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TUESDAY
Picador has signed “exquisite” memoir Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, a musician who records under the name Japanese Breakfast.
Editor in chief Ravi Mirchandani acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, including audio, from Jenny Meyer at JMLA, acting on behalf of Brettne Bloom at The Book Group. It will be published in August 2021.
The blurb explains “In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Zauner writes with humour and heart of growing up as an Asian-American kid in Oregon; struggling with her mother's high expectations; a painful adolescence; and treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was 25, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.”
Zauner is best known as an indie singer and guitarist who performs as Japanese Breakfast and has won acclaim for her albums “Psychopomp” and “Soft Sounds From Another Planet”. She is also the author of a viral 2018 New Yorker piece that shares the title of her book.
Mirchandani said: “I was deeply moved and engaged by Michelle Zauner’s original New Yorker article about the death of her Korean mother and their shared relationship to Korean food, so I am delighted to be publishing the fascinating, moving and beautifully observed book that it has given birth to. Michelle’s New Yorker piece clearly spoke to so many readers; I look forward to her book doing so too.”