Five years after Crying in H Mart, Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner has revealed her next book: Thank You for Your Suffering, out April 27, 2027 via Penguin Random House.
The memoir traces Zauner’s year in South Korea, connecting with her family in Seoul
and learning Korean, in hopes to read her late mother’s diary. It details her journey of living in a foreign city — from the apartment she moves into with her husband and bandmate (Peter Bradley), to the difficulty of learning the language — and her newfound connection to her roots.
Crying in H Mart, which stemmed from a 2018 New Yorker essay, centered on Zauner’s relationship with her late mother, the meals they shared, and finding a new connection to her Korean-American identity. Around the release of the book, she was already contemplating its follow-up. “I think that desire will strike again pretty soon,” she told Rolling Stone. “I definitely feel like I have another book in me, if I’m not horribly panned.”
That was hardly the case, as Crying in H Mart spent over 100 weeks at No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list (a film adaptation was in the works, but was put on pause after actor-director Will Sharpe stepped away from the project). “I think, if anything, perspective makes the best work,” she said at the time. “So if I’ve been away from the screenplay for years, when I open it back up again, I think it’s only going to get better from there. I think someday I would like to direct it.”
Zauner kept busy with Japanese Breakfast, following up 2021’s excellent Jubilee with For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), released last year.
In a new interview with Elle, Zauner spoke about Thank You for Your Suffering, becoming a mom, and what the writing process was like. “Especially having written my first book about something so raw and painful, it was really nice to write a book that had so much joy in it, and it was so funny to recall such a special time,” she said.
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