... powerfully maps a complicated mother-daughter relationship cut much too short ... Zauner's food descriptions transport us to the table alongside her ... a rare acknowledgement of the ravages of cancer in a culture obsessed with seeing it as an enemy that can be battled with hope and strength ...Zauner carries the same clear-eyed frankness to writing about her mother's death five months after her diagnosis ... It is rare to read about a slow death in such detail, an odd gift in that it forces us to sit with mortality rather than turn away from it.
From the moment we read the opening sentence of Michelle Zauner’s poignant memoir, we’re hooked. It’s a rare gift; Zauner perfectly distills the palpable ache for her mother and wraps her grief in an aromatic conjuring of her mother’s presence ... hardly ends in defeat, however. As difficult as her grief is, Zauner celebrates her mother in the very place they shared their most intimate joys, losses and pleasures: H Mart.
... a heartfelt, searching memoir ... Zauner’s storytelling—and recall of her past—is impeccable. Memories are rendered with a rich immediacy, as if bathed in a golden light ... Zauner is also adept at mapping the contradictions in her relationship with, and perception of, her mother ... The healing, connective power of food reverberates in nearly every chapter of this coming-of-age story...long, sensuous descriptions ... though her family experiences moments of love and relief, Zauner wisely does not imbue suffering with a posthumous glow of nobility. Suffering is painful, often defying meaning.
It is not unusual for a memoir to describe the decline and aftermath of a loved one, and what it means to move on ... Michelle Zauner’s take is exquisitely detailed and wonderfully layered, both episodic in its individual essays and continuous in its exploration of grief. Its depictions of motherhood and daughterhood stand alone ... The essays lose their episodic nature and weave together as a cohesive memoir. Themes mentioned earlier are picked up and carried on ... It’s a natural impulse to reminisce and block out sour memories when remembering someone lost. Creating a new picture from the pieces we have. Zauner, however, shows us all the pieces. We see how her mother’s legacy lives in its fragmented way, in photographs, family members, and recipes ... I came to Crying in H Mart expecting to cry (which I did), but what I did not expect was the amount of self-reflection it would cause. Zauner eschews broad platitudes and makes her work relatable, both on a cultural and personal level. She does not overexplain her Korean heritage, doesn’t provide a footnote for every morsel of food ... In this book, Zauner brings us all in so close that we’re left with no other option but to examine our own lives just as closely.
Crying in H Mart, much like a song, much like life, offers a kind of circularity ... In the end, Crying in H Mart succeeds the way good music nearly always does but good writing doesn’t always have to. Writing has to craft a compelling narrative but music has to make you feel; Zauner’s memoir achieves both.
Likely best known to the public as the singer and guitarist Japanese Breakfast, Zauner spends Crying in H Mart detailing the disorientation that her grief gave rise to, weaving food into her process of mourning. (The book feels particularly, if unintentionally, suited to this period in history, after the past year of accumulated grief.) ... Though it lacks recipes, Crying in H Mart teems with descriptions of food, and one’s mileage may vary with them. Zauner front-loads her book with elaborate memories of consumption that sometimes have a flimsy connection to the narrative spine ... Reading certain passages, I am reminded of the times in my career as a professional food writer when editors have pleaded with me to bring the story back to the food, as Zauner does here. This is the food writer’s dilemma: So often, our implicit job is to make our reader hungry. But fulfilling that brief can easily cause a writer to lose sight of their tale’s focus. As lovely as Zauner’s indulgent sketches of meals are, they slow her momentum ... But agile writers know how to mine food for emotional truth, and Zauner finds her footing as Crying in H Mart progresses. Near the end, she connects food to her own unmooring.
[A] refreshingly candid memoir about the trauma of loss, the limits of language and the meals made along the way ... [A] profound, timely exploration of terminal illness, culture and shared experience ... Whether detailing the process behind jatjuk (a Korean pine nut porridge that plays an important role in the narrative) or her eventual efforts to master the art of kimchi, Zauner brings dish after dish to life on the page in a rich broth of delectable details, cultural context and the personal history often packed into every bite. But far from letting food substitute for substance, H Mart also offers some remarkably prescient observations about otherness from the perspective of the Korean American experience ... In writing a memoir that will ultimately thrill Japanese Breakfast fans and provide comfort to those in the throes of loss while brilliantly detailing the colorful panorama of Korean culture, traditions and — yes — food, Michelle Zauner has accomplished the unthinkable: a book that caters to all appetites and doesn’t skimp on the kimchi.
Michelle Zauner’s new book shows that the lauded lyricist of indie-pop band Japanese Breakfast is capable of impressing in longer-form writing ... [A] multifaceted and astute memoir ... Crying in H Mart is at once a testament to a lost loved one, a charting of the ravages of terminal illness and a celebration of a mixed-race heritage that helps one young woman manage her grief.
... what’s apparent to me about Zauner’s musical style is that she has stunning command of opposing emotional dynamics ... This intensity of feeling is also the foundation of her writing, and it was rewarding to witness a continuity of experience between her two mediums ... There are stretches of writing like this throughout where the mundane and the significant slam up against one another, emphasizing the destabilizing effect that an event with such gravitational pull has on one’s surroundings. Though Zauner’s voice is gorgeously lyric in some places, it’s cuttingly straightforward, even pinched in others, and she maintains expert control over the ebb and flow of this shifting dynamic ... Even at the highest point of emotion, at this shift from life into death, Zauner keeps her narrative threads close at hand, rendering these scenes with a coherence that defies the senselessness of grief. Death drapes a heavy cloak over Crying in H Mart, but Zauner consistently lifts its edges as she writes about her Korean identity and how connecting with her mother’s and her own heritage is a protection against death’s theft of memory ... as Zauner guided me through these corridors of her own life, little pieces of her world attached to me. What I can say is that I will now move through my own world having been changed.
... takes the measure of the complex bond and the impassable, yet tender, interval between mother and daughter ... Her prose is a vivid performance, moving from self-deprecating to attentive, with textured descriptions of the aesthetic and felt qualities of any moment. Although we learn that it’s Peter who has 'read all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time', through her writing Zauner performs the work of creative memory that recovers and transmutes the past into something liveable, with verve and honesty ... it seems that in her art, she has found the tricky yet transformative key to her inheritance.
Zauner has brought her masterful songwriting skills to bear in the delicate prose of her memoir, the story of her artistic coming of age and a portrait of her mother’s extraordinary life and early death due to cancer. She deftly braids the story of her mother Chongmi’s life with her own ... the motifs braided into Zauner’s memoir carry us through both the buoyant and sorrowful chapters, helping us make sense of how the pieces fit together. A compelling and authentic story of grief has to have moments of joy to give it meaning, to give purpose to the life of the person who died. Zauner’s narrative craft shows us what is at stake: avoiding the urge to 'co-opt something so vulnerable and personal and tragic for a creative artifact' and instead faithfully documenting the greatest and most influential person in her life ... carries on the legacy of Michelle Zauner’s mother, and in doing so achieves what the greatest works of creative nonfiction strive to do: the writer transforms the wreckage, and is herself transformed in the process.
... on food, Zauner is deliciously specific ... Zauner does not share many specifics of her musical development, aside from the joys of eventually touring with her band in Korea, but it’s evident that from the initial struggles, her fierce independence and point of view have contributed to her success as an artist, both in the musical and literary senses. Crying in H Mart will push the reader to explore Korean food if it is unfamiliar, and share the poignancy of memories intertwined with love and meals past.
... this is not a rock-star-gets-book-deal situation, but a thoughtful, well-crafted piece of artwork that we should expect from a renaissance person ... I expected that we would get to see a familiar subject through a unique but mostly relatable perspective, with the engine—or what keeps the reader interested—being Zauner’s voice, her humility, and her ability to reflect on universal themes of growing up in a concise and clear way. Most of that is true, but also, like… shit gets wild. As a rule, memoirs do not have to be dramatic (or occasionally, traumatic) to be effective, but there are some stories in this book; from tales of punk-rock basements to a violent spat with her mother, the events in this book depict much more than a suburban slice of life. The relatable teenage angst is there, but Zauner’s memoir is also filled with anecdotes like seeing Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O deepthroating a mic on stage for the first time, or harboring the secret of her father’s infidelity ... reading Crying in H Mart has helped me feel pounds lighter during a heavy year.
... an exceptionally vivid memoir that deftly explores the complex relationships between culture and family, mothers and daughters. The details of Zauner’s mother’s illness and death, as well as their devastating impact on the author, make for gut-wrenching reading, but it’s hard to put this book down. The author holds nothing back as she navigates her adolescent search to understand her identity, made more complex by her biracial background. She’s particularly open about her evolving relationship with her mother ... The details and cultural references here are particular to Zauner’s life, but her account contains so many all-too-common experiences of grief and endurance that it will resonate with just about everyone ... Zauner has created a memoir that is distinctly her own, but it will leave a mark on anyone who reads it.
Sometimes bibimbap is just bibimbap, a jjigae just a jjigae, but when Zauner reaches for greater meaning in Korean food, her prose dazzles. Her realizations about the variety of processes for making kimchi start off like a literary science lesson ... While Zauner’s writing is fluid and thoughtful throughout, her narrative gets bogged down at times in the minutiae of the day-to-day of the year spent putting her career and personal relationships on hold to focus on savoring the last bits of time with her mother. Events, even as emotionally fraught as they often are, can begin to feel a bit list-y and repetitive. And while the focus is clearly, and rightly, on Zauner’s relationship with her mother, her father and boyfriend-then-husband end up a bit flat on the page. Ditto Zauner’s role as auteur behind the music group Japanese Breakfast ... Yet, Zauner’s tour-concluding appearance with Japanese Breakfast in Korea allows for a lovely, poetic denouement. Family relationships are refreshed and renewed, Zauner finally gets unburdened time with her new husband to explore her mother’s home country, and culinary delights abound. Probably not coincidentally, some of that same peacefulness and joy shines through on the recently released Japanese Breakfast album Jubilee, which could stand as a bright companion to the heavier, grief-filled and frank-yet-beautiful Crying In H Mart.
... terrific ... beautifully told, deeply felt and never sentimentalized but laced with all the love and frustration and rebellion that an isolated, headstrong young woman feels.
She casts an unflinching eye to the relationship between herself and her mother, who was highly critical and said shockingly hurtful things to her daughter. She shines a spotlight on her own less-than-perfect behavior as well, revealing, no surprise: a typical mother-daughter relationship, full of hurt and heart-stopping love ... At a time when the United States is reckoning with anti-Asian racism, books like Zauner’s and the story of her lived experience as a Korean-American feels vitally important.
Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart is as good as everyone says it is and, yes, it will have you in tears ... an essential read for anybody who has lost a loved one, as well as those who haven't ... I respect Zauner for sharing her darkest moments, her messy relationship with both her mother and father, the deep questions she had about her identity, and the confidence she has in who she is as she explores all of this. Korean or not, I think there is something for everyone. Zauner keeps it real with her storytelling; straightforward and analytical at times, but also deeply honest and vulnerable. I’m torn if I’m ok with her explaining in detail each Korean food or tradition, because in some ways, it felt like it was appeasing a Western audience ... Reading through this made me recognize how deeply personal food is, as we see how much comfort it brought Zauner during the most difficult time of her life. Though I haven’t lost a parent, Zauner created space for me to feel what she feels and it stirred up a lot of old feelings I have regarding my parents ... This is a book I’d recommend if you want a good cry or to read something on the topic of grief, love, and coming to terms with your cultural heritage.
... a vibrant, soulful memoir that binds her own belated coming-of-age with her mother’s untimely death, and serves up food, music and, yes, tears alongside insights into identity, grief and the primal intensity of the mother-daughter bond ... The book’s middle chapters make for difficult reading, and yet Zauner never loses sight of the person her mother was. Chongmi is beautifully observed ... That droll tone is a vital ingredient in Zauner’s prose, but it doesn’t obscure her honesty ... It’s this modest scepticism that sets Zauner’s book apart from so many other grief memoirs. She isn’t looking for readily formulated fixes, and instead remains open to truths that are hard to put into words in any language.
Crying in H Mart is not a book strictly about loss and grief nor is it written from a perspective difficult to understand. It is written from one daughter’s perspective—a perspective that is truly honest, heartbreaking, and hilarious at times—that will allow you to relate and realize the preciousness and precariousness of mother-daughter relationships. Zauner’s descriptions of Korean food will leave you hungry for jatjuk (a creamy, comforting Korean pine nut porridge) whereas her relatable recollection of memories with her mother will leave you tearful and appreciative of your own relationship with your mother.
A different kind of triangulation between a mother, a daughter, and food emerges: one in which food is not a mute, docile ornament (often much like the mother herself), but instead a rather lively contributor who loves, challenges, frustrates, and shows off in its own right. Zauner’s descriptions of food are delectable ... Her writing is dashed with conversational wit, humor and literary flair; it shows how food can be just as expressive as language ... Her mother’s dying days...are cataloged unflinchingly later in the book ... Zauner’s memoir fulfills her promise to ferment and transmute her mother’s life, thereby granting her a new one on the page ... Zauner accomplishes another kind of fermentation, too, combining common ingredients—love, grief, motherhood, Asian American identity, and food—and letting them react in a new, organic way.
The memoir is a moving portrait of her family; the culture and cuisine that she returned to in an effort to reconstruct her life while grieving; and the capacity for grace that we depend on for survival when survival seems impossible ... Stories about cooking and eating are the thread that Zauner leaves for her readers as they follow her through the labyrinth of grief ... Throughout the memoir, she describes meals with immense clarity and precision, as if the description itself were a way to recover this lifeline. Some of the most striking culinary descriptions take place when Zauner carefully observes the homemade Korean dishes that family friends bring to her mother’s bedside, hoping to grasp the essence of the cuisine enough to replicate it ... By contrast, she creates a brutally sincere portrayal of her father as the only one to self-destruct ... Whereas other debut memoirists sometimes fall into the trap of being too heavy-handed in their attempts to immerse readers in their life experience, Zauner’s background as a lyricist makes her a master of subtlety.
Readers will sense years of reflection built into every sentence of musician Zauner’s debut memoir ... As Zauner lives through her shocking grief, food binds her to her mother, as it always did, and in meditative paragraphs she shares her therapeutic experiences making jatjuk and kimchi. This is a beautiful, forthright memoir about the bewildering loss of a parent, and the complicated process of finding one’s art.
Zauner captures the total singularity of motherhood in East Asian culture ... Zauner not only captures that apocalyptic, mind-bending pain of witnessing that central, most important person in your life wither and lose herself to her illness, of no longer recognising the woman who raised you and taught you right from wrong, but holds on to this feeling and wrestles with it, committing it to paper. I was disarmed and moved by her commitment to being truthful about the darkness of losing someone. She lingered on every ugly moment, the ones our brains quickly move on from and erase from our memory to protect us ... Although this is a book about loss and grief, it is equally a book full of love and joy. This is no more evident than in Zauner’s exploration of food, specifically Korean food, as a means for showing love and finding home ... Describing Korean home cooked dishes in beautiful, intricate detail and parsing through each careful step with palpable care, we see Zauner cook her way to a sense of self that is more connected to her heritage and her loved ones ... This book is a beautiful, longing tribute to the experience of being part of a diaspora, of wanting to belong to a place you barely know or understand, but that you desperately want to love and for it to love you back.
The memoir imparts a sense of love which compels me beyond the point of recognizing my own mother in Zauner’s. Rather, it leaves me in awe of how Zauner has also drawn me into mourning the death of her mother ... Through Zauner’s prose, we waver between the contradictory sentiments of estrangement and intimacy toward her mother, paralleling Zauner’s own characterization of her maternal relationship ... As much as it is a linear narrative, the memoir also feels like an assemblage of literary vignettes which remind us of the innumerable ways in which Zauner misses her mother. Through these fascinatingly odd juxtapositions, Zauner reproduces the feeling of how grief always rears its head in the most unexpected places ... Zauner’s prose is both sober-eyed and harrowing in its descriptions of the progression of her mother’s cancer, the exhaustion of her mother’s caretakers, and the bewildering grief which consumes their family. This incredible memoir is never funny without also being heart-rending.
... an affecting, vivid chronicle of grief ... Zauner is keenly aware that her good fortune is born of the tragedy of her mother’s death, which inspired the songs that would become her first album and the essays that would become her first memoir. Her facility with language, her graceful ability to translate complicated topics into a coherent narrative thread, her illuminating reflections on loss, and her poignant insights into the mixed-race child’s yearning to belong mark this as a genuine literary debut rather than the usual dreary exercise in building a celebrity platform ... Like a visit to the eponymous supermarket, Crying in H Mart transports readers to a place where cultures meet, and food brings people together. Like an elaborate Korean meal, it leaves the reader sated while eagerly anticipating what will come next from its talented creator.
... stands as [Zauner's] abandoned, all-consuming, grieving cry in response to her mother’s untimely death ... Zauner writes in a way that carefully sets the table for each scene. When talking about a gathering, she takes as much care to describe the food shared as conversations that were had over it...A warning to readers: Her beautiful prose will leave you hungry ... filled with rich stories of familial love that weather the storms of immigration, illness and death. Michelle Zauner gracefully and honestly shares the story of her life as a growing artist learning about herself and her mother. She skillfully has crafted a memoir that is as heartbreaking as it is comforting and page-turning.
Death is the central subject of Zauner's memoir Crying In H Mart, but the book brims with life ... The strength of her writing lies in its emotional honesty. She confronts and documents her mother's deterioration from cancer with a great love unhampered by over-sentimentality ... A minor drawback of her essayistic style is its occasional disorganisation. Her prose sometimes reads like a journal and can be difficult to follow, prone to aphorism and sudden conclusion. But as a map out of trauma, its messy form is perhaps appropriate.
A poignant memoir about a mother’s love as told through Korean food ... Aptly, Zauner frames her story amid the aisles of H Mart, a place many Asian Americans will recognize, a setting that allows the author to situate her personal story as part of a broader conversation about diasporic culture, a powerful force that eludes ownership. The memoir will feel familiar to children of immigrants, whose complicated relationships to family are often paralleled by equally strenuous relationships with their food. It will also resonate with a larger audience due to the author’s validation of the different ways that parents can show their love—if not verbally, then certainly through their ability to nourish ... Zauner’s ability to let us in through taste makes her book stand out from others with similar themes. She makes us feel like we are in her mother’s kitchen, singing her praises. A tender, well-rendered, heart-wrenching account of the way food ties us to those who have passed.
Musician Zauner debuts with an earnest account of her Korean-American upbringing, musical career, and the aftermath of her mother’s death ... The prose is lyrical if at times overwrought, but Zauner does a good job capturing the grief of losing a parent with pathos. Fans looking to get a glimpse into the inner life of this megawatt pop star will not be disappointed.
