Hey, it’s fall. “Fall.”
I’ve lived in just enough different climates now to feel like the word has almost no meaning. In New York and Boston, it means boots and leather jackets and probably beanies and definitely turning leaves. In Denver, it means wildly unpredictable temperatures and one kind of tree in some parts of the mountains that’s leaves turn one color.1 In New Orleans, it means we get days in the 70s and low 80s and I can turn off the AC and open all the windows. Also, gumbo.
The one thing all of these falls have in common: encroaching darkness.
I will never, ever understand why anyone likes this. Give me back the sun.
— Ashley
let me tell you about this book
An incomplete list of places where I cried while reading Crying In H Mart:
Somewhere over the eastern seaboard
In my comfy reading chair, New Orleans, LA
In the guest bed at my in-laws’ house, Colleyville, TX
Somewhere over Texas
Somewhere over Lousiana
Crying on airplanes is apparently a very common (little-researched) phenomenon, but it wasn’t just that. Michelle Zauner’s memoir, which chronicles her mother’s cancer and death, is gut-wrenchingly sad.
I almost didn’t read Crying In H Mart precisely because I knew it would be so sad. Chance got the book in my hand — planting me in a bookstore in Portland, Maine, two minutes before close, needing a book for the next morning’s flight. I saw something I recognized as good and I grabbed. So I’m here now to say, don’t let the sadness put you off.2
Is it going to make you consider your own parent(s)’s death? Yes. Is it going to make think about how death could be right around the corner for us all? Uh-huh. Will you cry right on solid ground, no excuses? Probably! You’ll maybe call your loved ones more, spend more time with them, and rethink the dimensions of any strife between you. It will probably take a different shape.
It will also probably make you want kimchi very badly. I’m salivating just thinking about the chapter in which, in processing her grief, Zauner gets really into making her own kimchi. Woven throughout her portrait of grief is an appreciation of the Korean culture she shares with her mother3 and her frustration in not being able to share it fully, particularly through cooking.
The other thing Crying In H Mart is likely to make you experience: early aughts nostalgia. Which brings me to my next thing…
let me tell you about this song
Michelle Zauner recorded the song “Boyish” twice, once in 2014 with her old band Little Big League, which never saw much success, and once in 2017 as Japanese Breakfast, a very successful solo project that launched with an album about her mother’s illness and death.
The first take on “Boyish” is a scuzzy, reverb-y complaint, her vocal delivery somewhere between an eye-roll and a snarl. On the second take, which lives on her second Japanese Breakfast album, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, she’s instead settled on a tone somewhere in the neighborhood of winking melancholy. It’s dreamier, gauzier. And I just love that she found two totally different ways to deliver a chorus of:
I can’t get you off my mind, I can’t get you off in general
So here we are we’re just two losers
I want you, and you want something more beautiful
let me tell you about these cats
Every morning around 6 a.m. Jane, Frank Gloria, and Lou meet on their favorite porch in the sun. None of them sleep well at their age.
The porch at the aqua house on Piety Street is eastern-facing and thick with greenery and flowers. It’s a nice three steps up from the ground and divided from the riff-raff (dogs) by a chainlink fence. That fence, though. Maybe its ugliness would be more tolerable if someone didn’t keep relieving themselves beside it. Each of them suspects a different cat of being the culprit, including the actual cat (Gloria) who’s doing it but can’t remember.
I’m sorry, Colorado, I’m still just not that impressed by this!!!!!
unless of course you’re in a delicate or broken place of your own right now, in which case, save it for when you’re ready.
but not her father, though there’s a disastrous post-mortem attempt at sharing a Southeast Asia trip.