Crying in H Mart

Michelle Zauner grew up feeling half in and half out of her Korean heritage — the only Asian kid in most rooms in Eugene, Oregon, but Korean enough at home, where her mother expressed love not in words but in the food she cooked and the ritual of their frequent trips to H Mart, the Korean grocery chain that stocked the ingredients of Zauner's childhood.

When her mother is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, Zauner moves back home to become her caretaker, relearning her mother's recipes as a way of holding onto her and of finally understanding her. Cooking jjigae and kimchi becomes an act of grief and an act of connection at once, a way to keep a language and a culture alive after the person who taught it to her is gone.

Michelle Zauner, also known as the musician Japanese Breakfast, writes with unflinching candor about a complicated mother-daughter relationship, the particular ache of losing a parent in your twenties, and the way food can hold a person's memory when words fail. Crying in H Mart is a wrenching, funny, and generous memoir about grief, identity, and the inheritance of love through the kitchen.