Michelle processes the death of her mother, reckoning with a sometimes complicated and difficult relationship. Unapologetically acknowledging her own shortcomings, she starts to face her future without her mother. I’d give this to book groups and fans if Elizabeth Berg. ( )

A deeply moving and aching work- I teared up multiple times and had to put this down and take a break. Zauner writes with such honesty and rawness and obvious love that it really hurt to read at points. By far one of the best pieces of nonfiction I've read in recent times. ( )

This will forever be a six star book for me no matter how many times I read it. ( )

Memoir about a woman and her Korean mother told in the context of food and cooking. Good! ( )

Ms. Zauner, who I understand is a pop artist, lost her mother to squamous-cell carcinoma as a young adult and this memoir explores the aspects of her grief, but also her relationship with her tough-love mother when she was alive and the shaping of her Korean-American identity. The novel is also an extension of her 2018 New Yorker essay of the same name, which comprises the novel’s first chapter and captures the essence of what the remainder of the story is about: a young woman trying to discover who she is without the mother who dominated her life. ( )

I had no idea who Zauner was before picking up this book, but between the great title, the effective marketing campaign, and my interest in Korean-American immigration stories, I just couldn't wait for this to come out in paperback.

This is a memoir that feels incredibly personal and still raw. You're not going to get a lot of distance for analysis here. Zauner is in her feelings this whole book, which is kind of amazing. This is a book about feeling like an outsider. About mixed-race identity. About mothers and daughters who don't "speak the same love language" and the misunderstandings that causes. It's about cancer, and about being robbed of the time you might have had to learn to love each other better, to learn each other's stories, to pass on culture and food.

And yes, it's about food. As caretaking. About learning to cook your culture's food without someone to teach it to you — just sheer force of will and the internet.

Zauner's writing is so personal some may feel excluded, but for me it wrapped all the way around and I saw myself in her so many times — even in moments where our identities/experiences had only the tiniest overlap.

I loved this even more than I expected. ( )

I'm late in discovering Japanese Breakfast's music, and reading Michelle Zauner's memoir is a part of my catching up. It layers well with other reading I've done on the immigrant experience and on death, meshing the two together with some interesting background on Michelle's early experience in the music scene and how she got her start. The experience of her mother's long decline from cancer and eventual death is unstintingly portrayed, every curtain pulled back. It could be an uncomfortable revisit for anyone who's experienced the death of a parent from illness, but perhaps a helpful charting of the course for those who will face it in future. The level of emotion these chapters generate is very high, and they could not have been easy to relive in the writing.

I've not encountered this much food since reading the Redwall series to my kids, and I'm not nearly so courageous about sampling unfamiliar dishes, but it's still an engaging story about how food formed the primary bond between herself and her mother, as well as to her cultural identity, and how it provided a path to healing. I wasn't expecting such a wonderful writing style: the descriptions, the perfect pacing, the careful incorporation of flashbacks and the right degree of detail last throughout. I looked in vain for a coauthor who assisted her, and it explains why she's writing the screenplay. There's a second career waiting for her if the whole music thing doesn't pan out. ( )

When my mother was diagnosed with cancer on New Year's Day of 2021, one of the first things I thought about was the food I would make her. Her own mother had passed from complications with breast cancer only two years before, and I remember her 10-year fight, her dwindling appetite, her body's slow wasting, thinning. I couldn't- wouldn't imagine my own mother going through the same. My mind cycled through broths and dumplings and matzo balls and the local restaurants she liked; I catalogued every ultra-nutritious, bland-able food I could think of.

My mother read "Crying in H Mart" halfway through her chemo treatments. She couldn't put it down. She kept the book downloaded on Libby after she'd finished and encouraged me to read it. It took me another few months, until after the book was returned, the chemo was over, and hormone treatments had begun, after I'd moved to a different city, just when I was starting to miss home, before I finally picked it up at the local library.

So, when I say that I read "Crying in H Mart" with my heart in my throat, I mean that to read it was to feel it was to rocket months backward and experience my own life and Zauner's life all at once. The images she shares hurt and heal in the space of a sentence. So much of what her mother went through recalls my own family. Frantic surprise hospital trips. The unsurety. Someone you love looking so unbelievably small in a hospital bed, or out of it. Feeling like you're not enough of a caregiver and doing too much at the same time. Leaning on friends and family for help, for understanding. While the food and culture Zauner buried herself in was very different from mine, the intensity of feeling in the descriptions of ingredients and preparation, the sheer importance of it, felt immediate as myself, as a reader, and just as a person.

While this isn't much of a book review, I think what I mean to say is that this memoir, told in an astoundingly-frank-and-sumptuous-all-at-once voice, with food and memory descriptions bearing equal weight and depth, reached out and held me when I needed to be held. I would recommend it to anyone, without pause. ( )

So many stages and feelings of loss captured so well ( )

I cried. I cried so damn much. I just found out that H-Mart is opening up in my city and I will go there and cry too ( )

I do and I don't want to recommend this to my own mother, partly because we've butt heads in the past so I think she'd recognize some of the similar, "I'm showing my love for you by wanting you to do better" things, but also she's got a sense of her mortality and I don't think she'd take kindly to me sending her a memoir about when a daughter's mother is dying.

Michelle Zauner writes a bluntly emotional memoir, on how it feels when the person you thought you'd have for decades more suddenly starts to fade, and the process of working through that grief even while the person is still alive. Her hometown of Eugene is not far from where I am (I actually go on a weekly basis), so that helped with visualizing some of the places described for where teenage!Michelle went to see shows, or the drive up Spencer's Butte to the family home, or her nightmares about being a car driving off the Ferry Street Bridge. A lot of her bond with her mom is over food, and that's a universal love that can lead to, well, crying in H Mart. Or Sunshine Market, as it were.

Listen to Psychopomp for the final third!

Reread 2022 for book club~ ( )

Michelle Zauner’s memoir of losing her mother is raw, vulnerable, honest, and resonant. I feel that longing, that need, to take care of one’s ailing mother and be ill-equipped to provide the kind of care she needs. It’s almost a year since I lost my mom, and I found so much of this story relevant to my experience, even though Zauner and I have little else in common. ( )

I'll admit it - I did not expect this book to be so depressing. I know the synopsis mentions her mother's terminal cancer diagnosis, but that event and those that followed are really the core of the book. Even in looking back at her childhood, all experiences seem linked to her relationship with her mother, and her struggles to come to terms with the fact that their relationship will come to an end sooner than any of them suspected. So yeah, of course that's all very heavy and depressing. But the way Michelle writes about her childhood, her relationship, her mother's experience with cancer is just so personal and forthcoming that it made the story more painful to read. I almost felt like someone I know was telling me about their experience.

There are some funny moments and plenty of talk of food and music, but if you're already feeling down, be warned; this is not a light read. Despite that, I flew through it, mostly in one sitting. Even though the content is heavy, Michelle's tone is engaging. If it matters, I've only heard one song of hers and that was after I'd already purchased the book - so you don't need any prior knowledge of her music career to connect with her story. It probably deepens it if you do, however - I know my partner is more familiar with her work and mentioned that some of her songs deal with her mother.

Anyway, if you're into memoirs, whether or not you're familiar with the person writing it, I definitely suggest this one. ( )

Zauner writes about her relationship with her mother and her mother's diagnosis and death from cancer. Korean food and culture permeate this book as Zauner's mother tries to teach her half-Korean daughter all she can about her Korean roots. ( )

Vivid and moving. ( )

Normally I don’t read memoirs but damn this book struck so many cords with me. ( )

Beautiful and heart wrenching. I always appreciate a complicated mother daughter bond, and this one is excellent and relatable. ( )

Crying in H Mart is Michelle Zauner, of the band Japanese Breakfast’s memoir of growing up Korean American in the very white town of Eugene, Oregon. After she struggled with being one of just a few Asian kids in her schools growing up, she moved to the East Coast for college, where she met her husband. When her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she moved back home to take care of her.

First a warning: Do not read this book while hungry. In Michelle’s family, food equals love so there are a lot of vivid descriptions of tasty food. When Michelle moves back home to take care of her dying mother, food becomes even more important. As her mother declines, it’s harder and harder for her to eat. Michelle cooks all sorts of things trying to find something her mother finds appetizing.

Crying in H Mart was heartbreaking, as one would expect. The writing flows like a novel even though it’s a memoir. It’s the story of family love and identity. Michelle reads it herself, which made me even more invested in her life. Highly recommended. ( )

Hard to rate "objectively" because it's a personal story and also I was crying a lot so haha. I think it's hard to judge and review idk.

I guess it's impressive how it's both extremely personal and a lot of it is about stuff I've never gone through and some I never will but it still feels extremely relatable? The in depth talk about how difficult relationships with parents are - how it's difficult knowing that they love you but always feeling an unbridgeable gap - and all the struggles surrounding that is especially meaningful.

Although as always I wonder about the ethics of talking in detail about other people's experiences, especially when they paint them in a not-great light. She talks kind of meanly about one of her mum's friends who comes to be an unpaid carer for her and it's the sort of thing that's completely understandable emotionally but feels kind of weird and unpleasant in a book with a mass audience. I dunno. ( )

Really liked her writing, but I'm not a foodie so some of the longer food sections did not keep my interest.
Did enjoy the mother/daughter relationship aspect and the OR connections since I live in OR and my kids grew up in a locale similar to her house. ( )

3 stars
i rarely read nonfiction and i think that influenced my reading because i kept waiting for something more interesting to happen forgetting that this is someone’s actual story. enjoyed the writing style and structure!! loved getting to feel connected with someone i have very little in common with

characters: 3
plot: 1
writing: 5
(feels wrong scoring characters/plot for a memoir but oh well) ( )

This one hit me real fucking hard. ( )

This is a memoir of a Korean-American woman with large amounts of discussion of Korean food - foods she loved earlier in life, foods she made haltingly, foods her mother made at particular times - such as each time she returned to visit her mother - food she learned to cook as an adult - what the ingredients are for these foods, and some about how to buy them in the U.S., and some foods she only had on her visits to Korea. Another large - and to me "poignant" part of the book was about the diagnosis of her mother's illness, the author's efforts at being present for her mother during that illness and the long, difficult treatment regimen, and her mother's ultimate death from the disease. Her description of the illness and death of her mother was, for me, quite moving.

There were also some parts about the author's efforts to make it in music (which she did after years of trying with her band), about her meeting and developing of a relationship with the man she married during the latter stages of her mother's illness, and about her life after her mother's death. ( )

A fantastic look at life, grief, growing up in Eugene, Oregon, with a Korean mother and white American father, food, family, language, and forging a creative career (music).

I did not read this when everyone was, as I usually find popular books disappointing. When I found this on my library's new Libby audio available now list--and saw that Zauner read it herself--I immediately checked it out. And it was great. I loved the combination of food, culture, family, and dreams.

Excellent. ( )

Grief is subjective, every person processes it differently.

Crying in H Mart is a beautiful memoir that tackles the complexities in life as the author processes the loss of her mother. As an Asian (Indian) kid, I found solace in the similarities I found with the author's relationship with her parents and family. I rediscovered how subtle things and acts that usually go unnoticed turn to haunt us with memories of our loved ones that we lost.

This is a relatable, powerful story and it hit me harder than I thought it would. I recently lost my paternal grandmother and never really got over my paternal grandfathers death even after 9 years. I revisit the times I spent with them, regret the chances I missed out on and my heart decides to breakdown in their memory every once in a while.

Reading this memoir felt like a warm hug, a reminder that I am not alone and that THIS IS OKAY. It is never easy to live in a world deficit of your beloved and if time does not heal this completely, it is NORMAL!

This was just so moving. Thank you Michelle Zauner for writing your story for all of us. ( )