For some time, I’ve had an idea to create a website for book reviews based entirely on books you shouldn’t read at certain moments. I would categorize them by life event or trauma, and the empaths would thank me. Think of it as trigger warnings for the highly sensitive.
If I’d already started that website, Michelle Zauner’s memoir, Crying in H Mart, would be categorized under the section for “parents,” subcategory, “sick or dying.” I don’t plan to be too personal here, but I will say that I attempted to listen to this book when it felt far too relatable, which meant I took quite a few breaks, and didn’t listen to it while I ran because it is hard to run while you are sobbing (not impossible, but hard).
The memoir is about Zauner’s experience of her mother’s cancer diagnosis when Zauner, and her mother, were both still young, and when so much between them had been, up to that point, full of bitterness, misunderstanding, and resentment. On top of this, Zauner, whose mother was Korean and whose father is white, was grappling with the racism, exclusion, and feeling of in-betweenness of two cultures, of not feeling quite “enough” in either, while also navigating the beginning of her music career, her romantic relationship, and her relationships with her other family members, all of which culminated in the too-quick death of her mother. The memoir, which is beautifully written, particularly the passages about food, captures so well the insidious thing about watching a parent struggle: it’s there, along with all of the other parts of your life, the working and striving and paying bills and going on dates and finding joy in playing music and dancing. It’s there, intangible but present, like pollution drifting downwind. It forces you to pay attention to it even as you have to, sometimes, plug your nose so that you can live your life. So you can breathe.
Knopf (2021)