MICHELLE ZAUNER IS CONTEMPLATING the idea of boundaries. “A part of me is like, did I go too far?” she says, half-sighing, half-laughing. “But I think I naturally make intensely personal art. Often the most shameful admissions are the ones that stick with you.”
The frontwoman of beloved indie band Japanese Breakfast is no stranger to intimacy in her writing. But it’s the success of her recent memoir, the New York Times best-selling Crying in H Mart, that has inspired today’s exercise in self-evaluation. The 32-year-old’s lyrics have always been intimately personal – throughout Japanese Breakfast’s three albums, Michelle has explored the grief she felt following her mother’s death from cancer in 2014 – but in the book she truly bares her soul.
In its titular essay, Michelle walks the aisles of the eponymous Korean-American supermarket chain (the ‘H’ in H Mart stands for han ah reum, a phrase that roughly translates to, ‘One arm full of groceries’), asking whether her Korean identity has died with her mother. “Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy? ” she asks. It’s a question that sets the tone for the rest of the memoir, in which she chronicles her mother’s illness, their turbulent relationship, and her own bereavement.
“I felt very angry that I’d never been exposed to someone who had shared a similar experience that could have prepared me for something like this,” says Michelle today. “I felt so ill-prepared at that time. I felt like [my book] could help someone like me in a similar situation. To the core of my being, it felt necessary to express this.”
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Michelle and her parents moved to the USA when she was just a year old so that her father could take up a job at his older brother’s truck brokerage company. The small family retreated to the woods outside the town of Eugene, Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest. “I spent a somewhat abnormal amount of time alone,” says Michelle. “I was an only child so I had a lot of solitude. There was no one to talk to or play with, no neighbouring children and no friends’ houses I could bike to. I had to entertain myself.”
Left to her own devices, Michelle began to create her own fun, dreaming up worlds she could retreat into. It was in her childhood bedroom, at a little blue, wraparound desk, where she began her musical career, putting pen to paper and learning how to write songs.
A decade later, she returned to that same bedroom, staying there as she cared for her mother, who would
