by Michelle Zauner
Overall: a beautifully written memoir about Zauner’s relationship with her mother, who died of cancer. Zauner, an only child, grew up in the Pacific Northwest with her Korean mom and her American father. She often returned to Korea to spend time with her mother’s family, with whom she became close despite never becoming fluent in Korean. Zauner describes the personal toll of being caught between American and Korean cultures as well as her complicated relationship with her parents. Please only pick this one up if you’re able to sit with a very sad book about complex, difficult family relationships.
Likes: the writing is first-rate. Zauner has a knack for picking up on sensory details (tastes, especially) and describing them in evocative ways. She does not shy away from unpicking her contributions to the strained relationship she had at times with her mother, or from her sometimes questionable decisions. I felt I really knew Zauner at the end of the book in the way the best memoirs make you feel. Her descriptions of her relationship with her boyfriend are joyful and a wonderful testament to the care they have for one another.
Dislikes: having sat at the bedside of a relative who died of cancer, at times this book was too much, and I had to put it down. Zauner describes what her mother went through in excruciating detail. It’s one of the book’s strengths (too often we’re treated to rose-colored deathbeds in the media, in my opinion), but for anyone who has lived it, the passages about her mother’s physical deterioration, last breaths, etc., were very, very difficult to stomach. Zauner has far less patience for her father’s failures than her mother’s, which sometimes felt appropriate and at others like a failure on her part to extend the empathy she has for her mother to him.
FYI: This book’s subject is the death of a parent from cancer. It also contains a scene of child abuse.
Liz Helfrich 