Crying in H Mart is an engaging and personal exploration of identity, family, loss and life, and food. Michelle is a likable and eloquent narrator; her writing flows naturally enough that it is easy to read and enjoy, but with enough imagery and detail to add beauty to the everyday scenes and the tragic, heartfelt moments.

This wasn't a book that I consumed quickly and urgently; instead, it was one that I enjoyed bit by bit, often with long breaks between chapters. Occasionally, I found myself skipping through some of the lengthier descriptions of food, but despite this I still loved the ongoing image of food bringing people closer to each other and to their own sense of self.

With thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for my ARC.

Warning: This book may break your heart. But it's very much worth the read, and then some. I was initially attracted to this book because of the catchy cover and especially the title, as I am a huge H Mart fan and love shopping there whenever I can. When I read the description, it gave me pause, because it does chronicle the ending of her mother's life to cancer. My mom died of cancer as well, 20 years ago, and some days the wounds are as fresh as the day she died. But I plowed ahead anyway.

Michelle Zauner is in a popular band called Japanese Breakfast, and wrote this book originally as an article published in The New Yorker. Her mother is Korean, and her father is white, and she grew up in Eugene, Oregon feeling as if she's half in one world and half in another. As an independent and headstrong woman, she butted heads with her mother frequently in her teenage years, and in growing up and trying to make it as a musician in Philadelphia. Until one day she got "the phone call".

After her mother's cancer diagnosis, she moves back to Eugene, Oregon to help her mother get through her treatments and spend as much time with her as possible. I don't want to get too deep into the details of the story, because the journey in this book is emotional and personal and deserves to be read. I felt like I was there to bear witness to her grief and anguish, and in doing so, share some of mine which paralleled when my mother was diagnosed with glioblastoma, a very aggressive type of brain cancer.

This book will make you cry. This book made me cry through so much of it. Cathartic, perhaps, but also I was sniffly most of the way through this book. I had to read something else for awhile here and there just to give myself some breathing space. There was a special scene at her mother's death where her dad took off her mother's wedding ring and placed it onto Michelle's finger on her right hand and a keepsake. I cried as I read it, remembering my mother's wedding ring that I still have in my own jewelry box.

One of the best yet painful memoirs I've ever read to date. I'm still processing her story, as I just finished it last night but wanted to get a review out while the details were still fresh in my mind. Having lost my mother when I was 25, there were so many parallels in her story and mine. We both shared that helpless feeling of not being able to fix it, how to navigate a world where a strong mother was the dominant force in your family, and the dreams of my mom after her passing that were so similar to hers.

I received an early release copy from NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion, however it in no way influenced my review. This was one I would be reading regardless.

This memoir was simply stunning. Reading about Michelle's complicated, loving, confusing, depth-filled relationship with her mother, her father, and her extended Korean family members was both an utter joy and a heartwrenching look wading through loss and grief. I don't know what I expected going in, but this was just so beautifully written that it has shot up onto my list of all-time favorite memoirs. Highly recommend.

Absolutely stunning. Michelle's story made me ugly cry again and again as we all lived through the life that she and her mother shared. The grief that she felt is heavy within my own heart after reading this. I will be recommending this one to everyone.

A beautiful, heart wrenching novel that tells the story of a mother and daughter through Korean food. I could almost smell the dishes they made, the detail and care that goes into the descriptions makes the “food” a main character. Ultimately this is a story of survival and healing, and the path to get to that point. I highly recommend this boo.

** I received an electronic ARC from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review of this book.

Huge fan of Japanese Breakfast and this really shook me up. Psychopomp is an emotional record and this cuts even deeper by diving into events that led up to the recording of the album. Beautiful memoir chronicling the loss of her mother, navigating her korean-american identity and filial love through food. Sharp confessional style. Lovely.

This books is as beautiful as it is wrought with pain. Zauner gives us an incredibly intimate and honest look into her relationship with her mother before, during, and after her death from cancer. At times I was surprised with how frank and honest she was - laying bare her grief for us to examine.
But this is not a narrative tale. Each chapter felt like an essay exploring a new and different way that our cultures and our grief snake their way into the tiny crevices of our lives. The novel is the combination of a love letter, an apology note, and a reflection on the author's family. The mistakes she's made paired with the beautiful moments she has shared.

I blew through this book once I was able to give myself over to the fact that is was absolutely going to make me cry and maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. As a first generation American and someone who has lost a parent, the stories cut deep but Zauner's writing style kept me going rather than tempting me to step away.

Intertwined in this book are snippets for the author's relationship with her now-husband and bandmate, which is incredible in itself and how much it endured during the years detailed in this book. In fact, there is a lasting love and appreciation the author holds for so many of the characters in this book, which makes it a really wonderful read.

This book was so engaging and moving to read. My background and childhood are completely different than the authors but based on her descriptions and stories I felt like I could see the places she was talking about and smell all of the amazing food. It was so interesting to read about her life and her interactions with her parents. With each chapter she revealed more and more of her family and childhood experiences and I could not put this book down.

A thank you to Netgalley for sharing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I love multicultural memoirs and admire authors who are willing to share their personal stories so that others who can only stand to gain from the opportunity to walk into someone else's shoes. I'll be the first to admit that I'm far from a culinary queen, so much of the food talk went straight over my head. I can, however, relate to a mother who continuously demonstrates her love through cooking. I can also understand how losing one's mother would bring about an unparalled grief and I'm not ashamed to admit that a cried. A beautiful, heartbreaking read and I thank Zauner for sharing her story. Recommended it today on our weekly Facebook Live librarian's recommended reads episode.

vivid and heartbreaking. this was such a gorgeous memoir of grief, loss, and love, and michelle zauner did such a phenomenal job capturing the person her mother was in this book. i'm so glad i got the chance to read an arc of this, as i loved it completely. zauner is a talented musician and also a skilled memoirist; she writes about people and places and food so clearly that they seem to jump off the page. this was such an amazing memoir that filled me with so many emotions, and i highly recommend preordering a copy if you can.

I received an ARC from Netgalley in exchange of a review. All opinions my own.

CW: cancer, terminal illness, death of parent.

Such an evocative memoir.

Although I am not a very non-fiction kind of person, I am trying to encourage myself to read more books that I would not read spontaneously, but that I think I would enjoy if I just give them the chance. In this case, it was the way that the author talked about food in the blurb, it brought me memories from home. Whilst not so racially charged and with many differences, I am an immigrant in another country, as was my mother, and food and flavour bring similar memories to me. I can prove it with the huge bottles of cola cao that I hoard in my pantry.

Mainly, I absolutely adored the way it was written. I found it very accessible despite some hard themes. It was not unnecessarily adorned, or tedious. Despite sometimes narrating challenging moments, overall, I felt it as a very page turning and interesting book. It was such a delight to read, as it felt like reading a letter from a close friend. I really enjoyed how she described her relation with her family, as I found it very relatable for myself, but also for many people around my age in one way or another. Maybe not because of Michelle being mixed race, but wanting to pursue her dream as a musician, growing up in a tiny and isolated village, parents with very high expectations, studying away from home, or having a terminal illness in the family. I don’t know, I felt as there were many points in which the reader could feel that their lives are not so different but very relatable.

It was very interesting for me, at a personal level, reading about her travels to Korea as it was evocative of my own travel to my mother’s country when I was younger. Her way of dealing with the people and the whole experience of being in a country from which you are from, but at the same time aren’t, is a very specific one and I think she managed to make it widely accessible even for people who may not have had that experience growing up. I sometimes found myself marvelled on how accurately she could describe some acts and inner feelings that I may have felt, but was unable or incapable of describing.

Despite the situation, Michelle narration was a true delight and I found her introspective narration engaging and very interesting to read. Even people with similar experiences would not have similar feelings or reacted way different but she makes it easily understandable and even relatable to any similar experience you may have had. Again, it was one of the things I enjoyed the most. I wanted to keep reading and reading out of interest and concern on how would her life continue and what was going to happen next.

Besides: the food. The way she narrates and describes the different dishes made me so curious and intrigued to try many recipes. I am a little bit familiar with the Korean kitchen and culture, still it has made nothing but encourage me to search and look for more ingredients and recipes and even youtube chefs to elevate the book to another whole level. And the same goes for the music as I found myself listening to Michelle’s own one Japanese Breakfast, while reading the pages.

As to whether or not read the book, I would absolutely recommend it unless it is triggering for you in any way. I was familiar with the author because of her music, although not a hardcore fan, and did not know much of her personal life but this is a memoir that I will probably read again and recommend to my friends and customers.

I'm disappointed that I had to DNF this book. Made it 36% (to ch 8). It’s a hard book to read— so descriptive of the pain she’s going through, but it left me feeling disconnected to the people in her story. Without that, I didn’t have the motivation to push through that pain. I could see it being helpful for someone in a similar situation, but possibly very triggering too.

“Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?,” mused Michelle Zauner in her 2018 New Yorker essay, by the same title, and the springboard for this memoir. I read the essay after discovering and falling in love with Michelle’s solo music project, Japanese Breakfast, sometime after the release of her 2016 debut album, Psychopomp. A few Google searches later, I learned that the album was a tribute to her mother, who appears on the album’s cover, and which served as a channel for Michelle’s grief and loss following her mother’s death in 2014.

Although I don’t share Michelle’s Korean heritage, and nor am I mixed-race, I strongly connected and empathized with her struggles with identity, cultural heritage, and generational differences that come with being raised by immigrant parents. Like Michelle, I have always strongly connected to my cultural heritage by means of food, and similarly had the misfortune of seeing my mom struggle with survival in the face of a dismal cancer diagnosis when I was a teenager. As I read Crying in H Mart, I kept thinking about all the times I’ve stood in supermarkets, baffled by all the ingredients I grew up seeing in our fridge and cupboards - now suddenly intimidating and unfamiliar - and being able to call my mom and ask for guidance and advice on family recipes, finally bonding with her after the rocky years of my teen angst.

At the core of Crying in H Mart is Michelle’s relationship with her mother, both tumultuous and loving, often strained by virtue of cultural and generational differences alone. Born in Seoul to a Korean mother and an American father, and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Michelle’s Koreanness was unremarkable at best, alienating at worst. Trips to Korea with her mother were pleasant, but Michelle’s lack of fluency in Korean led her to mostly connect with her Korean family through food. After moving east to pursue a life not necessarily aligned with her mother’s hopes for her, Michelle’s urgency to connect and make amends with her mother sets in with the horrifying realization of her mother’s terminal illness; a race against the ruthless clock of cancer to not just to prove herself a good daughter, but to grasp and assert her Korean heritage.
A primer in the messiness of life, loss, grief, and identity, Crying in H Mart was a poignant story made enjoyable by Michelle’s unique voice, humor, and candid writing. I look forward to more of Michelle’s artistic and creative endeavors.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

This was as heart-wrenching and healing as I had hoped it would be. I've followed Michelle Zauner's writing and her music as Japanese Breakfast for a few years, and her memoir blew me away with its explorations of memory, love, loss, and food. I read this book in a few sittings and cried every time. It's an incredible depiction of Zauner's relationship with her mother with all of its complexities, as mother/daughter relationships tend to have. The vivid, sensory descriptions of Korean dishes and cooking reminded me of the importance of food as emotional, as well as physical, nourishment.

The different facets of loss are so viscerally rendered at every stage, particularly the cultural dimension of grief that is felt by so many children of immigrants. As a second gen Asian American myself, this story hit so close to home, particularly the tenuous connection we often have to our homeland through our parents. My mother was diagnosed with two types of cancer a few years ago and I've found myself similarly trying to recreate the meals of my childhood as a way to cope, using cooking as a way to remain connected to both her and my heritage.

I've never felt so understood and comforted by a book. I appreciate the balance Michelle's prose struck between confronting the messy, ugly feelings of grief and giving space to heal and excavate meaning.

This beautiful, touching, elegant memoir highlights the lead singer of Japanese Breakfast’s relationship with her Korean mother, from clingy youth, to angsty teen, through a post-grad growing bond over food that’s cruelly cut short by cancer. Her description of the dishes so culturally important to them are expertly crafted so that even the most meat and potatoes reader will savor each sentence. I ached for the author’s blooming relationship being cut short, never knowing how it would evolve deeper into adulthood. The description of her sold out show in her mother’s country, in the city she was born in, brought me to unexpected tears. One does not need to be a fan of the author’s band, or a foodie, to appreciate any and all parts of this memoir. Truly an exquisite, moving work.

The author does a fantastic job of writing in a style that makes the reader feel as if they are experiencing the story in real time. The flow of the story seems effortless and natural. The strong bonds between family and food as "an unspoken language between us, that (it) had come to symbolize our return to each other, our bonding, our common ground" express a universal truth. This truth is expressed in a way that while being specific to Korean foods, is relatable to all families with traditional foods that evoke strong feelings.

I appreciate the amount of Korean words and are integrated into the text. It is not overdone nor used as a gimmick to try to gain multi-cultural credibility. The Koreans words and phrases are included seamlessly so that the reader can understand that the word is a food, affectionate term, article of clothing, etc. without out need for a direct translation.

The memoir Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is a welcome addition to the memoir shelf. love,loss and food goes right to the heart.

I love this memoir about food as a transcendent force: it connects us to our identity, our memories, and the people we love.

I had just finished reading Brother's Keeper by Julie Lee when I started the pre-pub for this book. In Brother's Keeper, two children are fleeing North Korea and look for kimchi left behind as they travel from one abandoned house to another. I loved how Zauner tries to connect to her mother through the foods and flavors of her native South Korea. It's hard to make peace with the ghosts of our parent's disapproval. They say we marry our father but I married my mother and carried her criticism with me throughout adulthood. Zauner relives for us the memories of a childhood of never measuring up. She surprises us with her strength and resilience in the face of her mother's lack of sympathy and difficult expectations. We never see her give up or give in and her fight for self-awareness is remarkable. I loved this book a lot more than I thought I would.

This book made me depressed and hungry, and crave for Korean food. I wasn't too familiar with Michelle or <i> Japanese Breakfast<i/> before I read this memoir, but 20 pages in I searched their music up and I was in love.

I loved the writing, how it read unlike most nonfiction that I usually don't enjoy much. I felt the grief shown in the book so deeply, I cried multiple times. Detailed descriptions of various Korean food and the cooking process was interesting to read as someone who enjoys Korean food as well. The struggles of growing up mixed hit close to me, and I enjoyed reading about Michelle growing to want to be closer to her mother through their shared culture and finally accepting it as a big part of her identity.

I am also happy to have found a new artist to listen to.