Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner, 2021
A daughter's memoir of kimchi, scratch cards and a Korean mother—about learning to feed yourself after loss. A tender, lyrical memoir of grief and family, moving between memory and food with an honest, unhurried voice.
Feels like grief, tenderness and humor. About family, identity and memory.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy memoirs about family, identity and food, told through small remembered details. The grief is unflinching and may feel heavy if you are recently bereaved.
Why read it
It shows how cooking and memory can hold a family together after loss, and gives you a clear-eyed, warm account of becoming yourself.
A page from the book
The way a mother cuts meat, relearned from a stranger on YouTube.
Maangchi peeled the skin off an Asian pear with the giant knife pulled toward her, just like Mom did when she cut Fuji apples for me after school on a little red cutting board, before eating the left-over fruit from the core. Just like Mom, chopsticks in one hand, scissors in the other, cutting galbi and cold naengmyeon noodles with a specifically Korean ambidextrous precision. Skillfully stretching out the meat with her right hand and cutting it into bite-sized pieces with her left, using kitchen scissors like a warrior brandishes a weapon. Michelle Zauner.Zauner records as Japanese Breakfast; the memoir grew from a 2018 New Yorker essay of the same title, written after her mother's death.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Crying in H Mart for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy memoirs about family, identity and food, told through small remembered details. The grief is unflinching and may feel heavy if you are recently bereaved.
- What is Crying in H Mart like?
- A tender, lyrical memoir of grief and family, moving between memory and food with an honest, unhurried voice. Feels like grief, tenderness and humor. About family, identity and memory.
- What should I read after Crying in H Mart?
- If you liked Crying in H Mart, try Running with Scissors (Augusten Burroughs), When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi) and Me (Katharine Hepburn).
A taste of the feed
What a parent's accent does to the shape of a sentence.
My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.
Running with Scissors · Augusten Burroughs
A man writes a letter that is mostly a knife, and exactly correct about the sums.
Your income has always been ample, and you never ought to have borrowed any money, and Mary Towle did a great wrong in lending you any money. My opinion of you is the same as it always has been—that you are an extravagant, deceitful, dishonest, worthless person. You have squandered thousands of dollars and left your honest debts unpaid. But I do not think you are capable of comprehending the mistakes that you have made. Now that you are paying up Mary Towle, how would it do to pay the various other accounts that you owe?
Me · Katharine Hepburn
What a teacher gives a boy whose shoes are already broken.
He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.
Angela's Ashes · Frank McCourt
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