Mee Nam

Mee Nam (Thai: มีนาม) is the pen name of the Thai author of The Secret of Us (ใจซ่อนรัก), the Girls’ Love novel adapted in 2024 into the Channel 3 series of the same name.

The official English edition was released as an e-book on 16 May 2024 through MEB, translated by the meb translation team and published under T M, with a separate Special Chapters volume. The English edition runs 657 pages, roughly 98,000 words.

The television adaptation premiered on 24 June 2024, eight episodes on Channel 3, with the screenplay by Nitinun Supappong and directed by Saratswadee Wongsomphet. Sirilak Kwong and Kornnaphat Sethratanapong lead, with Apasiri Nitibhon and Paramej Noiam.

Five weeks between the book and the broadcast

The English e-book went on sale on 16 May 2024. The series premiered on 24 June 2024. Thirty-nine days separate them. That is not a novel being discovered and optioned. That is a book and a series being released as one campaign, with the English translation timed so that international viewers could buy the source the month before the show reached them.

The compression is worth noticing too. Ninety-eight thousand words became eight episodes. Whatever the series is, it is a substantially reduced version of what the novel is.

BLGLFlix editorial view. Two things on this page cut against the usual account of Thai Girls’ Love, and we think both are more interesting than the show itself.

The first is who made it. The Secret of Us was not produced by a Boys’ Love studio branching sideways, and not by a streaming platform chasing a niche. It was made by Channel 3, a mainstream Thai terrestrial broadcaster, for free-to-air television. When a general-audience national channel puts a Girls’ Love romance in its schedule, the category has stopped being a niche business and become ordinary programming, which is a bigger shift than any streaming commission represents.

The second is who directed it. Saratswadee Wongsomphet directed Yes or No in 2010, the earliest verifiable Thai Girls’ Love feature we hold. Fourteen years later the same director is making Girls’ Love for national television, adapted from a novel with an official English edition. Our own read is that this single career is the clearest measure of the distance Thai Girls’ Love travelled in that time: from an independent film that had to argue for its own existence, to a broadcaster’s summer schedule with a translation deal attached.

What has not changed in those fourteen years is where the story came from. It came from a book.