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Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner has announced her new memoir, Crying In H Mart.
The book is set to arrive on April 20th, 2021 via Knopf Publishing, and will explore how the death of Zauner’s mother forced a reckoning with the musician’s Korean-American identity.
At one point in the memoir, Zauner looks back on a time she broke down in the Asian supermarket H Mart, a traumatic experience that inspired the project’s title. She remembers: “Sobbing near the dry goods, asking myself, ‘Am I even Korean anymore if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?’”
Zauner dealt with her grief by writing music, and explained in a press release that being creative while “embracing of Korean food and culture” made her feel closer to her late mother.
My first book Crying in H Mart will be released April 20th 2021 and is now available for pre order : https://t.co/OBLQXbaHS7 pic.twitter.com/vjHLGkWRZD
— Japanese Breakfast (@Jbrekkie) September 30, 2020
She said: “I wrote two albums worth of material in an attempt to encapsulate all of that heavy darkness, confusion and loneliness, and then I spent another three years writing pages and pages to try and capture my mother’s brilliant character and spirit, what it was like to be raised by a Korean immigrant in a small west coast town with very little diversity, the intense shame I felt towards my mixed-race identity and how my embrace of Korean food and culture helped me come to terms with that upbringing, allowed me to reconnect with her memory.”
You can find further information and pre-order Crying In H Mart here.
Last month, Michelle Zauner and Crying’s Ryan Galloway joined forces to release a new EP called ‘Pop Songs 2020’. Arriving under the name Bumper, the four-track project was sparked by a previous collaboration that saw Zauner ask Galloway to write a guitar part for a song from Japanese Breakfast’s upcoming new album.
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