My wife is reading a book about the DPRK, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, written by a western journalist and based on defector testimony. I did a little digging and there's good evidence to indicate that defector testimony has structural incentives to push a particular narrative. It also seems to me that there isn't a ton of evidence about what things are really like in the DPRK. When I started to bring this up things got heated pretty quickly and, because I love my wife, I deescalated and we changed subjects.

My question is this, what do we actually know about the situation in the DPRK? I'm disinclined to believe the official western narrative due to the structural factors that work against an honest assessment. I saw this book, North Korea: Markets and Military Rule, and that seems to be relatively well regarded as being evidence based but, apparently, comes from a distinctly liberal perspective.

Beyond that I'm curious about how folks have gone about having conversations about the DPRK with people that have internalized western narratives. I found out pretty quickly that there's a strong emotional cord that underpins the belief. I'm sure I would have felt the same way at an earlier point in my life. Has anyone looked at this in more depth?