The Language of Grief, the Language of Food

On Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

Some books don’t just tell a story; they sit inside you, altering the texture of how you remember, taste, and grieve. Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart is one of those books.

When I first read it, what struck me wasn’t only the grief, though that pulse is steady throughout, it was how grief moved through ordinary details, a bowl of rice, the tang of kimchi, the silence at a kitchen table, etc. I highlighted the ways grief isn't just in the final goodbyes or a hospital room, but how it's also in the textures of daily life, in the way food carries memory, in the way language both connects and separates us from the people we love, and how it is often messy and nonlinear.

Zauner writes about her mother with a kind of honesty that refuses neatness. The love is fierce, but so is the pain, the misunderstandings, the sharpness of expectations. What stayed with me was how she doesn’t flatten her mother into a saint or a villain; she lets her be a full person, complicated, frustrating, and deeply loved, and that felt truer to the reality of grief. We do not only mourn what was gentle or kind. We also mourn the conflicts, the silences, the things unresolved, and in this book, that felt devastatingly true.

Food becomes the language of that grief, and the memoir is filled with scenes where meals become memory. Cooking isn’t just nourishment, it’s survival, ritual, communion. Each dish is a way of keeping her mother present, of speaking when words fall short. Reading those passages, I realized how powerful the smallest sensory details can be. I kept thinking of the way she describes shopping at H Mart, how aisles of groceries turn into a kind of memorial. Each ingredient holds a history, a reminder of meals shared, of lessons taught in the kitchen. Food here isn’t background, it’s testimony, an archive of care.

The book also lingers on language, on the gaps between English and Korean, on how fluency in one doesn’t make up for distance in the other. Zauner shows how language can both bind and estrange, how not knowing the right word can wound, how hearing the familiar sound of a mother tongue can comfort. The grief here is not only the grief of losing a person but of losing worlds of expression, of realizing what words you never got to say, and yet, even in those gaps, she finds ways of carrying her mother forward, through music, through memory, through food.

Crying in H Mart is not a book that rushes resolution. It dwells in what cannot be fixed. It honors the truth that grief doesn’t close neatly, doesn’t follow a linear path. There’s no triumphant healing, only a reshaping of how to carry what’s been lost, and yet, the book is filled with love, not the sentimental kind, but love that is gritty, messy, alive. Love that is sometimes harsh in its demands but steady in its presence.

This wasn’t a book I moved on from quickly. I finished it and found myself thinking about Zauner’s descriptions of rice, of silence at the kitchen table, of hair washed with care. How those details can summon someone back more vividly than any grand story. How inheritance is carried less in grand gestures and more in fragments of intimacy. It reminded me that grief is not just a memory, it’s a practice, a ritual, an ongoing act of carrying, and sometimes, all it takes is a taste, a scent, or a gesture to bring the person you love back into the room.

Until we meet again.

The Fragile Urgency of Living

On When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Some books arrive not as stories, but as reckonings. When Breath Becomes Air is one of those books. Written by Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon who found himself suddenly on the other side of the diagnosis, the memoir is not just about dying. It’s about what it means to live while suffering, to remain present when the body begins to betray you.

I didn’t read this book when I first got it. It stayed on my shelf for a while, quiet, slim, unread. I knew what it was about, or at least, I thought I did. I knew it was one of those books that was often spoken about with reverence, that it dealt with mortality, clarity, and maybe even grace, but I wasn’t ready, not because I feared the subject, but because I didn’t yet know what I was looking for inside it.

Kalanithi’s writing is precise yet tender, shaped by both his scientific training and his lifelong love of literature. What struck me most was how he refused to reduce suffering to either a clinical condition or a spiritual lesson. Instead, he let it remain what it is: confusing, relentless, clarifying, unbearable, and strangely full of meaning all at once. The book traces his journey from the operating room to the hospital bed, from being the healer to the one who needs healing. But it isn’t just about reversal. It’s about intimacy with suffering—how it strips away what is inessential, how it remakes time, how it forces a reordering of what matters. He doesn’t deny the pain. He doesn’t try to romanticize it either. What he does is face it with language sharp enough to hold both anguish and wonder.

There’s a line that stayed with me, where Kalanithi writes: “The pain of failure had led me to understand that technical excellence was a moral requirement” (Kalanithi  ). While Kalanithi was initially talking about surgery in more specific terms, this line also speaks to life itself. It speaks to how deeply suffering shapes our obligations, to ourselves, to others, to truth. His suffering becomes not just a private weight but a way of seeing the fragile web of responsibility and care that binds us. What hit me hardest, though, was the raw acknowledgment of uncertainty. Suffering here is not a puzzle to be solved but a reality to be endured, carried, and occasionally illuminated. He shows how suffering makes language falter, yet insists on writing anyway, and in doing so, he leaves behind a book that is both devastating and luminous.

This wasn’t a book I rushed through, and it’s not one I’ve returned to, at least not physically, but I still hear it. Still feel the voice of someone trying, with every sentence, to hold onto presence even as everything else slips. Maybe that’s what I was looking for when I finally opened it. Not the meaning of suffering, just a voice inside it. It’s a reminder that sometimes, the most intimate thing we can do is name the moment we’re in without rushing through it.

When Breath Becomes Air is not about finding peace in suffering. It’s about learning to live in its shadow, to keep reaching toward meaning even as the future collapses. It stayed with me because it asked the hardest question: what makes life worth living in the face of death, and didn’t offer a single, easy answer. Instead, it let the question remain, heavy and unfinished, the way suffering itself often is.

Until we meet again.

What We Inherit, What We Resist: Independence

On Independence by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Some books linger not because they shout, but because they carry a quiet urgency that stays under your skin. Independence is one of those novels.

Set against the backdrop of Partition, it tells the story of three sisters, Deepa, Jamini, and Priya, each navigating what freedom means when the world around them is fracturing. Political freedom. Familial freedom. Bodily freedom. The story begins in Bengal in 1947, but what it traces moves far beyond history. It’s about what happens when the structures holding your life together, family, country, and tradition, begin to fall apart, and you must decide what to carry forward and what to let go.

What stayed with me most wasn’t just the setting or even the plot. It was the intimacy. The way the novel handles sisterhood is not as harmony but as tension, devotion, misunderstanding, and love. How it explored the pull of duty and desire, of self and family, of care and resentment. Divakaruni writes relationships with such emotional texture that even in their silence, the sisters felt vivid, tender, frustrating, and real.

Each sister is drawn differently toward the idea of freedom. One wants to heal, one wants to love, and one wants to rise. None of their paths is simple, and none is untouched by violence, but none of them are passive, either. Even in loss, they choose, they act, and they survive.

What I appreciated most was that the novel didn’t flatten its characters into symbols of Partition or trauma; instead, it let them live through it, and let them contradict themselves. Their choices weren’t always admirable, but they were always human.

There’s a particular kind of grief in the novel, grief for what might have been, what should have been, what was never named. But there’s also resilience. Not the kind that feels forced or triumphant, but the kind that lives in the small, quiet moments: the willingness to go on, to stay, to imagine something else.

Independence isn’t just a historical novel. It’s a story about what we inherit, what we resist, and how we come into ourselves, sometimes through pain, sometimes through hope, often through both.

Until we meet again.

The Ones that Lingered

Some stories stay with you. Not because they’re flawless, or life-changing, or even because you read them recently, but because something in them took hold and didn’t let go.

These are a few of the books that did that for me.

1. Crying in H Mart – Michelle Zauner

This one settled in my body more than my brain. It was about grief, yes, but also food, language, identity, and how we carry love that was never easy. I finished it and kept thinking about the way she described the small details, rice, hair, and silence at the kitchen table, and how that was enough to bring someone back. I didn’t move on from this book quickly. It stayed.

2. When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi

I read this in a quiet season of my life, and it hasn’t really left since. There’s something about the clarity of his voice even at the edge of dying that made everything else feel still for a while. It’s not just about medicine or mortality, it’s about choosing to say something before you can’t. The language is gentle, but the impact is sharp. It lingers.

P.S. Do not listen to the audiobook version while driving; it is hazardous.

3. Independence – Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

This novel surprised me. Every time I came back to it, the novel opened in a new direction. It’s set during Partition, but it’s not just historical, it’s deeply personal. The lives of three sisters unfold against the backdrop of national upheaval, but the real power is in the quiet negotiations: love, freedom, responsibility. It’s a novel that lingers not just because of what it depicts, but because of how it feels, attentive, tender, and expansive.

4. The Storyteller’s Secret – Sejal Badani

This book arrived during an in-between time in my life, and it met me there. It moves across generations and countries, holding trauma, love, and memory with real care. What I appreciated most was how it didn’t try to resolve everything; it just listened. It gave space to grief without rushing to heal it, and that felt generous.

This isn’t a definitive list. Just a handful of stories I’ve been carrying lately. Others have stayed with me in different ways, and I imagine more will find their place here, too. The shelf is always expanding.

Until we meet again.