Crying in H Mart

Crying in H Mart is Michelle Zauner's 2021 memoir, the breakout literary commercial memoir of its year and the work that introduced a much larger audience to Zauner's music project Japanese Breakfast. The book runs Zauner's relationship with her Korean mother across approximately three decades: childhood summers in Seoul with her grandmother and aunt, the difficult adolescence in Eugene, Oregon when the bicultural family started fracturing, the late-twenties return when her mother was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer, the six months of caregiving in the family home before her mother's death, and the Korean cooking that Zauner taught herself in the years afterward as the most direct route back to her mother that remained available.

Zauner's structural method is the patient interleaving of the chronological mother-daughter biography with the specific Korean foods that anchor each chapter (the dotorimuk, the kimbap, the kimchi, the eventual jjigae that Zauner has to learn from YouTube to keep her grandmother's recipes alive). The H Mart chapters that frame the book run her recurring breakdowns in the Korean grocery store chains where the smells of the produce section are the most direct route back to the mother she is grieving. The Korean-American bicultural-identity material is rendered with the kind of moral specificity that the contemporary Asian-American memoir has been working toward for a decade. The Japanese Breakfast and music-industry material is treated with appropriate narrative restraint.

Recommended as required contemporary American memoir reading, as the canonical contemporary literary memoir of grief, food, and Korean-American identity, and as one of the most-discussed memoirs of the 2020s. Compare to Pachinko (Min Jin Lee) and Tell Me How It Ends (Valeria Luiselli) on the diaspora side. The Michelle Zauner audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.