This beautiful and illuminating memoir from Japanese Breakfast lead singer Michelle Zauner will break your heart and put it back together again. Zauner writes of growing up Korean American and of the tragic loss of her immigrant mother to cancer. She provides the reader with vivid descriptions of food and hauntingly sad portrayals of her time reconnecting with her mom during her battle with cancer. Gosh, this was so good. So beautiful and heartbreaking. I was literally sobbing at one point while reading it. Read this book if you are interested in a lyrical and gorgeous memoir about mother/daughter relationships, growing up biracial in America, and being the daughter of an immigrant. This is one of the best books I have ever read. I would recommend it to everyone.Publisher's description:
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist of Japanese Breakfast fame. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.