Read Women discussion

Here's the thread for our December nonfiction food-centric read. We are reading Crying in H Mart, a 2021 memoir by Michelle Zauner.

Her bio and book summary from GR:

Michelle Zauner is best known as a singer and guitarist who creates dreamy, shoegaze-inspired indie pop under the name Japanese Breakfast. She has won acclaim from major music outlets around the world for releases like Psychopomp (2016) and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017). Her memoir, Crying in H Mart, was released in 2021.

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The New York Times bestseller from the Grammy-nominated indie rockstar Japanese Breakfast, an unflinching, deeply moving memoir about growing up mixed-race, Korean food, losing her Korean mother, and forging her own identity in the wake of her loss.

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour 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, 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.

For those of you who don't know, H Mart is an American chain of Asian supermarkets. According to Wiki, it also has stores in Canada and the UK and the H comes from its original Korean name, Han Ah Reum.

Who will be joining for this read? It is highly rated and widely read. Let's see if it lives up to the hype or at least whets our appetite.

And of course, if you have already read it, feel free to join the discussion. If you didn't like it, perhaps hold back for now on discouraging comments until we are further along. But as we are dealing with a memoir addressing grief, I am compelled to say this suggestion about negative comments does not apply to content warnings, should you have any.

i had no idea about the origin of the H! i just know that our H Mart opened 5/6 years ago and parking remains at a premium all the time , daily.

i will join in ten days or so. everything I have heard about this one is positive. her interviews are worth a listen, too.

the Japanese Breakfast website: https://japanesebreakfast.rocks/

I read this a few years ago and gave it very high marks. I look forward to seeing what other readers have to say about it.

Oooo - this one has been on my TBR for a while. I might join you all. I have to finish the massive 1200+ book I am reading right now though first!

Oh heck - it was on sale, so I got it. I probably won't get to start it until next weekend though.

Just read chapter one- short and easy read- and touching- and has the same title as the book so it was food talk through and through :)

I’ve read page 1 today! Then read "So Long a Letter". Now I'm back to this one.

i started yesterday. it’s a compulsive read and I felt like I got “into” it quickly. i’m only at page 30 so don’t have any substantive thoughts yet. im just super glad that it isn’t making me sad. Grief memoirs cam be tricky like that, for me.

I just finished chapter 8, and it is definitely making me sad. My mom passed in 2021, and I helped take care of her at the end. I love the food references. My mom was a good cook, but it is the little things that remind me of her. Every Christmas, I buy several boxes of chocolate covered cherries - you know the red boxes that have like ten cherries in it. They're horribly sweet and sticky - LOL. She loved them though, so every year I have some and think of her.

I can so relate to her trying to get her mom to eat. My mom, at the end, was so skinny. She just couldn't eat much. She had an autoimmune disorder that attacked her muscles including those in her throat. Seeing your mom wasting away really does make you want to force food down her throat. I so related to that part of her story. When she talked about her mom looking at herself in the mirror and seeing someone different - oh god. I almost bawled.

This is a really good book, but it is hard. I might read a few chapters of something silly before coming back.

Well, I'm done, and I am wrecked. I was subbing at an elementary school, and I listened to it during their specials periods, and I was sitting in the classrooms just bawling. I'm wrecked. I walked home and listened to the last chapter. I had a Queen Anne Cordial Cherry, and now I am going to snuggle with my dog for a while. *sniff*

Oh wow, Misty. Take care. Thank you for sharing.

My reading has been paused a few days due to stress and demands here at my folks but I got to that part with the bath and catching her reflection in the mirror…

Well I think the writing has been really effective in taking you to her world. Perhaps to be appreciated she’s someone who studied creative writing since memoir writing can be so hit or miss…

How far along is everyone else?

I have just read about the last days, last words, last moments with her mother. Super moving, heart wrenching... I guess she is blessed to die with loved ones and in her home...

If you have gotten this far, I wonder what you all think of Zauner's impulse to go to the orchard, and particularly to feed the goats? I found this touching and perhaps easy to project why one might be compelled to this.

I still have 80 pages, so I wonder what unfolds next.

Another part I loved was the time with her Aunt on her solo Korea stay in the past.

Jen wrote: "How far along is everyone else?

I have just read about the last days, last words, last moments with her mother. Super moving, heart wrenching... I guess she is blessed to die with loved ones and i..."

I think I'm just a few pages before where you are because she just died, but I haven't seen any goats yet. I have so many feelings about this book. I took a break and switched to The Mighty Red for a few days just avoiding sitting in that place of grief. (My last day at my job was last week and there's just a ton of emotion tied up with that that I've finally gotten through and am left with the anxiety piece, which is easier in some ways.) Her writing and organization of this memoir are superb. I don't share all of her expressed feelings of love and closeness with her mom, e.g., I did not have that sort of relationship with my mom, and didn't lose a best friend or the like when she passed. But Michelle's pre-sickness statements about her mom and her relationship don't shout super-close either. What I see is someone who really wanted to be close to her mom at the moment she learned of her diagnosis, and the story she tells herself is that they were tight but their relationship was always more layered and challenging than she wants to live with and they did not become closer through this end of life experience.

I don't know how I'd feel if someone wanted to marry me because one of their parents was about to die. Peter's a champ, and a better man than me, reversing the genders.

To be clear, I find Michelle fascinating and her story well-told; I'm just not finding her very honest with herself in this retelling about her and her mom's relationship.

I also personally struggled both with the, I'm only getting 2 chemo treatments (because someone with a different health profile and especially a different kind of cancer died after 20+ treatments? that's just not how standard of care works, and pancreatic does not equal colon), and I fear that people reading this book and have no direct connection to oncology treatments, options, 5-yr survival rates, will take this anecdote as license that it's reasonable to have a number of treatments in your head and, when you hear cancer, you limit treatment to your preselected number. That's messed up in so many practical, science-based ways. Infuriating moment 2 - for me - was when they put this very sick, very much in pain, woman on a long-flight to Korea. Such an abominable, well-intentioned, but oblivious collective decision. Oh, and I'll a third - Michelle's way of handling her mom's nausea and almost forcing food into her that she didn't want to eat. I have been there with a stage 4 patient who has no appetite. It's difficult to watch them lose weight, but they do have agency and autonomy and you have to balance your pressure to eat against that lack of appetite and their inability to keep foods down. I understand Michelle was doing the best she could in that moment, but there's so very much helpful information provided by oncology teams to caregivers - including in-person and virtual meetings with other caregivers to share tips - on products and approaches to address treatment-related nausea and this book doesn't indicate that she took advantage of it when it came to that topic. I really felt for her mom that she had to manage Michelle while feeling so craptastic.

I realize those are long rants but they've been bottled up for a couple of weeks while I processed whether it was just me, and I decided they were important enough to share because either experiencing cancer as a patient or a caregiver is so common and this book has such broad reach.

Misty wrote: "Well, I'm done, and I am wrecked. I was subbing at an elementary school, and I listened to it during their specials periods, and I was sitting in the classrooms just bawling. I'm wrecked. I walked ..."

Misty - I'm so sorry that you were in public when you were reading this. I've had at least one book bring me to tears on a long flight and trying to get a grip and not explain to others lest you cry even harder is so difficult. Hugs.

Misty wrote: "I just finished chapter 8, and it is definitely making me sad. My mom passed in 2021, and I helped take care of her at the end. I love the food references. My mom was a good cook, but it is the lit..."
Oh my goodness Misty! I am sorry for your loss of your mother. I had a similar experience with caring for a sister. She was a wonderful cook who never let me go home empty handed and shared her recipes. It was incredibly hard to have her fade away before my eyes. My Christmas gift to her was the same chocolate covered cherries.

This was my last sentence in my review: I hope that this book was cathartic for Michelle and appreciate her sharing such personal history with us readers. It brought throat tightness and some tears but also some smiles.

Misty wrote: "I just finished chapter 8, and it is definitely making me sad. My mom passed in 2021, and I helped take care of her at the end. I love the food references. My mom was a good cook, but it is the lit..."

i am sorry i missed responding to this comment sooner. that must have been so so very hard for you. my husband hit 121 (he’s typically 175), and when no apparel fits and they just don’t look like themselves, it’s unbearable.

Sophie wrote: "Misty wrote: "I just finished chapter 8, and it is definitely making me sad. My mom passed in 2021, and I helped take care of her at the end. I love the food references. My mom was a good cook, but..."

i am sorry you went through this with your sister, sophie. that sense of powerlessness as well as heartache is breathtakingly hard. your review endng is elegant and kind.

Carol wrote: "Jen wrote: "How far along is everyone else?

I have just read about the last days, last words, last moments with her mother. Super moving, heart wrenching... I guess she is blessed to die with love..."

Thanks for sharing, Carol.

I guess this book is going to ignite personal stuff for folks who've been on a cancer journey or similar themselves or with someone very close to them.

I found the story up to her mother's death heart wrenching, but I find myself really falling for the book with what comes after that. I have about 20pg left.

I think I feel more empathetic to the author. I find her vulnerability- her admission of her flaws, missteps, troubled family relations - brave in its openness and I think her views of her parents come across compassionate. I like to believe a relationship can be tight as well as layered and complicated. In fact, maybe the qualities naturally go together. When we are tight, we can reveal all sides of ourselves to each other, good and bad. I think what's sad is how she seems at times a bit too hard on herself. And I feel for her having to confront this at such a young age and without much relationship repair having been accomplished since her teen years. But it stood out to me that, while in college, they bonded with phone calls on how to cook something and really thoughtful and generous care packages- the broken-in boots!

I love that she had a partner who came in the middle of the night to another city after a night shift of work to be there for her. I enjoy the thread of love story in the book and how it never feels like it's taking too much from the center.

I have come here to finally admit - I am struggling mightily with this lovely book. It's a combination of (big) things with the added even bigger layer of the time of year. There is a reason I save lighter-hearted chick lit and cozier murder mysteries for December.

Beautiful reviews, everyone, thank you. You make me want to finish the book. But I'm going to refrain from being here for this one, because if I start letting go, I'll be a maudlin mess. And that ain't pretty. Or healthy for me.

😘Mwah everyone! Wishing everyone a peaceful, happy holiday season!

I totally get that Gail. Take care of yourself. Happy Holidays.

Carol - this book had a lot of layers for you that it didn't for many of us. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. I'm sorry about your sister Sophie. Cancer is a bitch. I lost my brother to cancer. Sometimes I don't even know what to say about it other than the oh-so-eloquent - cancer is a bitch.

Carol - I also don't think Michelle was completely honest about her feelings about her relationship with her mother. I may be completely inserting my own complicated feelings, and what I am about to write might be absolutely and completely off the mark. But - here goes. I used to have a very close relationship with my mother - she was my best friend. Then I publicly came out as bisexual, and she disowned me. She eventually came back into my life, and she had rewritten the entire incident in her head - I think because of her guilt that her own ingrained prejudices had harmed me. I don't think she could ever truly face what she had done. Our relationship never completely recovered as much as I wanted it to, and I think she did as well. When she died, I had (and still have) a lot of weird feelings. I felt like Michelle was really trying to fit this relationship she wanted with her mother into a frame that just didn't quite fit. I think she had trouble facing up to the ways her mother really did fall short as a mother, so she focused a lot on her failings as a daughter. It is really hard to know that your mother wasn't what you needed. It was good for me - as a mother - to see how much love she had for her mother even though their relationship hadn't been awesome. Do I think she was completely honest about their relationship? No. Do I think she was as honest as she could be? Yes. I think writing this book probably helped her deal with a lot of the complicated feelings about her relationship with her mother. Have I completely faced all the crap with my mother? No. Will I ever? Not sure. Again, I might be inserting my own complicated relationship into something that is completely different - that's just the way I read it.

Finished! Packed train, 8 hour ride yesterday.