Michelle Zauner lives “a life without much yearning, the bread and butter of creativity,” she said. Sounding like a dopamine junkie, the Korean-American (“wh-asian,” as she put it) told Rolling Stone’s Angie Martoccio the best part of her SXSW was a club sandwich she ordered from room service.
The most anticipated experience for Japanese Breakfast’s upcoming Coachella gig? The catering.
Still, Zauner said she enjoys her time at the festival which helped her land an agent and label in 2016. In 2022, the singer-songwriter returns in triumph as a keynote speaker with two Grammy nominations for her third album, Jubilee, to go with her title of “New York Times Bestselling author” for her debut memoir, Crying in H Mart. The Grammy nods “have really helped with anger management,” said Zauner, whose life free of longing was simultaneously so full of grief over her mother’s fatal battle with cancer that most of her creative work for the past six years centered on that event. Jubilee, she says, was a conscious turn of the page.
“I felt like I’d become so known as an artist known for talking about grief and loss,” she said, sitting on the stage in a long pink dress, chunky white boots, and shiny black braids twisted up into knots on either side of her head. “I wanted to see where writing an album about joy would take me.”
With “big ambitions to pull out all the stops,” Zauner said she “wanted to make something big, but not pop because you can hear an indie band trying to go pop. You can hear this cloying desire to fill arenas. I wanted to find what was bizarre and weird about my particular kind of songwriting and lean into that.” Björk’s Homogenic was Zauner’s model for a perfect third album.
Meanwhile, Zauner has finished the first draft of a screenplay based on her memoir, an account of the difficult relationship between a Korean immigrant mother and her American daughter, and the daughter’s scramble to repair and rebuild a relationship as her mother becomes terminally ill. Zauner said that she was able to forgive herself, through the memoir writing process, for what felt like an isolated pattern of conflict with her mother at the time, but in hindsight seemed inevitable for two people with such different cultural frames of reference. A fan of Kmart realist authors, Zauner said she was always repelled by the idea of writing nonfiction because she feared her Korean heritage would stymie readers without a lengthy primer. However, a Glamour Magazine writing contest win pushed her to further develop her work. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Anthony Bourdain’s food writing, and M.F.K. Fisher on the menace of food also inspired her, she noted.
“I’m really looking forward to writing a second book,” said Zauner, hinting at what a new book might be about. “I would like to someday move to Korea and learn the language. What was difficult about writing about Crying in H Mart was rooting around in memory and what details to mine from them. Writing about the present would be a piece of cake.”
Zauner’s also beginning to think about another album. “Writing and music are all a type of narrative storytelling I’m fascinated by, which is kind of simple,” Zauner said, adding that she likes to focus on what makes the ordinary extraordinary. Perhaps life post-pandemic will accelerate the process.
“So much of what you do as an artist is about this super heightened belief in yourself and having to suspend that was hard,” she said.
After a short audience Q&A, the session was over, Zauner went off to sign her name for a line of readers and fans with copies of her memoir. Afterwards, she may have continued on the BLT kick she said she’s been on lately. “I have to eat simple foods when I tour,” she’d already explained.
This article appears in March 18 • 2022.