Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner Announces New Memoir Crying in H Mart

Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner has announced her debut memoir Crying in H Mart, slated for an April 20, 2021 release.

The memoir is an extension of Zauner’s 2018 New Yorker essay, and it discusses her relationship to her upbringing, identity and loss as well as food and culture.

Zauner said in a statement:

My mother passed away almost six years ago and ever since, my life has felt folded in half, divided into a before and after her death, my identity and my family having been fractured in the wake of her loss. I’ve spent the past six years processing grief in the best way I knew how-through creative work. I wrote two albums worth of material in an attempt to encapsulate all of that heavy darkness, confusion and loneliness, and then I spent another three years writing pages and pages to try and capture my mother’s brilliant character and spirit, what it was like to be raised by a Korean immigrant in a small west coast town with very little diversity, the intense shame I felt towards my mixed race identity and how my embrace of Korean food and culture helped me come to terms with that upbringing, allowed me to reconnect with her memory.

Crying in H Mart is available for preorder here. Keep scrolling to see the memoir’s cover art. Read Paste’s 2017 feature with Zauner here.