The household is asleep, and it is three in the morning in a Gangnam apartment. A girl from Oregon and her mother lie awake on a futon in the living room, wrecked by jet lag, until the mother whispers a suggestion: they should go and see what is in the grandmother’s refrigerator. At home the girl would be scolded for raiding the pantry after eight. Here, the two of them stand at the counter in the blue dark, opening every container, eating braised black soybeans and cucumber kimchi with spoonfuls of purple rice straight from the cooker, sucking soy-marinated raw crab from the shell with their fingers. Between bites the mother says, “This is how I know you’re a true Korean.” Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner is the story of what happens to that sentence when there is no longer anyone alive to say it.
The Recipe Was Never Written Down
The title comes from the opening chapter, an essay about the Korean supermarket chain where Zauner, years after her mother’s death, keeps breaking down beside the freezer cases. It is a wonderful piece of writing about displacement: the food court in Elkins Park outside Philadelphia, with its Chinese students who have taken a bus for soup dumplings, three generations of Korean women eating out of one another’s bowls, and a grown son being told by his mother how to eat his ox-bone soup. Zauner watches them and wonders how many of the diners are, like her, shopping for a person who is gone.
That opening sets the method for all of Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. Zauner is half Korean, raised in Oregon, and only partly fluent in her mother’s language, so food becomes the place where she can still belong. When her mother is gone, she teaches herself what was never written down, cooking along with the YouTube star Maangchi in a Greenpoint kitchen. The best of these scenes has her on the floor of her apartment, pausing a video with her chin because her hands are coated in red pepper paste, making her first kimchi in an onggi, the earthenware jar she bought at the Flushing branch of H Mart. Out of it comes the book’s governing idea. Fermentation, she realises, is not decay but a controlled kind of new life, and if she cannot have her mother back she can at least carry on the taste.
The First Thanksgiving Without Her
The grief writing is strongest when it stays small. The autumn after the funeral, Zauner cooks as if she were feeding a prison’s last suppers: pot pies, lasagnas, baked potatoes under drifts of sour cream. For Thanksgiving she spends weeks collecting recipes, roasts a ten-pound turkey from Costco and makes cranberry blizzard, a strange concoction of ice cream, Cool Whip and cranberry jelly that a relative once taught her mother. It is an American holiday, cooked almost defiantly, by the half-Korean daughter of a woman who loved it. Another night she and her father split lobsters, and both find their shells empty of the roe her mother used to scoop out with such delight. Neither says more than a word about it. Neither needs to. Of all the meals in Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, this unglamorous holiday spread may explain the book best: cooking as a way of keeping someone at the table after she has left it.
What Crying in H Mart Admits About Family
The memoir is unusually candid about family. The adolescent war with her mother is told without self-pity on either side: a lunch at a Korean restaurant in Eugene ends with her mother telling her that if she wants to be a starving musician she can go and live like one. Her father, a recovered addict who met her mother at a Seoul hotel front desk in 1983, is drawn with a frankness that must have cost something to publish. A father-daughter trip to Vietnam after the funeral, meant to heal, curdles into a row over a seafood salad sent back at a restaurant in Huế. Then she watches him from a distance, alone on the hotel steps, and her anger gives way.
Here is where Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner asks for patience. The father’s story is raised with great force and then simply let go; by the end he has moved to Thailand and the book has moved on. Kye, the family friend who takes over much of the nursing, is seen entirely through the daughter’s resentment, and although Zauner admits she may be unfair, the portrait never gets a second look. Peter, the boyfriend who becomes her husband, is steady and kind and not much more. And the self-reproach becomes a refrain. Again and again she calls herself selfish, until the confession starts to feel rehearsed.
The warmest late figure is her aunt Nami, who barely shares a language with her and still becomes the closest thing she has left to her mother. Their scenes together, conducted half through a translation app, are some of the most moving in Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. Readers should know that the hospital chapters are graphic about cancer, medication and dying, and that drinking, depression and family violence run through the book as well.
The Musician Behind Crying in H Mart
Zauner is better known to many readers as Japanese Breakfast, and the book grew out of her prose as much as her songs. In 2016 she won Glamour’s annual essay contest with a piece about cooking Maangchi’s recipes after her mother’s death, and two years later the New Yorker essay that became this book’s first chapter brought agents calling. Orion Pictures announced a film adaptation in 2021, with Zauner writing the screenplay and the soundtrack; Will Sharpe signed on to direct, but she said in early 2025 that the project was on pause.
Her life since has circled back to the subject. Time put her on its list of the hundred most influential people in 2022, she scored the video game Sable, and in 2024 she moved to Seoul to study Korean at Sogang University. A second memoir about that year has been announced, which suggests the conversation Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner began is far from finished.
What It Leaves Behind
The flaws are real but small beside what the book achieves. It is a memoir about a death that is mostly about appetite, and it understands that the people we lose stay with us through the senses long after the stories fade. For readers drawn to daughters reckoning with difficult families, Educated by Tara Westover makes a fierce companion, while Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo shows the expectations that press on Korean women at home and at work. And for anyone dreading the holiday table this year, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler is a novel about a family that keeps sitting down to eat together and never quite gets through a meal.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner ends somewhere quieter than catharsis, with a daughter still a beat behind the words, trusting the taste to carry her the rest of the way.