Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner | book review

This review is spoiler-free!

“It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to.”

– Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

Title: Crying in H Mart
Series: standalone
Author: Michelle Zauner
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
Published: April 20, 2021
Category: adult
Genre: memoir
Pages: 256
My Rating: ★★★★☆
Goodreads page

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Synopsis

This is a memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

In this story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian American kid 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 pancreatic 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.

[ This synopsis was taken directly from Goodreads. ]

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