Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

This is a memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. It was Goodreads winner for Best Memoir or Autobiography last year.

"Sometimes the grief feels as though I've been left in a room alone with no doors."

Michelle Zauner 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.

"Now it was up to me to make sense of myself, aided by the signs she left behind."

My Verdict

Crying in H Mart takes on the complex bond between mother and daughter. Her prose is vivid, moving from self-deprecating to attentive, with textured descriptions of each moment. Through her writing Zauner performs the work of creative memory that recovers and translates the past into something liveable with incredible honesty.

After chemotherapy Chongmi says her veins look black, as if toxins run through them. This parallel between the cancer and Zauner's relationship with her mother and with her own identity develops into an amazing story of great loss and growth,

I found myself at times lost in the lengthy descriptions of food, but that did make me think about how personal food is and why so many reach to it for comfort. It acted as a bridge for Zanier and her mother to find each other -- and for Zauner to find herself.

For me personally, the long descriptive passages at the beginning and throughout the book made this a challenging read. I did appreciate what she was trying to do, though, and I know that for others this was the power and originality of the memoir. For this reason, I give this book 4 stars.