For Michelle Zauner, the road back to her mother has always run through language, food and music. Now, the Japanese Breakfast frontwoman is returning to the page for a second memoir that picks up the story begun by the acclaimed Crying in H Mart — and takes it somewhere both more complicated and hopeful.
Thank You for Your Suffering, due April 27, 2027 via Knopf, follows Zauner through a year living in South Korea, where she set out to learn Korean in the hope of one day being able to read a diary left behind by her late mother and forge a deeper connection with her family in Seoul.
The book finds Zauner confronting the less romantic realities of that project, too. Korean proves brutally difficult to learn, while an intensive language school leaves her in tears. Living abroad also places unexpected pressure on her marriage to Peter Bradley, her husband and Japanese Breakfast bandmate. At the same time, she develops new friendships, explores Seoul’s underground culture, spends time with her mother’s sister and begins performing songs in Korean.
In a new interview with ELLE, Zauner describes the book as a different kind of story from Crying in H Mart. The title itself comes from the Korean expression “gosaeng haesseoyo,” a phrase used to acknowledge someone’s hard work or effort. Her year in Seoul, she explains, became less about mastering some idealized version of her heritage than about the messy, sometimes funny process of learning, failing and starting over.
“To me, my mom was this very stoic, beautiful, very elegant and meticulous woman,” said Zauner, who was born in Korea but moved to Oregon as a small child. “And my aunt is like, no, that’s the annoying little girl that would put out cigarettes in my desk and steal my money. And I was like, what?”
These distinctions marks a meaningful evolution from Crying in H Mart, the 2021 memoir that chronicled Zauner’s Korean-American upbringing, her complicated relationship with her mother and the devastation of losing her to cancer. The book became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and remained on the list for more than 100 weeks.
When SPIN spoke with Zauner around the release of her album Jubilee in 2021, she was already reckoning publicly with the ways grief had reshaped her identity. That album represented a turn toward joy after the mourning that defined Japanese Breakfast’s earlier work, with Zauner finding room for hope without pretending the loss had disappeared.
Her relationship with Korean language and culture has continued to surface in her music, too. In 2022, Japanese Breakfast released a Korean-language version of “Be Sweet” featuring So!YoON! of SE SO NEON ahead of the band’s performance in Seoul. Zauner said at the time that she wanted the recording to pay tribute to her Korean heritage.
Zauner announced in June that she and Bradley were expecting their first child. Japanese Breakfast’s most recent show was in July opening for Death Cab for Cutie in Raleigh, N.C.
