Will I love Crying in H Mart?

Michelle made me laugh, made me cry, and made me feel the full weight of reconnecting with a mother only to lose her.

I related deeply to her sense of self unraveling after losing the person who anchored her world—I lost my own mother in my late twenties. Through her vivid memories of time spent with her mother and grandmother, and her journey of reclaiming herself through the foods of her childhood, Michelle pulled me in and carried me forward. 

This book so thoroughly deals with grief in a way that normalizes how gut-wrenching it is to lose someone you love, even if your relationship was complicated. Whose relationships aren't complicated, anyway?

This book reflected a particular story that’s so different from my own—cultural, familial, and otherwise.

Yet the author’s attention to detail and her open vulnerability helped me see myself in it, recognizing that there are echoes of her life in my own, and that so much of what we experience in life is a shared human experience.

The book is beautifully written and a pleasure to read, and it’s helped me see the challenges that I face and the challenges others encounter as something that bind us all together. 

This is a memoir I was able to relate to in so many ways as Michelle opened up about her relationship with her mother and her mother’s battle with cancer. I loved learning about Michelle’s relationship with her parents and family, her childhood, and all the foods that Michelle grew up eating.

It was a beautiful honor for her family and her culture. What I also enjoyed while reading this book was learning about Michelle's early 20s experience as I related to the early 20s adventure of moving to New York to pursue my passion. 

I love this book because Zauner tells her story in a vivid and relatable way. I resonated with Zauner’s identity crisis, her complex relationships with family members, and her single-minded determination to be an artist. Heart-wrenching, honest, and funny at the same time, I could not put this book down.

Michelle Zauner’s writing is rich with detail, especially descriptions of Korean foods and visits to relatives in Korea that blossom with imagery, scents, and sounds. Against the backdrop of those vivid childhood scenes and the food shopping and eating scenes, the story remained vivid as her mother succumbs to cancer.

Two themes struck me throughout the book: Michelle’s father is Caucasian American, her mother is a Korean immigrant, and M. struggles to find her place in either culture. Her youthful rebellion against her mother’s over-protectiveness and very Korean-ness becomes painful to face as her mother is sick and dying.

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Cathartic and raw, irreverent and at times funny, this is Michelle Zauner grappling with losing her mother—and the possibility of losing her Korean-ness and herself.

As a first-generation Chinese-American, I could particularly relate to Zauner’s exploration of food to connect with her mother before and after her death. I was moved by Zauner’s unflinching honesty as she processed challenging and, at times, conflicting emotions and inner enemies.

Like the best memoirs, Zauner’s distinct voice is all her own as she confronts her past and contemplates her future.

In my defense, I read this book long before Jungkook recommended it, and it single-handedly became my gateway drug into memoir. I had never heard of Japanese Breakfast beforehand, but no matter—hers was the kind of story around food and loss that I found incredibly relatable in feeling, even if not in the actual details. 

I craved a book that would distract me from the daily sadness I felt more than a year after my cousin’s death, I knew she wouldn’t want that. I needed something that wasn’t a “how-to” but a “how I got here and what I’ve learned about myself.” This memoir gave me that.

I was gripped by the frank introspection and the way Zauner confirms and affirms her memories now that her mother is gone. That resonated because I have almost no childhood memories that don’t include my cousin, who was more like a fraternal twin because we were raised in… show more.

I snapped up this best-seller to see what the fuss was about. Sure enough, indie musician Michelle Zauner (aka “Japanese Breakfast”) won me over with memories of her childhood meals, fraught relationship with her Korean mother, and the devastation of losing her.

Their love language, food, is so tantalizingly described that I found myself looking up recipes for the succulent dishes Zauner and her mother shared. After one mouth-watering passage, I marinated Korean short ribs for three days and wrapped them in lettuce leaves to feed to my son.

Poignant and heartfelt, Crying in H Mart offers many layers to… show more.