I read this in one sitting because I know the pain of losing your Mom. What this book does well that a lot of other books handling grief lack is the experiences in life that make your grief pop up (like being in an H Mart). The pain you can feel when she cries out for her Mom will make you bawl.

I liked that the central theme of H Mart, food, and the culture she shared with her Mom and that the story always came back to one of those themes.

I loved her honesty with herself, her parents, her feelings, and the conversations she had with the people in her life. The “what if?” And “why me?” questions suck but you can tell she’s trying to work through them in the ways she knows how.

Overall, Michelle does a really beautiful job of painting pictures with her words when it comes to H Mart, the relationship with her Mom, the pain, and her grief.

I first picked up this book, not because I like the author’s music (which I do), but because I love food memoirs. Crying in H Mart is so much more than a food memoir though. It is the story of a mother and a daughter, sometimes at odds, but caring deeply for each other. This is a story of loss and grief, healing, growth, and culture. Parts of this book are completely heartbreaking and I had to put the book down for a couple minutes. Korean food is what ties the story all together, both Zauner eating it and learning to make it on her own to feel closer to her mother after her passing.

To put it simply: I love this book. I won’t say that I “enjoyed” it, because it was quite sad at times and hit pretty freaking close to home. It was easy to read though and I really liked the author’s voice. It is personable and feels like a friend telling me about their life. I am also very close to my mother, so it was very difficult to read the parts where her mother is going through cancer treatments and her eventual passing. It was beautifully and vividly written, though; I could picture the scenes in my head and feel the emotions that the author evoked.

Honestly, I’m having a hard time completely and succinctly putting my feelings for this book into words. Just read it. It was fantastic. It contains so much in an unassuming package. Be prepared for some tears, especially if you’ve lost a loved one to cancer. Expect to get super hungry at all the delicious-sounding food mentioned. You will commiserate with Michelle and you will root for her as she goes through her 20s to become the awesome lady she is today.

One part that I had to mention: There is a whole passage about the band Modest Mouse. I love this band. They are my favorite band! I am very jealous that Zauner got to see them in the early aughts, which I would argue was their best era, but it was really neat to read her description of a show she went to and the first time she went crowd surfing!

Read this is one sitting. The author explores the complicated relationship between her mother and herself and finds comfort in learning more about her heritage through food and her Korean family. She also finds her own identity.

In this memoir, Zauner explores her complicated relationship with her mother and father, while exploring issues of personal identity as a multiracial woman. While I connected to this book based on my own Korean-American background, I feel anyone who has a deeply loving, but also sometimes dramatically fraught mother/daughter relationship will identify with this book. The author strikes a delicate balance between showing the terrible and lovely sides of herself and her family, which were pushed to their extremes when dealing with her mother's cancer diagnosis and subsequent death. Zauner also gives luscious descriptions of food, and how she bonded over food with her mother. There were a few times when I felt the writing was just a tad overwritten (for example, I needed to re-read a passage a few times to understand it), but overall, a moving memoir.

This book is a moving account of a mother/daughter relationship that captures all of its complexities. Love and guilt, disconnect and respect, and hopes and regrets weave together to depict a new perspective and wholly unique relationship while also presenting the universals highs and lows of loving someone fully. The author’s love for her mother is so clear and visceral, readers will be able to feel her pain in their own gut as they read. Devastatingly real, heartfelt and relatable, Zauner has laid out her heart in this beautiful and emotional memoir.

Wonderfully memoir that recounts a complicated mother-daughter relationship and the potency of grief. Food is a recurring motif that highlights cultural connections and familial bonds in lost, found and rediscovered.

I was excited to read Michelle Zauner’s new book because I love memoirs told through food and how cooking can being us so much comfort when we need it. The book was a heartbreaking memoir beautifully told. The writing about the food was so realistic I could practically taste the foods in my mouth---even though I haven’t heard of many of these foods before. I also enjoyed her depiction of her complex relationship with her mother. The food tied together the past, present and future and enabled Zauner to also describe her relationship with both of her parents, but especially her mother, in a profound way instead of linearly. I enjoyed the way the story dipped back and forth from the past to the present. Her descriptions of people, places such as H Mart and S. Korea, and the food were so well done. I felt like I was really there in her pain and loss, this was a truly moving story that made me tear up. I would have loved to have more explanation about what some of the foods were.

Crying in H Mart is a moving memoir by the ever so inspiring Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast. I'm a Japanese Breakfast fan and after having read this book, I am even more impressed by her journey as a musician. The whole book felt like a tribute to her Korean mother. It is so heartfelt and so relatable. I cried through so many sections of this book and it really put me in a reflective mood. Though I am not Korean, I fully related to the idea of food being a love language and how food often triggers memories of home and comfort. It made me so appreciative of my (Asian) culture, trips to Asian supermarkets with my mother, and my mother.

This is a 2021 favorite and I will be recommending this to everyone and especially fellow Asian Americans. I am grateful to the publisher and NetGalley for letting me read an advanced copy of this beautiful memoir. Thank you to the author for sharing your grief and words with us.

Author Michelle Zauner is better known as indie musician Japanese Breakfast, whose 2017 album Soft Sounds from Another Planet is all-hits-no-skips for me. I can pick that record up in any mood, weather or situation, and take away something new. Zauner’s memoir, Crying in H Mart, is no different. The essay collection tackles food, grief, family and identity with incredible intimacy, and have parts I’ll return to forever. Zauner writes each piece like it’s a song, or more specifically, a sweeping ode to all that has made her. Dive into the titular essay, originally published in The New Yorker, and just see if you can resist picking up the rest.

I included this in my preview of winter and spring titles for Book & Film Globe: https://bookandfilmglobe.com/fiction/seven-books-to-look-forward-to-in-2021/

Thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for the ARC.

🎸 CRYING IN H MART 🎸

As an angsty high school girl in Ohio, I devoured as much @jbrekkie as possible (obviously). Her lyrics are smart and compelling, so it was a good bet that Michelle Zauner’s memoir would be just as good.

It did not disappoint!! I was crying and calling my mom by the end of it. Zauner outlines her relationship with her mother and Korean heritage while detailing her mother’s death from stomach cancer. It is extremely vulnerable and evocative, recalling meal after meal Zauner shared with her mom and dad.

Not everything has to have an environmental bent, and certainly that is not the goal of this memoir. However, I was struck by Zauner’s descriptions of growing up mixed race in Oregon, a place of intense natural beauty that runs alongside myopic whiteness.

Preorder a copy for April 20, 2021! Prepare to cry...

This book was very heartfelt, and I only hesitate to recommend it to my friends because of how (although beautifully written, poetic, and downright lyrical in parts) emotionally heavy it gets. Topics of growing up mixed race, as an ethnic minority, not quite fitting in both the United States/back in the motherland, or as someone with different views on religion from the other fellow Koreans in their town are covered, but it all goes back to the author's relationship with their mother. The core of this book is the author's relationship with their mother, and while it is far from perfect, it is, as the mother's favorite word goes, lovely.

I've sat here staring at the review box for ten minutes because I'm at a total loss when it comes to accurately describing the way this book made me feel.

You may know Michelle Zauner from her dreamy albums under the moniker Japanese Breakfast. You may have read the titular essay in the New Yorker when it went viral--with good reason--in 2018. Maybe you don't know her yet. After reading her stunning debut, I promise you'll remember her.

Crying in H Mart is a series of essays about Zauner's relationship with her late mother. She takes the reader through her unwavering childhood adoration, teenage relationship strained between her mother's Korean heritage and blunt love and wanting to disappear via assimilation with her white Oregonian classmates, and her mother's devastating and unexpected illness. Throughout the text, Zauner lovingly details her family's shared bond over good food, illustrating how it can make or break a relationship, become your safe place, or change the course of your life. For Zauner, Korean food her mother lovingly prepared became a therapeutic coping mechanism in the wake of her untimely death. Zauner learned to cook (and eat) through her grief and celebrate her mother's life and their Korean heritage along the way.

Zauner's writing is incredible. She instantly pulls the reader into her world, providing colorful detail without unnecessary exposition. She has mastered how to balance moments of anger, stubbornness, and jealousy with underlying fear, embarrassment, and love. She embraces the messiness of being human--of having a close relationship with a mother whose love is complicated. She is honest, and she writes about grief in a way unlike anything I've read before. I ached for her. I had to stop reading several times to try and pull it together after breaking down into a pool of tears too messy for a woman I didn't know--for women I don't know. Her writing is infuriatingly beautiful, and her ability to work through her grief and share these complex moments with the world admirable.

I am so thankful to the publisher and NetGalley for letting me read an advanced copy of this text, and I am even more indebted to Zauner for writing it.

The title of this book immediately caught my attention, but it wasn't till far into the book that I found out the author is the singer of Japanese Breakfast. But this book isn't about her life as a singer. Rather, it's about Zauner's Korean mother, their relationship, and ultimately, her mother's demise. She writes of shock, bargaining, grief, and all the myriad emotions that are part of the process of losing someone you love to an illness that ravages them. At the same time, Crying in H Mart is also about the experience of being mixed and about how she connected/connects to the culture of her mother's side of the family. After finishing this book, it's clear that Zauner is multitalented-- she can sing, write, and even make kim chi. I hope that she found some solace in recording her experience and sharing it with the world.

Absolutely loved this book. So honest and heartwrenching. Food component was great. I read it in one day.

What a beautiful, heartbreaking, witty, and moving memoir. As a fellow Asian American who has never felt she really belonged in either country, Michelle's story was relatable in so many ways and I truly admire her tenacity. Reading it made me feel understood and seen and reminded me of our underlying shared humanity. And while our cultures may be different (I'm Chinese American), the use of food essentially as a love language was so poignant and felt so true to my family's values as well. I finished the book feeling inspired to spend more time with my parents, both learning about our family and roots in China and learning how to cook. An absolute favorite that I'll recommend to many of my Asian American friends.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review!

This is exactly the type of book that is I gravitate towards - family relationships, memoir, Asian-American culture, food. This book hit perfectly on all of those points for me. Growing up feeling torn between two cultures, Michelle details the ways in which her mother represented everything Korean in her life and the impact that has made on her.

Her writing is witty, descriptive, and engaging. This story reminded me so much of my relationship with my own mother - the complexities of culture clashes, constant power struggles, and strange ways in which love is given and received. The writing was impeccable and very impressive for a debut author. This was such a great read and has become one of my all-time favorite memoirs!

"When I go to H Mart, I'm not just on the hunt for cuttlefish and three bunches of scallions for buck; I'm searching for memories. I'm collecting the evidence that the Korean half of my identity didn't die when they did. H Mart is the bridge that guides me away from the memories that haunt me..."

In short, Crying in H Mart is the memoir of a woman who has lost her mother to cancer. Michelle was born in Seoul to a Korean mother and American father with a traumatic past. During most of her earlier years, being half Korean was somewhat inconsequential to Michelle, and not particularly outstanding to her...serving more to separate her from her friends in Eugene, Oregon than anything else. Despite yearly trips to Korea, at which she struggled to understand Korean and enjoyed eating more than just about anything else, Michelle's Korean-ness was unremarkable.

Once Michelle's mother becomes terminally ill, everything changes for her. She returns home from her carefree life in Philadelphia to help care for her bedridden mother and to bond with her as never before, and in so doing, becomes fascinated with learning to cook Korean food, at first to help to feed her mother, who can hardly tolerate any food at all, and later to "become" her mother. This pursuit turns more compelling after her mother passes away, leaving Michelle totally bereft and searching for meaning in the aftermath. It is then when Michelle intentionally and passionately seeks to connect with her Korean side, and she narrates her journey with intimate details of her thoughts and feelings. Her relationship with her father is a tenuous one, and as he moves further from her in real life, Michelle becomes closer to her mother in death than when she had been alive..

This memoir is heartbreaking and beautifully written. I feel that there were too many elaborate descriptions of food and recipes, that at times served to slow down the story for me, but in all it is a read that takes us into the author's mind as a biracial person who is negotiating her identity, and as a person who has suffered an irreparable loss. TW for those who have lost or are losing a person to cancer.
#NetGalley #CryingInHMart

Heartbreaking and healing, this may have been the best memoir I have read since Know My Name. Michelle intricately weaves together the grief of losing a parent and the navigation of identity in a way that welcomes the reader in effortlessly. While I have extremely limited knowledge of Korean food, it was so easy to identify with the ways that specific foods can trigger memories and feelings of home and family. This memoir is moving, thoughtful, and extremely clever.

I loved it. It was heartfelt without being sappy; the descriptions of food and Korea were transporting. Really solid memoir about a difficult time.