Crying in H Mart

Michelle Zauner was already known to indie fans as the musician behind Japanese Breakfast when her 2018 New Yorker essay about grieving her mother in a Korean grocery store went viral. She expanded it into a memoir that became one of the defining bestsellers of 2021. Crying in H Mart is a book about losing a mother. It is also, in nearly every chapter, a book about food.

What it's about

Zauner grew up in Eugene, Oregon, the only child of a Korean mother and a white American father. Her relationship with her mother, Chongmi, was fierce on both ends: a childhood of exacting standards, teenage years of open warfare, an adult truce that never fully settled. When Zauner was twenty-five, her mother was diagnosed with cancer. The memoir follows the diagnosis, the brutal months of treatment, the wedding Zauner rushed to hold so her mother could be there, then the aftermath of a loss that arrived before the two had finished figuring each other out.

Food is the connective tissue. Korean dishes carried the love her mother rarely said aloud; after the funeral, Zauner teaches herself to cook from Maangchi's YouTube videos, trying to keep her claim on a heritage that suddenly feels half-orphaned. The H Mart of the title, the Asian grocery chain, becomes the place where grief ambushes her among the banchan and the rice.

Why everyone's talking about it

The memoir spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list and appeared on nearly every best-of-2021 roundup. It struck a nerve with second-generation readers who recognized the push-pull of an immigrant mother's love expressed through food rather than words. BookTok kept it selling long after publication. A film adaptation has been in development since the book's release, with Zauner herself writing the screenplay, which says something about how completely this story belongs to her.

The verdict, for now

This is one of those rare grief memoirs that earns its reputation, though it is not flawless. The stretches about Zauner's early music career read thinner than the mother material; the chronology loops back on itself; some readers find the accumulating treatment scenes exhausting in the middle third. The prose is plain, direct, occasionally workmanlike. None of that sinks it. The specificity of what Zauner remembers, a mother peeling pears, the exact taste of jatjuk, is what makes the loss feel like yours. Bring tissues; better yet, bring snacks.