A Review of Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart (Knopf, 2021)

Posted by: uttararangarajan

 

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn

Edited by Uttara Rangarajan 

 

I am late to the game reviewing Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart (Knopf, 2021). By now, this book has become a bestseller, and Zauner herself would have already been nominated for multiple Grammys for her work as the lead singer for Japanese Breakfast. I had heard so many people reading this memoir, which made me, I think, pause for longer. I finally picked this one up, and boy, it does pack a wallop. The question for me is: what makes a book like this one a bestseller given its serious topic matter? What are readers gravitated to when they read the issues that Zauner brings up? Let’s let the official marketing description do some work for us: “In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band—and meeting the man who would become her husband—her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.”

The questions I posed remind me of that attraction readers sometimes have to illness memoirs, as they seek to sublimate some personal form of strife that finds some sort of resonance through whatever they are reading. In this way, I’d guess that many read this book as a way to deal with their own forms of loss and grief. Zauner’s work is perhaps one of the most appropriate venues for this form of interactive bereavement because she’s so willing to delve into the complications and the conflicted feelings that arise when someone you love is dying. But beyond the content, Zauner has exquisite prose, which is also why I believe this work has found such a broad audience. Perhaps, it’s because Zauner is an artist of all stripes: someone who can wield musical notes inasmuch as she can capture the precision of words. One of the main ways that she can imbue this memoir with poetic and stylistic coruscation emerges in her connection to food. It is one way that Zauner can confront the loss of her mother. At the same time, Zauner’s tender attention to the process by which food is made, the many ingredients necessary to complete a dish, and how the various things she makes are indeed a testament to a larger set of social relations, manifests a robust form of life writing that so many can connect with. It is a profound and beautifully wrought work, written from the vantage point of incredible devastation.

 

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