Crying in H Mart
She learned to cook Korean food while her mother was dying. Food was the only language left. Zauner made that into something extraordinary.
Maangchi's Daughter
Michelle Zauner's 2021 memoir began as a viral New Yorker essay and grew into a book about losing her Korean mother to cancer and trying to hold onto her through food. Zauner, the musician behind Japanese Breakfast, writes about navigating the cultural distance between her Korean heritage and her American upbringing, the terrifying intimacy of caring for a dying parent, and the way smell and taste carry memory when words cannot. H Mart is the Korean supermarket chain where she would cry over ingredients her mother taught her to use. The memoir debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
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"To be Korean American is to be the product of a love affair, and grief.
"Michelle Zauner · Crying in H Mart
The essay that became the memoir was published in The New Yorker in 2018 and went immediately viral. Zauner received thousands of messages from readers who had lost parents or were losing them and felt completely seen.
Zauner wrote much of the memoir while simultaneously making Japanese Breakfast's album Psychopomp and then Soft Sounds from Another Planet, both of which deal with her mother's death. She processed the same grief in music and in prose simultaneously.