Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Crying in H Mart

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

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This memoir had been on my radar for some time, but I just wasn’t sure if I had the emotional wherewithal to read a book about losing your mother to cancer. I had been thinking about it ever since I watched Michelle Zauner’s band, Japanese Breakfast, play on Saturday Night Live (sidebar: I looked it up to see when that performance occurred, and it was in 2022. WHAT EVEN  IS TIME). However, when I had to do a very quick book shop to get something […]

A Reflection on Grief & Culture

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

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I’ve read many books over the years that have made me cry, novels and memoirs both. Few books made me cry while also making me hungry from the incredible depictions of food that tied so closely to the emotional heart of the story. And yet Crying in H Mart had my nose running and stomach rumbling throughout. Written by Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, Crying in H Mart is a memoir about the cancer diagnosis, failed treatment, and subsequent death of her mother. It is […]

“Food was how my mother expressed her love.”

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

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I’d seen Crying in H Mart (2021) by Michelle Zauner on Barack Obama’s Recommended Reading List as well as NPR’s Best Books, but it never really called to me. My husband read it last year, but he was very vague on what it was about: he said it was a woman feeling lost about her life (or something). So that didn’t really make me want to read it either. But I never forgot it, and when I needed a book about Asia for Bingo, I thought it just […]

For a long time I had tried to belong in America, wanted and wished for it more than anything, but in that moment all I wanted was to be accepted as a Korean by two people who refused to claim me.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

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“Mom’s afraid you two will fight if you come,” my father admitted later. “She knows she has to put all her focus into getting better.” I assumed the seven years I’d lived away from home had healed the wounds between us, that the strain built up in my teenage years had been forgotten. Now we were closer than ever, but my father’s admission revealed there were memories of which my mother could not let go.” ― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart “Sweet braised black […]

“For the rest of my life there would be a splinter in my being, stinging from the moment my mother died until it was buried with me.”

Crying in H Mart: A Memoir by Michelle Zauner

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In her mid-twenties, Michelle Zauner gets the call that her mother is sick. It’s cancer, and it’s bad. She heads home to help look after her mother through her treatments, and until her death. Entwined around these recollections are essays about her relationship with her mother, childhood memories of holidays spent with extended family in Korea. Meeting, or failing to meet, parental expectations. Coming of age, moving out, trying to make it in music. And always coming back to her mother and the effect losing […]

Heartbreaking But Beautiful

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

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One of my favorite discoveries of the past year is the band Japanese Breakfast. They’ve been around for a while, but I just never got around to listening to them. Something else I just never got around to was reading Crying in H Mart. What’s the link here? Michelle Zauner is both the lead singer of Japanese Breakfast AND the author of this beautiful and heartbreaking memoir. Michelle had a somewhat unpleasant upbringing. As one of the only Asian American students at her school in […]



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