On food as love language: Crying in H Mart

In this moving memoir, singer-songwriter Michelle Zauner reflects on her youth in the Pacific Northwest, her mother’s illness and passing, and the parallel shaping of her artistic career and love life. 

The narrative centers on grief as a path to rediscovering her Korean heritage and understanding her mother’s culture—a bridge across years of disconnection and a reminder that parents, especially mothers, carry histories and identities often unseen, especially for mothers.

‘The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me.’

Food becomes the memoir’s most original lens: a quiet transmitter of culture, memory, and love. Zauner shows how maternal gestures, especially those tied to nourishment, endure across generations, even when overlooked.

Beyond family and heritage, the book also captures the struggles and triumphs of an artist’s coming-of-age. Zauner shares glimpses of her creative process, her devotion to music, and her perseverance in a landscape with little representation for Asian-American musicians.

 It is a testament to resilience, creativity and the slow work of building a career when life gets in the way. Nothing happens over night, and this book is a bundle of empathy, inspiration and delicious flavors put into words. The book also offers a new lens into her music writing and the experiences that lead to her poetry, showing us that process and authorship can never fully untangle:

‘When the world divides into two people

Those who have felt pain and those who have yet to

And I can't unsee it although I would like to’

-‘Posing in bondage’, Jubilee, Michelle Zauner