A resounding success
Published in the United States in 2021, Crying at the supermarket has won over critics and audiences alike. It sat on the best-seller list for almost a year. New York Times. It became one of Barack Obama’s favorite reads. It sold over a million copies. It even earned Michelle Zauner the title of “literary star” and a spot among the American magazine’s 100 most influential people. Timein 2022. When the French translation appeared last June in Quebec, the writer Kevin Lambert said on the show There will always be culture having “really fallen in love” with the 35-year-old author and her book: “It’s as if she were telling you her life story over a beer in a cool bar in New York.”
From mourning to writing
Crying at the supermarket (Crying in H Mart in English) began with an essay published in the magazine The New Yorker. Michelle Zauner was 25 when her mother died after a six-month battle with devastating cancer. She had already been away from their Oregon home for seven years, eager to escape the pressures of her Korean mother, whose traditional values stifled the rebellious, impulsive teenager she was. When she was diagnosed, she left her life of odd jobs on the East Coast and returned to care for her mother in her final months. The book opens with a scene at H Mart, a Korean grocery chain, where Zauner breaks down in tears. “Am I still Korean if I don’t have anyone to ask for the reference for the dried seaweed I grew up with?”
The story navigates between memories of her childhood in a mixed household, between a mother who only showed her affection for her only daughter in the dishes she cooked for her and a rather absent American father.
She recalls her mother’s trips to Korea, her chaotic adolescence, her desire to repay her “debt” for everything she had done to her, and their final battle with illness as their relationship took a turn for the worse. Michelle Zauner recounts, without holding back, things that most would have preferred to keep quiet or forget, revisiting heartbreaking arguments and deeply intimate scenes that must have required a colossal dose of humility to reveal.
Culinary therapy and identity issues
As she mourns her mother and tries to find her in the flavors of her childhood, Michelle Zauner also reflects with great sensitivity on what it means to grow up with mixed heritage. “I had spent my adolescence trying to blend in with my peers in suburban America,” she writes, “which had made me a young adult convinced that my rightful place was perpetually up for grabs.” […] Half of one, half of the other, I was likely to be ejected according to the desires of someone more legitimate than me, someone complete. Someone whole.” She even questions the effects of the lack of diversity on limiting beliefs when she wonders if a girl “like her” could break through in music. Through these identity questions, her story echoes many books that have been published in recent years — such as those, in our country, by Caroline Dawson, Anita Anand, Soleil Launière (with Akutu) or Michael Gouveia, or even Ocean Vuong, in the United States.
PHOTO TAKEN FROM MICHELLE ZAUNER’S INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT
Michelle Zauner on stage with her band, Japanese Breakfast
Coming soon to the big screen
Good news for fans of the artist, the book will be turned into a film, and Michelle Zauner has already started working on the film adaptation, while her band, Japanese Breakfast, will compose the soundtrack for the feature film. It is the English actor and screenwriter of Japanese origin Will Sharpe (who we could see in The White Lotus) who will direct. “His personal experience, having grown up between two cultures, makes him the ideal director for this film,” Michelle Zauner told the magazine last year Peoplewhen the news broke. Will Sharpe said the book had deeply affected him “as a half-Japanese, half-British person.”
A story to follow
The story will not end with either Crying at the supermarket. In an interview on the show Today NBC’s Michelle Zauner said last year that she plans to write a second book inspired by her year spent in South Korea learning to speak the language fluently. In her book, Zauner recounts Crying at the supermarket that she had to devote every Friday evening for six years, during her childhood, to taking Korean lessons not far from her home. However, she did not take these lessons seriously enough at the time – something she deeply regretted when her mother died. And even more so in her efforts to reclaim the Korean part of her identity and in these moments of shared mourning, in Seoul, with her maternal aunt, her last tangible link with her. If her project comes to fruition, we will be able to delve into this immersion and discover the path she has taken since her first book.
Crying at the supermarket
Christian Bourgois
313 pages