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.

As soon as I heard that the beautiful and heart-wrenching New Yorker article by Michelle Zauner (Japanese Breakfast) was being adapted into a full memoir, it was on my radar. I am so thrilled to have gotten the chance to read it early so that I can recommend it to anyone and everyone I know when it releases. The chapters in this book are so beautiful, sad, at times funny, and well crafted. The way Zauner describes her complicated relationship with her mother is so relatable, and emotional that any daughter will feel connected to this book in some way. I was particularly taken with the connection Zauner draws between food and her mother and her grief - I think it's a unique perspective but also extremely relatable. Highly recommend.

In "Crying in H Mart," Michelle Zauner tells the beautifully heartbreaking story of her complicated relationship with her mother. Zauner weaves her memorial of the trials and joys of being her mother's daughter in a way that is so relatable that the reader can't help but feel along with the author. All the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship are deftly reflected in this intimate memoir, and any daughter will come away from "Crying in H Mart" with a strong sense of being seen.

Growing up in Eugene Oregon with a Caucasian father and a Korean mother, it took the death of her mother from cancer for the author to understand life from her mother’s perspective. And as in many cultures, its food that brings us the most memories. In this case, it was going to the Korean grocery store, H Mart that brings fresh grief as Michelle looks over the shelves of food with which her mother cooked. It’s a moving and honest look at how children's’ relationship with parents change. The beginning chapter alone makes this one of the outstanding memoirs of 2021.

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I had no idea Michelle Zauner was the founder of Japanese Breakfast; I requested this because it sounded like a compelling memoir about a daughter processing the grief of losing her mother, and Zauner delivered on that.

While the story is heart-wrenching and filled with graphic details about her mother's illness, gradual decline, and death, there's also an element of hope in here found in Zauner's journey with her music and art as well as her Korean heritage; namely, Korean food. She turns to the ever-comforting Maangchi (y'all should really check out her recipes if you never have) and the endless aisles of H Mart as a form of therapy and a way to process everything.

If you're looking for a vulnerable retelling of a daughter's love for her mother and her path toward emotional fulfilment, this one's for you.

This was a well-written memoir that touched on family, food, music and grief. I had no idea of who the author was, so I was hoping for a more details/focus on cooking Korean food or the musical journey. This kind of touched on all things, which may appeal more to fans of Zauner.

Crying In H Mart is heartbreaking, insightful, and better than I imagined. Michelle Zauner has a voice outside of her songwriting and I hope to God she'll contribute more to our dried up culture because she's as authentic as they come

Michelle Zauner, most known as the face of Philadelphia indie rock outfit Japanese Breakfast, can never remember the day her mother died. She writes in the early chapters of her debut memoir, Crying in H Mart, this perpetual misremembering causes her guilt and a sense of shame for not mourning the right way.

There really isn’t a rulebook for the way humans grieve, mourn, or remember the ones we’ve lost; and despite her inability to remember something as arbitrary as a date, she will never forget what and how her mother ate. It’s through the relationship with food that connects her and her mother that Zauner is able to document the complex, often sordid relationship between her and her mother — resulting in an earnest, heartbreaking story of a daughter seeking her mother’s affection.

Zauner knows all too well the ways in which our relationships with our parents shape the way we think, feel, and respond to our conditions. For Zauner, her mother’s incessant criticisms of the way she looked and how she behaved built within her a sense of resentment that would eventually push her far away from her home in Eugene, Oregon, in order to embrace her idea of liberation and empowerment.

It’s when she’s exploring the terrain of freedom and struggle as an artist in the northeast that her mother’s health starts to decline — she’s diagnosed with colon cancer. She dedicates herself to caring for her mother and rebuilding what was broken between them. There were few things that brought the two of them a sense of shared, collective joy, so Zauner had to make the most of every moment she felt affection and care. For her it was always food, particularly Korean food from her home country. Zauner writes it’s through the food she prepared, cooked, and ate where she saw a side of her mother she wished she saw more of: a mother who expressed happiness, freedom, and joy — a mother who showed her how to love and celebrate where she comes from.

Zauner explores her most ardent feelings of resentment and desire for her mother to look on her with favor in this deeply empathetic literary debut that weaves together music, culinary arts, and racial identity. Loss creates in us feelings we can’t always explain, rationalize, or process in conventional ways; Crying in H Mart is for everyone who seeks to make sense of it all.

I read through Crying in H-Mart in less than one night. There is something about Michelle Zauner's writing that's so personal, you feel like she's sitting next to you, recounting the stories of her childhood, her adolescence, and the forced thrust into adulthood she experienced with her mother's unexpected diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer and eventual passing.

She begins the novel in such a heart-wrenching way, recounting the number of times she has wound up crying in H-Mart, the well-known Korean grocery store, due to the way so many of the items remind her of her mother, and the way her mother expressed her love through food - a common occurrence for many Asian parents. Throughout the rest of the novel, she rotates between her memories as a child with a Korean mother and a Caucasian father, her rebellious adolescence as she discovered music and wanted to follow a less-than-approved path, to her more recent memories of discovering her mother's terminal cancer diagnosis, and being by her mother's side until her eventual passing.

I loved this novel for the author's vulnerability, the confusion she experienced on her own identity as an Asian American, the way food (especially recipes she learned from Maangchi) is interweaved so seamlessly across so many of her memories, how completely she built out the characters of her family and people around her, and how she recounts living across Oregon, Philadelphia & NYC, and South Korea. In all - a beautiful, thought-provoking, and emotional novel.

I always feel weird reviewing memoirs because it is someone’s personal experience, and it feels odd critiquing it. So instead I’m going to talk about my expectations vs the reality. What I expected was an exploration of grief through food, and the book delivered. Upon finishing I made a large Korean meal because I couldn’t stop thinking about food.⁣
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I also expected Zauner to talk about her experiences being the only Asian American kid growing up, and I kind of got that? I don’t know. A part of me feels like I may have missed something. I think I would have preferred CRYING IN H MART to have been a series of essays, with the thread of her mother and grief. I have read a couple of articles she’s written and they’re fantastic.⁣
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I personally connected with the food references. I understand Zauner’s need to learn Korean cooking because food is so much apart of any culture, and it can be incredibly comforting. I really felt for her when she began learning to cook from Maangchi after her mother died. It’s the way I have been able to connect with being Korean. ⁣
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I had not ever heard of the author before and only grabbed this ARC on a whim after seeing someone I follow on Instagram raving about it and mentioning how food was one of the primary topics. I am a sucker for food memoirs and so was looking forward to drooling through the book, not realizing what I was getting in for.
Basic synopsis, this is a story of a mother-daughter relationship with all its challenges, ups and downs, and annoyances, but, ultimately, a love and closeness that is powerful and intense. The author's mom gets cancer so the entire middle section of the book is dedicated to the horrific and terrifying pain, physical and emotional, that comes with her treatment and care.

Throughout the book, though, are the descriptions of the Korean food that Zauner's mom made and that they ate every summer on their trips back to Seoul. Zauner attempts to re-create these dishes as a way to bond with her mom, to give her mom comfort during her illness, and a way to comfort herself. The details of the dishes, the step-by-step process of how she made some of them, are mouth-watering, but I also felt the love in them, and the power of food to heal, to share a common language, to comfort.

This book is incredibly heart-wrenching and I cried numerous times. I have to say, it can potentially be triggering to some people, as the description of her mom's illness is in all the graphic details, nothing held back. However, it was also incredibly well-written, paragraphs of description, meditations, emotions, so vivid and evocative. It was a page-turner but also a go back and savor sentences and whole paragraphs because of the deliciousness of the writing.

A remarkable memoir.

I guess I feel grateful to have not connected with this book, as it's about the grief of losing a mother. I'm sure this is a case of just not being the person this book is written for.

I really, really loved Michelle Zauner's memoir <i>Crying in H Mart</i>. I knew nothing about Zauner before reading her book (she is a very popular musician) and I think that was best for me! The main focus is all about her mother, whom she lost to cancer when she was 25. The loss was heartbreaking and brought up so many feelings - will Zauner, who is mixed Korean and American, lose her connection to her Korean culture? Will Zauner have the same relationship to her father now that her mother is gone? Zauner tackles her heart-wrenching emotional journey throughout this memoir and yet leaves you love-filled and hopeful.

The one topic Zauner kept coming back to was food. It was the way her mother showed her love, always having Zauner's favorite Korean foods and snacks ready when she was home and always keeping her well-fed and connected to her Korean heritage. When she died, Zauner started watching a YouTube channel to learn how to cook the complicated meals which often took numerous hours or even days to complete. She explores her trips around NY and Oregon to find H Marts and other Korean grocery stores to get the best ingredients and how even that environment would cause her to cry and remember her mother (hence the title). I loved that even though a lot of Zauner's relationship with her mother fit Asian American stereotypes (focus on good grades and schoolwork), it is also so much more than that.

Zauner's exploration of her mixed heritage (something that I share with the author) was also fascinating, especially with the fear that she will lose her connection to Seoul and Korea after losing her mother. She doesn't speak Korean fluently so often struggles to connect with her last remaining maternal relative, her mother's older sister (Zauner had not only lost her mother to cancer but one of her Aunts as well) but still visits and keeps that relationship alive. I love that though losing her mother was a period of deep sadness, there was excess joy for the few years after - when Zauner found success with her music and marriage and began making a career from her passion. It was as if her mother was paving a path for her, in the most beautiful way.

A beyond gorgeous memoir, this book is 10000% worth the read!

Michelle Zauner (aka Japanese Breakfast) has crafted something really special with this memoir. It is an ode to her relationship with her mother in all its complicated, lovely glory. She threads through memories via the vehicle of food, the descriptions of which are vividly rendered. It's a very effective through-line that allows her to really ground the narrative in a powerful sensuousness while allowing for a nonlinear approach. It was also super interesting to read about Zauner's experiences and worries with regard to staying close to her Korean family and the fear of losing that part of her family and self with the passing of her mother. That being said, because this is very much her story, it is necessarily limited by her experiences, which make the text at once imbued with feeling and very focused. This did at times leave me wondering what other members of her family were doing during the events of the memoir, but it doesn't detract from the overall book.

This was an incredibly touching and painful memoir and I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the genre.

FTC disclosure: I received this book from the publisher through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

One of, if not the best, rock n roll memoirs of all time--and it's not even *really* a rock n roll memoir, more on par with Didion, it's a gripping piece about ancestry, loss, and food, and it punches you in the gut over and over and over.

Lyrical in the lovingly crafted images that create a sensory memory. Readers experience the author's grief in such a way that we can feel the vacancy of loss against the vibrancy of an intimately cultural experience.

This is a very moving memoir. I am a quarter Korean and I can identify with all of the Korean food references. My grandmother's world revolved around food and she had a fraught relationship with her daughter (my mother). I can see some parallels which gives the story special meaning to me. That said, I felt the middle of the book really slowed down in pace. It was hard to get through and that's coming from someone with knowledge of the food and culture. I'm not sure how well this will appeal to patrons going into the book without that experience.

I really enjoyed this memoir. Zauner's writing style is beautiful and blunt, as she recounts her life and the time she shared with her mother. I find this book to be the perfect example of "perspective is everything," and I think her retrospective consideration of her mother's actions and the purpose behind them forces the reader to address their own qualms regarding their parents' parenting style. Overall, I really enjoyed this memoir and read it almost as a love letter from child to mother.

This is a beautifully written heart wrenching account of Michelle Zauner's (Who before this book came out was most famous for being Japanese Breakfast, but I think after this book hits the shelves she will be better known for this. It's excellent and unforgettable.) family dealing with her mother's terminal cancer.

I read the first chapter and I thought I knew what I was in for. It's excellently written and it pulls you into what I knew was going to be a sad story filled with memories of food, and Zauner's memories of her mother. Still. This didn't prepare me for the rest of the book. She doesn't simply write about the surface level of her grief. She dives deep and examines the loss from all sides. She examines the relation with her parents, between her parents, all while examining her own identity as the only non-white kid in the town she grew up in.

If you've ever lost someone this book is going to open those old wounds. Zauner captures the delicate pain/anger/blankness you feel in vivid detail. She captures the pain of being a caretaker for someone who never needed one.

And, before you get the wrong idea. This book is also really sweet and funny. The descriptions of the visits to Seoul are a lot of fun. The story about the visit to the spa the first time her parents met her boyfriend, hilarious. There's lots of heartbreak, but there are lots of things to make you heart soar. It's a love story, in parts.

Zauner including unflattering facts about everyone, but especially the extent to which her and her mother didn't get along added a depth to this memoir that was unexpected. I thought it would be a story of grief, (and culinary delights) from that first chapter, but I did not expect to get such a deep reading on what set them apart, which made it when they were able to bond and come together at the end so much more satisfying (and heart breaking.)

One final thought about this book: The scenery was written in a beautiful novelistic way. I felt like I was walking in the streets of Seoul, I could see the house in Eugene were she grew up. She has a knack for description that not only lets you know how something feels/looks like, but it makes you want to reread the sentences because of their impeccable beauty.

I was lucky enough to get an early copy of this book from Netgalley. This did not affect my review.