Crying in H Mart Book Review

Crying in H Mart is all of the adjectives everyone is using to describe it: heartbreaking, indelible, moving. With the precision of a musician, Zauner brings the story of her twenty-fifth year to life. Searing in its lyricism, Zauner's detailed prose is accessible for every reader, creating a novel that is a universal study of grief.  

Michelle Zauner is best known as a singer and guitarist who creates dreamy, shoegaze-inspired indie pop under the name Japanese Breakfast. She has won acclaim from major music outlets around the world for releases like Psychopomp (2016) and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017). Her memoir, Crying in H Mart, was released in 2021. 

When Michelle Zauner, the indie rock musician known as Japanese Breakfast, was in her mid-twenties, working as a waitress and struggling to launch her music career in Philadelphia, she got a call that her mother was ill. She put her life on hold and flew home to Eugene, Oregon, to be with her mother through the final, excruciating months of her battle with cancer. This Zauner's searingly candid coming-of-age story: of growing apart from, and then back together with, her Korean identity and of forging her own path in the wake of devastating loss. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up Asian American, staining to meet her mother's expectations, moving across the country, and returning home to reckon with grief. And through it all, she savors the unexpected solace of weekly trips to her favorite Asian grocery store. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Crying in H Mart is an unflinching, powerful story of family, food, grief, and love. 

I had the chance to listen to Michelle read from her novel when she was in Iowa City on the paperback book tour. She read the very first chapter, and there was something incredible about listening to her read from the novel and then speak about it. The most memorable comment she made was about how she laid out the book. Each chapter has a title, and they can each stand, more or less, on their own as short essays about this time in her life. She explained that the crafting of this book was much like creating a musical album, where each chapter was like a separate track to build an overall arc. I adored this comparison, and found it to be overwhelmingly true. Each chapter speaks to a different part of Michelle's experience in grief and caretaking, strong on its own but even stronger when in conversation with the rest of the book. 

Michelle said in Iowa City that she felt like it was her responsibility to warn people of the realities of caretaking, because she didn't feel like she was warned. Her desire to warn comes across, as she shares heart-wrenching details of what it was like to take care of her ailing mother. Michelle does not shy away from the gory details, and the strange emotions that surrounded her during this time in her life. While many of these details are seeped in her own personal experience—the food she craved in certain moments, the mementos she wanted to keep after her mom's passing, what her childhood looked like—there are so many ways these things are universal to the grief experience as a whole—everyone has inexplicable food cravings, everyone has mementos from their loved ones they hang onto, everyone has a different challenge from childhood. I appreciated Michelle's honesty in the details, her ability to pin down the story with specificity. It is, overall, what makes this memoir so powerful and memorable. 

Michelle's mother had a note about how you should always save 10% of yourself, so that you always have something to fall back on. I love this piece of advice, and Michelle returns to it throughout her memoir. While she spoke to the crowd in Iowa City, she mentioned that she did save 10% of herself from the memoir, and part of the challenge was making sure she spoke about the experience candidly while also having that bit of privacy. I have the utmost respect for this, and I feel Michelle was successful in this endeavor. There is so much honesty between the pages of this book. I did have several questions—did she really never find out what Kye said to her mother, or what Kye's motivations were? what did her relationship with her father look like while Michelle was in Philadelphia putting her life back together? why does she think her aunt could have had it easier to ignore her?—that I didn't feel like were fully answered by the end, which is the only reason I'm teetering on the edge of a full-five.

Michelle has no shortage of art to engage with. You can find her on Instagram @jbrekkie. 

*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*