Author of ‘Crying in H Mart’ Michelle Zauner ends book tour at the Michigan Theater

“Wanting to be a writer was somehow loftier of an ambition than being a musician,” shared best-selling author Michelle Zauner on the last stop of her official book tour for “Crying in H Mart.”

In conversation with author Kiley Reid at the Literati Bookstore-sponsored event, Zauner — also known as the lead musician of Japanese Breakfast — discussed the process of writing her acclaimed memoir with a full house at the Michigan Theater on Sunday, April 23. 

“Crying in H Mart” began as an essay. After a year of receiving rejections, Zauner’s piece “Real Life: Love, Loss and, Kimchi” won Glamour Magazine’s 2016 essay contest. “I thought (the award email) was spam,” she laughed. Around the same time, Zauner’s music career began to take off. It wasn’t until her tour for Soft Sounds from Another Planet ended in Seoul in 2017 that she realized she had much more to say. 

The memoir is the story of Zauner and her mother, who passed away from cancer when Zauner was only 25 years old. Zauner chronicles the stages of her mother’s sickness, from the diagnosis to her final moments, while she reflects on the past. She describes their strained relationship — the tensions influenced by their disparate upbringings and backgrounds — and how they navigated their challenges: through food.

Zauner explains the role of food in her relationship with her mother at the start of her memoir, writing, “Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem — constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations — I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.” Throughout the night, Reid and members of the audience posed numerous food-related questions, which Zauner happily answered, “Everyone has some sort of food memory that connects them with their family,” she said.

Beyond the foodie interrogation — Reid came up with a food quiz halfway through the night — much of the conversation centered around Zauner’s writing experience. The creation of her memoir was a five-year-long on-again off-again process. “A lot of this book was written in between sound check and show time, in the van, on the plane,” she said. “I wrote really badly for a long time until I hit 90,000 words.”

In response, Reid clarified that a lot of people don’t understand that “writing well requires writing badly,” which was repeated several times throughout the night. “It’s so freeing to go in and write badly and get it out of the way,” Zauner added. Later, when asked by an aspiring writer for advice, again she shared the importance of “allowing yourself the freedom to write poorly,” and to remember that “a lot of what is going to be good (happens) during revision.” 

In addition to sharing tips and details on the writing process, Zauner entertained the crowd with her effortless charm, humor and quick anecdotes — for instance, telling us about the night she embarrassed herself in front of Taylor Swift — and inspired us with her honesty.   

“One part of (the) memoir (genre) that’s interesting is that it forces you to have radical empathy,” Zauner shared. “I was so angry in the first draft, and I didn’t want to tell that story. I don’t think I realized how angry I was until I stepped away from it … I realized it wasn’t fair, and (I knew) I needed to be as fair as possible,” she said. 

“I had a lot of shame before I started writing this book,” Zauner said, in reference to the fraught relationship she and her mom shared when she was a teenager. The two had finally reconnected when her mom fell sick and Zauner added, “The most heartbreaking thing is that we were just returning to each other.”

She speaks to this heartbreak near the end of her memoir with beautiful, lyrical prose: “Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line — generational, cultural, linguistic — we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”

The night reached a fitting conclusion with Zauner answering a question about grief and food. An audience member wondered how Zauner dealt with the inability to recreate a meal exactly how her mother made it, to which she replied, “It’s a good thing that it’ll never taste the same.”

It’s what allows us to remember.

Daily Arts Writer Lillian Pearce can be reached at pearcel@umich.edu.