The Short Pitch:

Grief, kimchi, and identity crises. Michelle Zauner (yes, the indie-rock queen behind Japanese Breakfast) delivers a memoir that feels like getting gut-punched by a memory you didn’t know you still had. It’s about losing your mother, finding your culture, and the complicated mess that is love in a family that doesn’t say “I love you.”

The Review (This Book Made Me Call My Mom and Also Want to Learn to Cook Everything)

This isn’t one of those “my trauma, but make it lyrical” memoirs that skims the surface of pain and calls it depth. Nope. Crying in H Mart digs in. It’s raw without being performative, tender without trying to fix you, and so specific it loops back around to universal.

Zauner doesn’t just talk about her Korean-American identity — she feels it in every plate of food, every awkward phone call, every attempt to keep a part of her mother alive by learning to make jjigae from YouTube aunties. And the grief? It’s not soft. It’s not graceful. It’s chaotic, angry, and deeply inconvenient. Which is to say: it’s real.

And the writing? It’s deceptively simple. No purple prose. No literary gymnastics. Just razor-sharp honesty wrapped in sensory overload — the smell of garlic, the sting of memory, the taste of longing.

Honest Review (No-Fluff Zone)

Let’s be clear: this book will wreck you if you’ve ever lost someone — or even just feared it. Especially a parent. Especially if that relationship was complicated.

Michelle Zauner does not come to heal you. She comes to show you how grief lives in leftovers, how it creeps up in the rice aisle, how it turns identity into a battleground.

My one gripe? Occasionally, the pacing drags when we’re deep in the “tour diary” era of her music career. It doesn’t ruin the flow, but compared to the devastating family scenes, the indie-band grind feels like a minor detour.

Still. If you don’t feel at least one full-body emotion by page 30, I question your humanity.

Who Would Love This Book:

• Anyone with a complicated relationship with their parents. So… everyone?
• Food lovers who know the kitchen is a holy place.
• People figuring out what cultural identity actually means outside of a checkbox.
• Fans of honest, grief-laced writing that punches and hugs at the same time.
• People who appreciate a good ugly cry in the ethnic foods aisle at H Mart.

Read This Next (3 Memoirs That Slap Just As Hard)

1. Know My Name by Chanel Miller — Devastating, empowering, and gorgeously written. A survival story that redefines the word “brave.”
2. Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong — Less memoir, more cultural gut-punch with personal stakes. Raging, funny, brilliant.
3. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion — The OG grief memoir. Cold, clear, iconic.

Recom:

Crying in H Mart isn’t just about a mother dying. It’s about a daughter becoming — through language, food, music, and mourning. It’s a book that lingers like spice on your fingers, long after you’ve turned the last page.

So now I have to ask:
Are you more into grief memoirs, coming-of-age chaos, or survival stories with teeth? I’ve got recs for all three and then some.