Reading Crying in H Mart Days After Ur Mom Died

How leaning into the sadness actually feels really, really good.

Anyone else sometimes feel devastated about something and then really want to double down? I mean really feel sad?

In grad school when I was feeling alone and sad I’d listen to the song “We Don’t Eat” by James Vincent McMorrow while watching aerial footage of Washington State... and for whatever reason it got my sadness goingggg.

It’s like putting salt in the wound, and perhaps a bit sadist, but man does it feel good to me.

I had wanted to read Crying in H Mart since it came out in 2021. It was on the New York Times Best Seller list, it was written by an indie artist I liked, Japanese Breakfast... it was the cool girl read. But for whatever reason I never got around to it.

And tbh, I’m so glad I didn’t then. The gist of the book is about how Japanese Breakfast (Michelle Zauner) copes with the passing of her Korean mother. Hence the whole H Mart thing. If I would have read this while my mother was still alive, it just wouldn’t have hit as hard. I’m sure it would have been a profound read— dealing with a complicated mother-daughter relationship and the buzzy topic of grief, but reading if after made all the difference.

Michelle talked about things I could only really relate to after my mom was gone—like seeing old women and being jealous that she’d never get to see her mom become truly old. Or seeing mothers and daughters in public shopping and just longing for one more shopping trip with her mom. AND THESE ARE SO REAL! My mom was only 69. I never got to see her give-in to gray hair. I never got to see her full wrinkles form. I’ll never get to go shopping with her at Nordstrom Rack again and see her use her “triple points.” When I see an old as hell lady on an airplane now, yes I’m happy for her, but there’s a part of me so upset that my mom didn’t get to be an old as hell lady flying to a vacation somewhere awesome.

A lot of the book is pre-grief for Michelle. Her mom had stomach cancer and she knew her mom was dying. Michelle was coping and grieving at the same time. (Which I had seen before with my brother whose wife also passed away from cancer almost five years ago). While all of that was happening, Michelle was also trying to mend her relationship with her mom. Because newsflash, not all of us are super close with our moms.

My mom had an eating disorder and was an alcoholic my whole life. And to be honest, most of my life we weren’t very close and it was really hard to be around her. Fortunately, my own personal work led me to radical acceptance and forgiveness— so the last six years or so we were a lot closer. But net-net mother-daughter relationships can be so hard!! And hearing Michelle struggle through this similar dynamic made me feel seen. While also being envious at times that Michelle knew her mom was passing, so she got more of a proper goodbye, unlike me.

I “read” the book as an audiobook on Spotify—which I especially love for memoirs, since more often than not the author narrates their own story. Hearing Michelle’s voice in my ears as she told hers was incredibly comforting. If you really wanna picture it— imagine me listening to Michelle while walking through my childhood neighborhood passing the ponds where my mom and I used to catch frogs, and the houses where we’d go trick-or-treating. So many of Michelle’s anecdotes stirred up emotions I’d been holding, but in a way I welcomed. I was grieving, and it felt like Michelle was right there with me. We were both longing to hug our moms, to be with them, but we couldn’t. Still, we were together across time and space.

Which is kind of a nice visualization of my mom and me now. She’s physically deceased, but we’re still together... which I’ll get to in another post.

At this point, us millennials all pretty much all know it’s best to feel our feelings and not push them down, but I’m not sure how popular it is to really lean in and amplify those hard feelings. I mean why would you want to feel WORSE? So maybe it’s not for everyone but if my soul chose to have this experience, I wanna honor it and squeeze the damn juice out of it.

Love you so much,

Stacie

*Rare exception was Britney Spear’s memoir “The Woman in Me” which Michelle Williams did a hell of a job reading.