Crying in H Mart

Michelle's descriptions of family, food, grief, trauma, and her relationships with her family and husband are immersive, honestly descriptive, and heartfelt.

This memoir dragged on too much for me. Found it hard to enjoy. Lots of repetition as well.

Crying in H Mart tugs at the heartstrings of the reader, making them live in the world of Michelle Zauner. The book is an ode to the feeling of losing someone, it describes Zauner's battle with self-identity inside an American landscape while raised by a Korean mother.

Strong words are abundant in the book, picturing a heavy sense of not only grief, but also hope. Zauner logs her emotional journey in a manner that is true to life and honest, not holding back on uncomfortable subjects.

It's a very good book to reflect upon life and relationships.

Man, what a memoir. This woman really went through it. The writing is heavy but beautiful. Michelle talking about her mom and not being able to remember the date of her passing was so relatable. I can see why this is on every best of list this year. Also, the food descriptions are sublime.

My goodness this was devastating. Beautiful and visceral, but devastating. Zauner writes about her relationship to her mother through the experience of cancer, but more so through the experience of food, and how that connected her to her mother and Korean identity.. If the old adage about the stomach being the way to one's heart, this book proves it. It has a slow start but once it picks up, it takes a firm grip on your heart (and stomach) and doesn't let go until long after you're done (so much so that I went on a special trip to H-Mart the very day I finished it!).

I hadn't ever really been interested in autobiographies or memoirs, but reading Crying in H Mart as my first was all that I could ask for. I enjoyed this book more than I thought it would, especially Zauner's ability to make me feel her emotions - sad, happy, stressed - all of them. For anyone curious about reading this book or worried about not enjoying it, dive head first!

3.75 stars

Loved how descriptive and insightful this memoir is. Thank you for writing it and sharing it with people.

One sentence synopsis... A plainspoken, honest essay that became a layered memoir about loss, grief, Korean culture, and a mother-daughter relationship.

Read it if you like... Japanese Breakfast. Or if Lane was your favourite Gilmore Girls character.

Further reading... for the mother-daughter dynamics, A Mercy (Toni Morrison). For the Korean culture, Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 (Cho Nam-ju).

Thanks to Knopf and NetGalley for the digital ARC. I wasn't compensated for this review, and all opinions are my own.

Wow, this memoir. I think I was worried that the book would be much more focused on Zauner's musical career (which didn't interest me that much, as I didn't even know who Japanese Breakfast was before I heard about this book). But it ended up being this beautiful, complex, at times painful book about mother-daughter relationships, grief, food, what it means to be part of two cultures at once (but never really enough). At no point was this book over the top or sickly-sweet. But it was also pretty raw. Definitely a memorable book that I will be purchasing for my shelf.

The mother-daughter dynamic is a slow and careful walk, holding hands, across a shaky bridge over the abyss. During the teen years, the hands are often dropped and the bridge is generally missing whole sections.

Crying in H Mart is the story of Michelle Zauner's fraught relationship with her mother. Her mother is seen as demanding, petty, unrelenting. Michelle is described as a difficult child. Their relationship is turbulent. The two find moments of peace together through the common bond of their deep love for Korean food.

And then Michelle's mother gets sick. And then she dies. And Michelle is allowed, finally, to cry, to weep, to wail.

Crying in H Mart is a story anyone who has battled with a parent, anyone who has tried to connect with a parent, anyone who has lost a parent can read and love. The writing is vivid, fresh. The stories are completely new while also feeling common to all of us. Zauner does go on a bit too much (for me) about food; at times, I got lost in the detail and in my unfamiliarity with the foods described. But the emotional connection with this book is powerful and evocative and, oddly, healing.

A very raw and personal journey through one woman's life balanced between two very different cultures, trying to find her own path aside from her mother's culturally infused parenting only to be confronted by a looming loss that will change her perspective and course in life and find some solace in the same culturally significant things she once felt removed from through her childhood and adolescence.
It is interesting that though we all go through personal losses that seem so isolating at the time, the feelings, thoughts, pain and turmoil you experienced are so similar to others stories. Michelle's story definitely hit a nerve and very close to home in a lot of ways. Although I haven't experienced the same cultural and racial trials she has, I did understand all too well the heart-breaking journey of cancer and loss. Her story is so many of us who have had to go through that same journey and the turmoil, grief and pain it inflicts, but also how we find ways to cope and connect afterwards.
I enjoyed Michelle's honest and raw way she wrote her personal journey and how her mother's Korean culture was both a separating and connecting string through it. It opened a door for me about the Korean culture itself - especially the food (I want to try SO much of it!) and the difficulty of finding an identity of her own when she was born of two cultures and both wanted to honour that, but also carve her own path. It has not something I've had to grapple with myself, but Michelle's writing made me feel empathy for her struggle.
Lots of feels, lots of food and a very good story of dealing with loss and of forging a path ahead that both honours the past and takes what we learn from our parents and grandparents into the future.

Zauner has managed to write the impossible grief memoir — scrumptious and scathing.

The book grew out of a viral essay of the same name that appeared in the New Yorker. It's about growing up in Oregon with a white father and Korean mother. A mother whom Michelle lost to cancer when she was 25.

We see her mother succumbing to the cancer and Zauner navigating that time with her father. In that sense it is a novel exploring her grief, but for me it's the recollections of food that evoked such strong memories of my own. So much shared experience buried in the food. The miyeokguk served on birthdays, the bitter herbal remedies insisted upon, the foraging of banchan in an aunt's fridge, the quick comfort found in jjajangmyeon, the long unbroken apple peels. Even the discovery of Maangchi and her enthusiastic recipes for Korean food follow a familiar to me trajectory.

It is also Zauner discovering her own Koreanness that hit home. Recollections of Hangul Hakkyo, her pat Korean phrase to explain her lack of fluency, and growing up in a mostly white suburb. In writing a deeply personal book Zauner manages to evoke an incredible amount of resonant emotions. It's not going to hit the same way for everyone else but I couldn't help but love this read.

For a biting epilogue that shows how sharp her writing remains, read her essay in Harpers Bazaar (When My Mother Died, My Father Quickly Started a New Life. I Chose to Forgive Him) where she writes about how her father moved on after his wife's death by dating an Indonesian woman 7 years younger than Michelle herself.

This is such a beautiful and visceral book! It's of course so sad about Zauner's mother's passing but I felt like I got to know her a little bit which was lovely. It's also a book that will make you very hungry and one that kept me looking up pictures of all the dishes she talks about.

A great book for anyone who loves their mom and food.

"Where do you go after you witness death, I wondered."
"It was strange to be on my own in a place we'd always gone to together."
"I was not prepared for this. No one had prepared me for this. Why must I feel it? Why must I have this memory?"

Một cuốn sách rất riêng tư, không ít đoạn cảm giác như Zauner viết không dành cho mình đọc vậy, đến mức khiến mình cảm thấy việc rate sao có chút gì đó sai trái (?).
Tuy nhiên, trải nghiệm có thể cá biệt nhưng cảm xúc lại rất phổ quát, mình relate với rất nhiều những trải lòng của Zauner trong cuốn sách này, và mình cũng tin có nhiều người như mình, về mối quan hệ mẹ-con gái luôn phức tạp mà (mình nghĩ là) mãi duy trì ít nhất 10% sự toxic, vềsự chối bỏ nguồn gốc đồng thời không ngừng khao khát tiếp nhận và được nhìn nhận bởi chính cội nguồn mình thuộc về, về sự hoang mang và nỗi sợ hãi đánh mất danh tính khi những sự tồn tại khẳng định danh tính đó của mình cứ dần biến mất không báo trước, và nhất là về sự mất mát.
Zauner viết về mất mát đột ngột ập đến với chị, chấn thương tâm lý khi đối diện với mất mát, cách chị vùng quẫy trong mất mát và vượt qua thực sự xúc động.

Và cuối cùng là, nghe Japanese Breakfast đi ạ hehe