Michelle Zauner

Michelle Zauner is a Korean American musician and author whose memoir Crying in H Mart blends grief, food, and cultural identity into one of the most celebrated debut memoirs in recent years.

Michelle Zauner is the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist behind the indie project Japanese Breakfast, but she reached a far wider audience with her 2021 memoir Crying in H Mart, which began as a viral New Yorker essay. The book chronicles the death of her Korean mother from cancer and the grief that followed, using food — specifically Korean food found at H Mart grocery stores — as a frame for exploring cultural inheritance, immigrant identity, and the complicated love between a mother and daughter.

The writing is precise and sensory, particularly in passages about cooking and eating, where Zauner channels both pleasure and loss simultaneously. She is honest about the difficulties of her relationship with her mother: the pressure to perform Korean-ness, the clashes over ambition and lifestyle, the guilt that accompanies grief. That ambivalence gives the memoir genuine depth beyond what a simpler tribute would have achieved.

Some readers find the sections devoted to her music career less compelling than the memoir’s central story, and the book occasionally loses momentum in its middle stretch. But Crying in H Mart earns its acclaim. It is a tender, specific, and beautifully written account of mourning, belonging, and the way food holds the memory of people we have lost.