhood was full of fairy tales and children's stories that her parents purchased for her. Eun once stated, "My most important reading was pretty much done during my childhood." Even as a student she always read books (non-schoolbooks), and also recounts reading so intently that she failed to hear that school was ending, and only realizing it when she was surrounded by silence as the other students had left.[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.

Eun's father was a carpenter who employed many workers. Eun noted that when these workers spoke directly to her father they spoke entirely differently from when they spoke behind his back. They also betrayed, intrigued and fought with each other, and Eun particularly remembers a carpenter running off with a cook. Eun saw these things as indicative of the warmth of human relationships between imperfect humans.[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. In her stay at the temple she finished five short stories and a novella. The novella was A Duet, which won a Spring Literary Contest in 1995.[2]

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