Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner tore me apart and pieced me back together. I don’t know why I thought listening to an audiobook about a woman who lost her mother to cancer was a good idea having just lost my dad to pancreatic cancer a year prior, but I’m so glad I did. It took me a while to get through it, to no fault of the audiobook’s. Life got busy, as it does. I don’t know how to explain the healing that takes place through grief by knowing someone else felt the same thing, even if that is a bit twisted. Of course I don’t want anyone to experience that feeling of loss, the despair that comes with it. But, Zauner told her story, her mother’s story, in such a way that made grief tangible– like it was this thing I could finally grab onto and say– There. There you are. I’ve got you now. Her words spoke to emotions I couldn’t place and pulled them out from the deep places I’d buried them, telling myself I’d grieved and had healed completely now. I needed this book, needed to hear someone else say that not all memories are good and that’s okay. I needed this story of a mother and daughter, their relationship going through fits and starts, and ending too early. I needed to know that someone’s life doesn’t end just because we don’t know what lies beyond, just because we didn’t understand them perfectly. Zauner takes us on a journey through her life and shows us how she became who she is today; an incredible musical icon to so many, an author, a wife, a daughter, a niece, and so much more. She shows us that lives are winding paths, not straight or paved. We don’t know what will happen next and sometimes we get crushed. But, we can learn in that gutter, in that dark and deep place that loss lives. We can take back things we lost– like a mother’s recipe, a language, a place. We can begin to make ourselves anew with memories and what a beautiful thing that is.
This review is more of a thank you to Michelle Zauner than anything else. You made me cry real tears of heartbreak, of relief. You took thoughts I had on grief and memorialized them in ink on paper. This is a book I’ll read again. One I hope to buy soon and mark up with every emotion and thing that comes to mind. I’ll definitely be making the dishes you described. They all sound delicious. You let us into your world, into your mother’s home. We got to cook beside you, cry along with you, and smile. It takes a special person to invoke such visceral reactions to words. I am forever grateful for your story.
A Couple of My Favorite Quotes*
“The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me; so that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, proof of her life, lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.”
“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.”
*As I listened to the audiobook, the punctuation within the quotes may not match what is written in the physical books
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