Japanese Breakfast’s Memoir Crying In H Mart Will Be Out In April
Last year, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner announced that she had signed a book deal for a memoir, building off an essay she wrote for The New Yorker called “Crying In H Mart.” Her memoir shares that title and will be released next year on 4/20 via Knopf. It’s available to pre-order now and that’s the cover above, with art by John Gal.
“My mother passed away almost six years ago and ever since, my life has felt folded in half, divided into a before and after her death, my identity and my family having been fractured in the wake of her loss,” Zauner wrote in a statement about the book. She continued:
I’ve spent the past six years processing grief in the best way I knew how-through creative work. 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.
Japanese Breakfast’s most recent album, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, came out in 2017. Earlier this month, she teamed up with Crying’s Ryan Galloway for an EP for a new project called BUMPER.