Before moving to Seoul, Michelle Zauner found her mother’s diary in a bank safe-deposit box. Written in Korean, it gave the Japanese Breakfast musician a particularly intimate reason to study the language: her mother had left behind a record of her life, and Zauner wanted to be able to read it. Having written a bestseller about their relationship, she now had the possibility of encountering her mother on her own terms.
That desire runs through Thank You for Your Suffering, her second memoir, arriving April 27, 2027, through Knopf. Following 2021’s Crying in H Mart, which examined grief and Korean American identity through food and family, the book recounts a year spent learning Korean and developing closer relationships with her mother’s relatives. Its premise puts an accomplished writer and musician in the uncomfortable position of having plenty to say and struggling to find the words.
Zauner spent 2024 in South Korea, pursuing an idea her mother had planted years earlier. In a She recalled her mother’s belief that living there for a year would allow her to learn the language. Following that advice after her death gives the project an emotional charge that extends well beyond academic achievement.
The practical business of the move supplies its own complications. The memoir follows Zauner and her husband and bandmate, Peter, into a rented apartment and through language classes demanding enough to leave her in tears. Beyond the classroom, there are new Korean friends, time with her aunt, excursions into Seoul’s underground scene and attempts at writing songs in Korean. For someone whose career depends on expression, becoming a student again carries unusually personal stakes.
Despite its title, Zauner describes the period as a happy one, and writing about it as a welcome experience after the pain of her first memoir. She kept a daily journal in Korean and English, later returning to those entries to shape the book. Those two languages give the project its most compelling tension: the language in which she has already told her mother’s story, and the one in which her mother could tell her own.
