One of my favorite memoirs to date. Zauner's relationships - most importantly with her mother and with food, are open for inspection and examination. Such a fantastic read. It also made me hungry haha.

Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart is a beautiful memoir that resonates with raw emotion and heartfelt honesty. What struck me most about this memoir is Zauner's ability to weave together the complexities of her relationship with her mother, her Korean heritage, and her own struggles with grief and belonging. Her writing is a vivid portrait of her experiences growing up as a Korean American and navigating the challenges of cultural identity.
As She processes her mother's illness and eventual death, Zauner eventually finds peace and connection through her love of food and music. Crying in H mart is a must read celebration of resilience and the healing power of self-discovery. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC, all opinions are my own.

What a beautiful, emotional, heartbreaking book! From the first chapter, where Michelle tells us about how she experiences grief walking through the aisles of HMart, this book takes you on an emotional journey that is both heartbreaking and poignant. Zauner relates all of the parts of her relationship with her mother, including the ugly parts, but is unflinching in her honesty. Her connection to her mother centers around food, which brings in the HMart aspect of the title. Be prepared to read this book with several boxes of tissues next to you.

I really loved this book - I felt like Michelle dove into so many areas of her life. Her talking about grief and being a caretaker as well as the dynamics of her family was really enthralling and well done. I would absolutely recommend.

It took me a while to start to relate to Michelle and her relationship with her Korean mother. But after several starts it finally clicked and the story started flowing for me. Michelle tries to present her life and relationship honestly. That takes courage on her part and understanding from the reader that this is not a glossy tale of love and food, but rather a tale of dysfunction between mother and daughter that only heals when they both need each other. Crying in H Mart is also a tale of memory embodied in food from Michelle's past. A worthwhile read!

I loved everything about this book. The food, the family, etc. It helped me and my family members come to terms with the recent death of our mother. Highly recommended to people grieving a lost loved one--and anyone who is a fan of good memoirs. Plus, it is quite impressive that Michelle Zauner is such an amazing author in addition to her musical talents.

This book is beautiful and gut wrenching. It’s a memoir of Michelle Zauner’s losing her mother. She writes about growing up Korean American in Eugene, Oregon, but the way she writes about her mother and their relationship—that’s I think of when I think of her book. It’s beautiful and introspective. Every time I see this book on the shelf I feel the love.

Really good. A relatively fast read. If you’re reading to learn something about the leader of Japanese Breakfast, its terrific and enlightening. If you’re just looking for a memoir, its fine. Extremely sad, which is to be expected for covering such devastating events as losing a parent to cancer. I wouldn’t call it anguish porn, its just that bleak, to the point you feel like you’re losing a parent too. At the very least, you’ll learn a lot about korean cuisine and culture and about H-mart, if you don’t already.

This was a lovely book! Sort of a Like Water For Chocolate only Korean American. You will want to have a Korean restaurant nearby. It made me wish there was an H Mart near here! I would love to have some of these recipes. Especially the pine nut porridge. I need to go back through and write down names of dishes to try to find. Ms Zauner has a gift in sharing her journey. A love story for her mother and for the food they shared. There are so many facets to the foods we eat. Very touching conclusion.

A core memory formed for me while reading this book: at a summer cottage by the dock with my eReader, bursting into tears and me whimpering "I want to call my mum now, " and my friend giving me a hug. I call this memory 'Crying on Cottage Dock from Reading Crying in H Mart'.

Everything about this book was filled with a memory and tied to an emotion. Michelle Zauner wrote from her heart and you can sense every anecdote and every food dish she shared dripping with meaning and sentiment. This book is a new favourite of mine, and now everytime I go to a H Mart, I'll think of it.

This stunning memoir shattered me. I cried the entire time. Zauner expertly captured the tenderness and fury in a mother-daughter relationship.

Thank you to Knopf for providing me an uncorrected proof of this book via NetGalley.

Incredibly quiet but so profound, Crying in H Mart is Michelle Zauner's magnum opus and say this as a huge fan of her work under Japanese Breakfast. Seriously, I'm kicking myself for not having read this sooner.

Zauner's account of the events surrounding her mother's death and their effects on her Korean identity is completely engrossing, and so uniquely moving. She has this way of slipping details in that just clothesline the reader without pausing, each chapter delivering a new revelation, each anecdote a perfectly crafted vessel for a new emotional gut-punch. It's one of the most competent portraits of grief I've ever read.

Fans of Japanese Breakfast might be disappointed that she talks rather sparingly about her musical pursuits in the book (at least until the end), but if you're going intoH Mart expecting that, you're after the wrong thing. This is not the work of Zauner's band it's the gentle ruin and reconstruction of a woman whose life is much, much bigger.

There's a reason this book was a #1 nonfiction bestseller for months and months. Pick it up!

A very specific type of memoir about both grief and food, a la Heartburn, but with the poetic writing of a songwriter versus the mind of Nora Ephron.

Michelle Zauner (ie, the beloved front woman for indie pop band Japanese Breakfast) writes about the death of her mother with the eye of a daughter who clearly loves her mother, but doesn’t romanticize their relationship-sharing their early 20s arguments and the underbelly of her parents’ marriage, along with beautiful descriptions of kimchi prep and the love she was surrounded by through her mother and her mother’s Korean family.

Shockingly, I didn’t cry once, but I think it’s because Zauner painted such a clear depiction of true life, love, and grief that I was left feeling incredibly emotional, but without any cheap tricks to make the reader sob-something that is quite hard to pull off.

This was a beautiful memoir about grief, acceptance, and learning about one's culture. Your heart breaks for Zauner as she describes the deterioration of her mother and of her own struggle in trying to help her, whether it's physically or in trying to comfort her. I can't imagine the frustration. Her descriptions of the food she and her mother used to eat together were mouth-watering and it is obvious how much joy it brought them and how important food is to Zauner in connecting with her Korean roots.

This is a 4.5 for me, but rounding down. I requested this on Net Galley after hearing a lot about this from friends.

I don’t know exactly what kept this book from being a 5/5 for me, but there was something missing.

This book was so well written, and the stories were so provocative. I found myself deeply empathizing with her loss and feeling some of her loss through her writing. She was so raw about her feelings and it really made the story more compelling.

I especially loved how she connected throughout the story to how food played such an important role. Food is something that unites all of us and I loved how she was able to take us on her journey while sharing things that matter to her so intimately.

I fully understand the hype about this book and I think it was a great read. I would caution anyone still actively coping with trauma, especially losing a parent or loved one to something like cancer, that this might evoke some serious emotions. But that said, for anyone ready to feel her loss and cope with her, this is the book for you.

What a lovely and well written book about family, love, culture, food, and identity. This has received a lot of acclaim and it is well deserved.

I can see why people would really relate to this book and I enjoy the simple conversational style writing but this wasn’t for me. I couldn’t connect with Michelle and her tumultuous relationship with her mother. However, if you grew up in Eastern Asia and lived a similar experience in regards to the culture and food or growing up as a first generation immigrant surrounded by your parents traditional ways this would definitely connect with you.

(This review was written months after having read the ARC, after dealing with a period of some personal issues. Apologies for the tardiness as I catch up on the backlog of reviews.)

It's a gorgeous and dreamy work that is reminiscent of Zauner's work as musician Japanese breakfast that intertwines storylines about grief – for a demanding mother who dies from cancer – and the specific cultural foods that recall her mother and heritage.

The flashbacks paint a meditative picture of a childhood and coming of age that is both nostalgic yet unflinching, aligning how loss and identity led to Zauner's emergence as an artist. It's heartbreaking to read about those difficult immigrant/diaspora communication gaps between parent and child, and yet so familiar to those of us who've been through it.

Never self-pitying, but still mournful and self-recriminating at times, it's a rather breathtaking memoir for someone making her longform publishing debut. It was blown away but her insight and imagery – what a joy to read.

This is a book about the author's relationship with her mother. Her mother married her father while her father was working in Korea and the two of them then moved to the USA, where the author was born. Her mother, Chongmi, was a huge force in Michelle Zauner's life. Because she was such a strong force, there was a lot of strong conflict. The author was just starting to find her way back to her mother when her mother's cancer diagnosis brought everything into sharp focus.

It's so interesting; everyone's relationship with their mother is so unique and yet it's so easy to recognize ourselves in the description of a different mother-child relationship. My mother is not Korean, but her first language was German, we also ate food that connected me with my heritage, and my mother made sure that I met the relatives that she had left behind when she married my father and began the life of a military wife. My mother also had strong plans for me, most of which I devoted considerable energy to thwarting. And even so, we are alike in ways that I don't want to acknowledge.

All of these themes are part of the book. I looked up the foods that the author described repeatedly. I don't know a lot about Korean food but I've become interested in learning more and this book definitely increased that desire. It's so evident that food connects us to our heritage and our families.

The title of the book gives away that the author's mother did not survive. Michelle Zauner goes into detail on the process of how her mother's health deteriorated, how they tried to find ways to take back control of their lives, and how ultimately they could not. It's heartwrenching and I would say that if you have lost or may be losing your mother, this book is going to absolutely wreck you. Think about if you are ready for it.

The author has a very clear understanding of her past, her self, and her family and she also has the ability to convey this understanding. This is what makes the book so powerful.

I never expected a book about death to be so engaging. I also didn’t expect to relate to Michelle Zauner’s relationship with her mother to this extent.

My love language is preparing food for people, and I got that from my mama. Children of immigrants know this - our parents might not say “I love you,” but they will prepare our favorite foods with love, and bring us cut fruit. I still remember all the elaborate lunches my mom would send me off to school with, from kindergarten all the way to university.

“No matter how critical or cruel she could seem — constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations — I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.”

All the hype for Crying in H Mart is well deserved, it’s definitely one of my favorites of 2021!