Michelle Zauner
Michelle Zauner was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1989, and moved with her family to Eugene, Oregon, as a young child. The daughter of a Korean mother and an American Jewish father, she grew up navigating the complex terrain between cultures—a negotiation that would become central to her artistic identity. She attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she studied English literature, before moving to New York and then Philadelphia to pursue music. It was the devastating illness and death of her mother from pancreatic cancer in 2014, when Zauner was just twenty-five, that became the crucible from which both her most acclaimed musical work and her debut memoir would emerge.
As the founder, songwriter, and performer of the indie rock and shoegaze project Japanese Breakfast, Zauner released the album Psychopomp in 2016 as an explicit processing of her grief, followed by Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017) and the widely celebrated Jubilee (2021), which won two Grammy Awards. Her music is known for its sweeping emotional range, its layered production, and its willingness to move between tenderness and noise. As a musician, she built a devoted global following before her literary debut arrived, making her one of the few artists of her generation to achieve major success in both music and literature simultaneously.
Crying in H Mart (2021), available on Writers Review, began as an essay published in The New Yorker in 2018—an essay so viscerally honest and beautifully written about grief, food, and Korean-American identity that it went viral and led to a book deal. The memoir expands that essay into a full account of Zauner’s relationship with her mother, her Korean heritage, and the way food—particularly the food of H Mart, the Korean-American grocery chain—functions as a site of memory, identity, and mourning. The book is simultaneously a filial elegy, an immigrant story, a coming-of-age narrative, and a meditation on cultural inheritance. It became a number-one New York Times bestseller and one of the most talked-about books of 2021.
Zauner’s writing is characterized by its sensory specificity—she renders the smells, textures, and flavors of Korean food with an exactness that makes them function as vessels of memory and meaning—and by its emotional directness, which never tips into sentimentality. She is unflinching about the difficulties of her relationship with her mother, the particular pain of cultural estrangement, and the consuming nature of grief. Her voice is simultaneously vulnerable and controlled, capable of great tenderness and sharp self-awareness.
Michelle Zauner represents a new kind of creative figure: an artist who moves fluidly between musical and literary modes, whose work in each medium deepens and illuminates the other. Her memoir has become essential reading for anyone interested in questions of diaspora, identity, grief, and the sustaining power of food and culture. She continues to record and tour as Japanese Breakfast and to write, and her influence on both the indie music world and contemporary literary memoir is already firmly established.
