How. Dare. She.
Be this good at writing AND be a musician and be gorgeous. Ridiculous. I was rapt the entire way through. And very hungry for Korean food.

Crying in H Mart is a touching and heartfelt memoir about the wonderful and complicated relationship between the author and her late mother. Food was one of the things that connected Zauner to her mom and her Korean culture. She takes you into her grief as she struggles with her mom's cancer diagnosis and ultimately her death. A devastating and beautiful read.

Thank you to Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my review.

I cried several times while reading this book. The last time, at the very end, I cried so much into the first Korean food I had eaten in 9 years. This book was heartbreaking for me because the love that Michelle felt for her mother was the same I felt for my grandfather, and I felt we were grieving at the same time. It was similar, but different. I noticed so many feelings and emotions that were buried deep within bubbling to the surface while reading this beautiful memoir of loss, loss, and life. I'm grateful to Michelle for telling her story, and for this book, to which I feel gave me the opportunity and space to grieve for my grandfather. This one is staying on the shelf, while I purchase other copies for friends who are experiencing grief and loss.

Part an account of her mother’s unfortunate death and part food memoir, Michelle Zauner’s “Crying in H Mart” links how food is inextricably tied to her mother and memories of her Korean-American mother are just as tangled in food. She describes the joy they both found in the contrasts and complements of Korean cuisine with infectious delight—no dish goes uneaten, no flavors undescribed.

After Zauner’s mother told her that she was dying of stomach cancer, she spent as much time as possible with her, with the goal to support her as much as she herself was supported. She casts an unflinching eye to the relationship between herself and her mother, who was highly critical and said shockingly hurtful things to her daughter. She shines a spotlight on her own less-than-perfect behavior as well, revealing, no surprise: a typical mother-daughter relationship, full of hurt and heart-stopping love.

Zauner, who greatly regrets her poor Korean-language skills and inability to cook Korean food, hoped to learn as much as she could about cooking Korean food to nourish her mother’s body and soul. But Mrs. Zauner was too ill to cook, and a friend of her mother shut Zauner and her father off from a closer connection to her. She ends up learning how to make authentic dishes by watching the YouTube channel of a Korean-American home cook. (The inspired reader is likely to make her way there as well.)

Although Zauner seems selfish at times, particularly in planning a trip to Korea that her mother was clearly not well enough to enjoy, and getting married to her boyfriend Peter in her mother’s final days, she almost desperately explains how she hoped those things would raise her mother’s spirits and distract them all from the horror of her impending death. Like many adults, Zauner behaves like a child around her parents, and they revert to their past roles—critical mother, provocative teenager, distant father. No one knew that better than her mother. “‘When you were a child, you always used to cling me. Everywhere we went,’ my mother whispered, struggling to get the words out. ‘And now that you’re older, here you are—still clinging to me.’”


Inevitably, the ones we love the most have the ability to hurt us the most. Zauner writes, “There was no one in the world that was ever as critical or could make me feel as hideous as my mother, but there was no one, not even Peter, who ever made me feel as beautiful.” Her enthusiastic prose may be over-laden with adjectives, but what hurtles through the page is her earnestness and honesty. At a time when the United States is reckoning with anti-Asian racism, books like Zauner’s and the story of her lived experience as a Korean-American feels vitally important.

Those familiar with her musical career may be surprised that she rarely mentions her band, Japanese Breakfast. The indie band is receiving national attention and even a recent booking on “The Tonight Show.” A wider audience has led to greater visibility of not just the band but the overlooked human being that she is—a role she takes seriously. “After the shows, I’d sell shirts and copies of the record, oftentimes to other mixed kids and Asian Americans who, like me, struggled to find artists who looked like them, or kids who had lost their parents who would tell me how the songs had helped them in some way, what my story meant to them.” What a brilliant way to connect the reader to her story, using food, the sights and smells we all have in our lives, the scents that a mere whiff of in the grocery store will lead to tears.

“Crying in H Mart”
By Michelle Zauner
Knopf, 256 pages

This honest and illuminating memoir really captured the complexity and enormity of grief. Zauner brought her mother to life through vivid descriptions of her skincare routines, parenting style, and, of course, her cooking. She described all of the food and ingredients so beautifully that I found myself searching for recipes as I read along. Not only was I introduced to Zauner's mother and her lovely family, but also to a culture and cuisine that I did not know much about. You do not have to be a fan of Japanese Breakfast to be truly moved by this memoir, but I'm sure you will be once you have read it. For fans of Rick Bragg's The Best Cook in The World and Tung Nguyen's Mango and Peppercorns.

QUICK TAKE: warning: do not read this book on an empty stomach, because there is a LOT of talk about food in this emotional and well-written memoir about a Korean-American woman who puts her life on pause to come home and care for her ailing mother. Family is complicated, and I feel like while my life experiences are nothing like the author's, I was still able to easily relate to her struggles and family drama, and I ultimately really loved so much about this book. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to find my nearest H Mart.

This is obviously a heart-felt memoir of a young woman’s struggle to come to terms with her mother’s cancer diagnosis and death. Her descriptions of her feelings are passionate and well-written. I realize that she is trying to reconnect with her Korean heritage through the cuisine but, my goodness! It seems like a third of the book was lists of food! I also wish she could have included her husband more in the story instead of him seeming like an afterthought.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Random House for the ARC to read and review.

Wow I really loved this book. The subject matter is sad. Michelle depicts her relationship with her mother growing up, the traumatic experience of losing her to cancer, and the process of grief she goes through in the years afterwards.

Michelle’s exploration of her relationship with her mother is described through food. So much memory and connection is found in food, and you really felt that in this book. It’s definitely a very personal depiction and is more about her side of the relationship, rather than her mother’s. Even though it’s one-sided, her experience of grief is universal and I connected with a lot of it.

Michelle Zauner writes about losing her Mom to cancer, what it was like to grow up Korean-American, how she connects to her family through food (and discovers this while caring for her mother.)

Near the end of the book she talks about finally finding success as a musician, which she never expected, in her band called Japanese Breakfast. The cover of Psychopomp has her mother reaching a hand out.

I was expecting something a bit lighter, maybe a bit more snappy, but I also enjoy grief memoirs, so even though it was slower paced than I expected, I felt a true sense of the author by the end. I also liked hearing her stories about Eugene, Oregon, since that's not too far from where I grew up. I may have spent some time watching the food YouTube videos she mentions, and reading articles about the many H Marts in Oregon. My youngest sister took me to a Korean market in Beaverton that had Koreans upstairs and a kimchee tasting table, but I don't think it was an H Mart.

Japanese Breakfast's album 'Psychopomp' explored Michelle Zauner's grief over her mother's death through music. 'Crying in H Mart' made that exploration through food.

At once lively and poignant, Zauner's memoir proves that her talents extend far beyond singing and songwriting. Her narrative style is conversational: she seems to have a discussion with the reader about her experiences, allowing them to feel her emotions through her words. The language used is eloquent, seemingly effortless, and conveys each fact of Zauner's life clearly.

If the cover and blurb weren't indications enough, food makes for a very important theme in this memoir, tying every single memory together with a discernible thread. When food is abundant, eaten with relish, there is happiness in the household, a ceasefire between mother and daughter. When someone refuses to eat (or is unable to do so), it is obvious that the order of Michelle's world has been upturned and that something is very, very wrong. The dishes themselves are described with great care: their names and backgrounds, how they're made, how they're eaten. You can almost taste them alongside the author as you read along.

Zauner chooses to present her life in fragments. One moment, you're in the middle of reading about her mother's illness; in the next, you're thrown into a flashback of her mother's siblings when young, through a photograph that is one of Zauner's few ties to her mother's past. These changes in scene are often sudden and unexpected, but when you get used to them – when you start to expect them – they stop being so surprising.

A memoir isn't exactly the easiest thing to review: this isn't a story with characters and plot, this is a written representation of a part of someone's life as they saw it. That being said, I can speak for its writing, and that writing is very, very good.

Happy publication day!

Crying in H Mart is the memoir of Michelle Zauner, a singer who records under the name Japanese Breakfast. While the book does chronicle her interest in music and her eventual rise to fame, it is primarily a story of her relationship with her mother, food, and her Korean heritage. Crying in H Mart refers to her grief in the wake of her mother's death; everything in H Mart (a well known chain of Korean grocery stores) reminds her of her late mother.

I really enjoyed Zauner's frank and honest portrayals of her relationships with her Korean mother and Jewish American father. She also uses food as a link to everything in her life- the dishes that she ate in Korea with her family, the food that her mom prepared when she was a child, her own forays into Korean cooking as her mother gets progressively weaker. It was at times difficult and painful to read about her mother's last days, but it was written well. My only complaint is that the beginning is a bit disjointed and difficult to follow because of the timeline jumps. However, the story becomes more cohesive towards the end of the book.

Overall, I thought this was a thought provoking, fairly short read. I definitely recommend giving it a try!

After finishing Crying In H Mart, I had to sit with my emotions for a few days before writing this review. Zauner's debut memoir is at once raw, vulnerable, and deeply necessary. Because of how close the books subject matter was to me as a Korean American, it's difficult to encapsulate everything I felt while reading this book in this review.

I've enjoyed Zauner's lyrics as part of Japanese Breakfast, and it was refreshing to see her writing in a different medium. She share deeply personal parts of her life, some unflattering, without navel-gazing or putting others down. All at once this book was a warm embrace, a reassurance, a message of heartbreak, and a chance for a new start.

Thank you NetGalley and Knopf for providing a free advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

"Save your tears for when your mother dies."

Beautiful, vulnerable, and intensely relatable, Crying in H Mart had me crying from the first pages all the way through to the end. Michelle Zauner's words carry a depth of emotion I can barely only begin to conceive within myself, and every word rings true. Touching on intimate matters of biracial identity and what it means to be connected to the culture or the world of either of your parents, what it means to develop your own identity in the midst of parental expectations, the awkwardness of role reversal when you find yourself caring your parents as their independence wanes, the struggles to orient yourself within your peer group after a foundational experience they are unlikely to experience for decades, and the heaviness of the realization that you were only just beginning to get the know your parent as actual person when they are taken away from you so soon, no single work has hit me this hard in the last decade.

Zauner's narrative style is exceptionally organized with an easy flow that makes it hard to put down, as heavy and painful as it gets sometimes. Food weaves a strong guiding thread through the book that makes the story feel complete. In some chapters, Zauner highlights dishes that bring a cultural connection between mothers and daughters (e.g., miyeok guk, which mothers are encouraged to eat for postpartum recovery and children on their birthdays to honor their mothers); in others, she illustrates her mother's decline in vitality through a loss of appetite and contraction of her palate. It is a magnificent exposition of the way food can build relationships and strengthen bonds--or, in some cases, drive a wedge through an already strained relationship.

"I wondered if the 10 percent she kept from the three of us who knew her best--my father, Nami, and me--had all been different, a deception according to a pattern that together we could recompose. I wondered if I could ever know all of her, what other threads she'd left behind to pull."

What hit me hardest about Zauner's narrative was the urgency with which she yearned to know her mother better by the end. Losing a parent at 25, it's easy to get caught up on what your parent is going to miss in your life, such as with Zauner's rush to get married before her mother passes and her desire for her mom to bear witness to and share in the success of her music career. But what you often overlook, at least for the first few years, is what you didn't get the chance to see of your parent's life. What you didn't get to understand or know about who they are as a person, their deepest pains and fears, the intensity of their love for you. Like Zauner, I lost my mother in my early 20s, and it's not until you start to really become an adult yourself that you realize just how little you know about your parents as actual people; and in those cases, there's no one really around to ask anymore. It was such a beautiful and moving moment for me to see Zauner connect with her aunt in Seoul, despite the language barrier, and begin to see her mom in a new light, and to understand her just a little better.

My truest thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for the eARC in exchange for the review; I'll be cooking Indonesian food and on the phone with my aunt every evening for the foreseeable future if anyone needs me. Highly recommend to anyone with a relationship with their mother.

Holy moly, what an amazing book.

Zauner's memoir is so heartbreaking and uplifting as she chronicles her complicated relationship with her mom and the painful journey of losing someone you love. Each chapter made me tear up so much because she captures so many moments so beautifully, whether it was eating a certain dish or a conversation she has with her mom. I saw my own mom within this narrative and it definitely reminded me to call her and say I love you.

Crying in H Mart is a beautifully written and raw memoir, and I highly recommend everyone to pick it up.

Indie rockstar Michelle Zauner delivers a heartfelt, poetic memoir about losing her mother and searching for her identity. Whether she’s writing about a hurtful misunderstanding or their shared love of Korean food, Zauner shares moments from her tumultuous mother-daughter relationship with tenderness and love. After her mother’s cancer diagnosis, she sets out to connect with her Korean-American identity by exploring the stories of her past. I cried while reading this honest, lyrical memoir and cherished the way Zauner writes about grief, growing up, and making amends.

A striking exploration of grief and identity, I've already recommended this book to my biracial friends. The language can get choppy, but the cleverness is striking.

This is easily the most moving memoir i have ever read (albeit from a small sample size). I know how it is for cultural food to be so deeply tied with my relationship with my mom, and hearing Zauner discuss it so beautifully helped me to see the impact this really has had on my life every day. I cried so much and had to call my mom multiple times while reading this just to say hi. Frankly, i’m crying still now while writing this review. Everyone should read this (and call their moms if they can). It reads like fiction which makes a very easy read to comprehend but it hits so many close-to-home and real points in me that it did take me a while to get through.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this title. I was VERY moved by this memoir, even to the point of tears in certain sections. It was so well written and honest, much like Michelle Zauner's music. It felt very relatable even though I haven't experienced the loss of a parent. Any memoir fan will get a lot from this book.

I often find it tricky to review memoirs and personal essay collections. It’s embarrassing, almost, to judge what you know is someone else’s personal experience and not feel like you’re either being too cruel or too soft. I didn’t know Michelle Zauner or her music — she records under the name Japanese Breakfast — before I read this memoir. My friend was a fan and told me about the New Yorker essay that inspired the book and served as its first chapter, but I went in woefully ignorant, half assuming this would be a companion piece to an album that I wouldn’t fully grasp. What I came away with was one of my favourite reads of the year, and a vivid example of what a great memoir looks like, how it works, how it feels.

The premise of the book is painfully simple — Zauner navigates the grief of losing her mother, the complicated, profound relationship they shared, and the inextricable way it is tied to Zauner’s own sense of identity as a Korean American. Structurally, each chapter functions almost like a mini-essay in itself, though they are generally chronological and interlinked. What’s immediately striking about Zauner’s voice is the easy frankness of it. There are no belabored attempts to ‘explain’ what she’s feeling. The honesty with which she delivers her experiences is enough, and it inspires the kind of pathos that means you don’t just feel for her but with her. She isn’t afraid to bring you all the way up close to the often painfully fraught relationships she has with her parents, her humorous but heavy self-assessments, the cultural confusion surrounding her own identity. The unapologetic, unpretentious honesty she uses cuts right to the quick. Zauner exquisitely renders her relationship with her mother. I could see my relationship with my own mother in there; I think any child of an immigrant parent, any daughter of a mother, will be able to do the same. She implicitly forces the same kind of honesty in you; it’s hard not to read about her parsing through her own relationship with her mother or her culture or her art and feel moved to do the same yourself.

The vehicle for much of Zauner’s relaying of her relationships is food: from the dishes she and her mother would share in restaurants to the aisles of the titular H-Mart, food is how Zauner navigates memory, transcends language, demonstrates bonds. Food is a powerful tool. It’s ability to invoke sensorial experience, to ground you immediately in the how-and-now of a scene, is unparalleled. It can transform reading into a near-tangible experience. But I’m often wary when I see it used as a major element — albeit typically in fiction — because it can have a tendency to wrest control of the whole story. People who choose to write about food typically love food, and often get so swept up in that love they end up losing sight of the story in their quest to play out elaborate culinary fantasies and sense memories on the page. The food eats the epicures. Zauner doesn’t just avoid this trap — she conquers it.

She understands the relationship between food and home and love and culture intimately and knows exactly how to convey it. Her book doesn’t become a vehicle for food porn; food is a vehicle for her own story. It becomes a touchstone, an immediate point of access where you can almost taste her food, and with it, her grief. I’m not being facetious when I say this book frequently had my mouth and my eyes watering simultaneously.

It feels almost pointless to write a review of this book because what is immediately clear is that there is no one better placed to tell Zauner’s story than Zauner is — not just because it is her own experience, but because she is a uniquely capable writer. I can try to explain how good it is and why, but frankly, nothing will be able to convey that as well as reading Zauner’s writing. This book instantly gets under your skin and stays there, and what an honour it is to be a home for it.

This is a memoir that doesn't need to be reviewed - it is raw, packed with unprocessed emotions and evocative.

CRYING IN H-MART captures the Korean culture at its best, which food and beauty are integral part of it. Food as a sole identity and a means by which Zauner's mother expresses her love. Beauty not only as a visual appearance, but rather a way to present yourself into the most perfect version. Both are intimately associated, representing a form of mother-daughter bonding.

I felt every emotion and I could almost feel the depth of Zauner's sorrow. Some moments resonated with me - how our mothers showed the love in their own way, even if it was tough love, industrial-strength. In our grief, we try to rediscover our mothers by rooting around their belongings, in an attempt to bring them back to life.

Besides family and grief, Zauner details her journey as a musician and her relationship with her husband and father.

After reading this memoir, you will mostly appreciate your mother.
Heartbreaking yet healing, this memoir will mess with your emotions.