In her mid-twenties, Michelle Zauner gets the call that her mother is sick. It’s cancer, and it’s bad. She heads home to help look after her mother through her treatments, and until her death.
Entwined around these recollections are essays about her relationship with her mother, childhood memories of holidays spent with extended family in Korea. Meeting, or failing to meet, parental expectations. Coming of age, moving out, trying to make it in music. And always coming back to her mother and the effect losing her had.
I seek out books like this now. My mother died last year and I’ve found other people talking about their grief weirdly comforting. I am not going through this alone. Maybe this person has some secret to tell me, about how to get through it? Unfortunately, there is no magic answer. But I appreciate their words anyway. Like:
If I’m honest, there’s a lot of anger. I’m angry at this old Korean woman I don’t know, that she gets to live and my mother does not, like somehow this stranger’s survival is at all related to my loss. That someone my mother’s age could still have a mother.
Yep. It’s not rational. But you still have two parents and I have none? I’m pissed about it, even if doesn’t make sense. I know there’s nothing fair about life. It just is. And yet.
This resonated as well:
She was my champion, she was my archive… Now that she was gone, there was no one left to ask about these things. The knowledge left unrecorded died with her. What remained were documents and my memories, and now it was up to me to make sense of myself, aided by the signs she left behind.
There’s so much that’s lost when someone dies, not just the person but their memories of you, ones that you were too young to hold. All the little idiosyncrasies of me that my mother knew, they’re all gone.
This is definitely a book for the senses, as she describes food in great detail, the preparing of it, the ingredients, how it evokes memories and comfort. This was less interesting for me as I don’t enjoy reading about food. This is my baggage, but it bores me, and I’m afraid I started to skip those segments. But if this is something that appeals to you, you’ll enjoy this as it’s written beautifully.
