‘Food was an unspoken language between us’: Practices of Healing in Michelle Zauner’s Grief Memoir, Crying in H Mart (2021)

The relationship between different types of crises (collective and private ones), the trauma resulting from their experience, and literature has been widely investigated in the field of Trauma Studies. Literature can be a privileged space to uncover, negotiate and even resolve personal experiences of crises and traumas (Pellicer-Ortín & Sarikaya-Şen 2020), thus providing readers with valuable perspectives on quintessential human experiences. Bearing this in mind, my presentation will concentrate on Michelle Zauner’s literary debut, Crying in H Mart (2021), a poignant ‘grief memoir’ (according to Fowler 2007; Berman 2010; Małecka 2023’s definition of the term) recounting the author’s mourning in the aftermath of her mother’s death to pancreatic cancer. In this autobiographical account, the strict relationship between the loss of a loved one and the loss of one’s ‘sense of self’ or ‘identity’––as defined by modern bereavement theorists such as Silverman (2005) and Parkes & Prigerson (2010)––is pivotal, as Michelle, born in Korea and raised in the US, feels her ‘Koreanness’ (Zauner 2021) swiftly fading away the moment she loses her mother. If the act of writing helps Zauner to cope with her grief both on the diegetic and extradiegetic level of the narrative, it is the act of cooking and eating Korean food that allows her to reconnect with her late mother as well as with her identity as a Korean-American woman. Drawing on the anthropological literature on the relationship between food, trauma, and identity (Strand 2023), I also intend to emphasize the role of cooking as a coping mechanism within this autobiographical narrative. Lastly, this presentation, aims at highlighting the cultural relevance of this contemporary literary genre, as well as opening up a discussion on its potential therapeutic benefits, both for authors and readers alike.