You’ve probably seen this book around. I think it’s one of the (if not the) most talked about memoirs of the past year. It’s the story of a mother and a daughter – a mother who has been an indomitable presence in her daughter’s life since she was born, and who has never been one to back down. Then she is diagnosed with cancer, and everything changes.
The memoir takes the form of a back and forth between the recent past when Zauner was caring for her sick mother, and slowly taking us through her illness and the memories of her childhood that she deals with throughout the process of caring for her mother and grieving her. So in this way we are given windows into Zauner’s whole life, and her relationship with her mother.
There are a few major themes in this book. The first is the love lost and found between Zauner and her mother. The second is the parts of their relationship that were fraught and hard. The third is Zauner’s identity – not American, but also not Korean, and her feeling of exclusion from her mother’s culture (at times seemingly purposeful on her mother’s part). Another is food. Food was how her mother showed her love, and yet Zauner realizes during her mother’s illness that she doesn’t know how to make some of the foods that she now desperately wants to make for her mother to return that love and care. Learning how to make some of these dishes is a form of memorial and therapy for Zauner – it is a way to repair some of the loss and to take charge of creating a connection to her culture now that her mother is no longer the gatekeeper.
This book is confrontational in its pain, unflinching descriptions of illness and grief. Zauner puts everything on the page, and we are forced to step into her experiences with her, to feel her pain, anger, frustration and shame. Her feelings are huge, and all-encompassing. But as she traces a line from her mother’s harsh response to Zauner’s childhood injuries to her insistence that Zauner go to college to her seemingly excluding her from being part of her tight relationships with other Korean women, we see her starting to understand her mother in retrospect. The interactions that felt harsh to her in childhood she now sees as her mother either pushing her to be resilient or trying to impart her values (both cultural and personal). We also see Zauner’s anger that it took her mother’s illness for her to begin to understand the depths of her mother’s love for her, and that some of the realizations have arrived too late for her to share that understanding with her mother.
Though it’s a book of pain and loss, this is also a book all about love and a search for belonging. Zauner explores her seeming lack of connection to her Korean roots and her slow realization that her mother transmitted a deep understanding of Korean culture to Zauner without her being aware of it, that the very foods that feel like home to her, the language that makes her feel a deep recognition (even if she doesn’t understand every word) are hers, too. That she must seek out the recipes her mother didn’t have time to teach her, that she can learn how to make food that seemed complex and nearly magical to her. That she has a birthright to this knowledge and can, in fact, assert that ownership.
This book is one of the best representations of a mother-daughter relationship I’ve read. There is so much that is misunderstood, so much resentment and rebellion. But there’s also the powerful bond and unshakeable foundation of love that allows for all the damage done during the tumultuous teenage years to be forgiven and transcended. And there’s a return to the maternal love that happens during her mother’s illness, when she begins to see just how much her mother did for her, and just how intensely her mother loves her, even if that love at times takes the form of an unwelcome push.
I don’t know what I expected going into this book, but I didn’t expect such complex and layered relationships. I wasn’t prepared for the almost harshness of the raw emotion. For the intensity of Zauner’s feelings, and for her ability to wring out every last drop of them onto the page. I can definitely see what the fuss was about, and while I didn’t necessarily enjoy reading it, I also know it is one that will stay with me and that I will reach for memories of in my own relationships down the road. Lots of trigger warnings, but also lots of praise go to this one.
An unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.
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.
Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread. – Goodreads
Book Title: Crying in H Mart
Author: Michelle Zauner
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook
Published By: Knopf Publishing Group
Released: April 20, 2021
Genre: Non-Fiction, Death, Culture, Cancer, Family, Grief
Pages: 242
Date Read: August 5-7, 2022
Rating: 7/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.31/5 (175,322 ratings)