CRYING IN H MART by Michelle Zauner

Zauner, the frontperson for the band, Japanese Breakfast, writes about her relationship with her dying mother, her Korean identity, and food with equal parts rebellion, curiosity, and familial love. The Korean American supermarket H Mart is where Zauner begins her memoir: “Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” Food is its own character in the book. Korean food and the memories of shopping for it, making it, and eating it during Zauner’s childhood and into adulthood when she tries her hand at cooking for her sick mother. It’s an honest look into what it feels like to be a Korean-American with a mother who demands perfection from a daughter that insists on forging her own path. 

Favorite line(s): But nothing impacted me so profoundly as the first time I got my hands on a DVD of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs live at the Fillmore. The frontwoman, Karen O, was the first icon of the music world I worshipped who looked like me. She was half Korean and half white, with an unrivaled showmanship that obliterated the docile Asian stereotype. She was famous for wild onstage antics, spitting water into the air, bounding across to the far edges of the stage, and deep throating a microphone before lassoing it above her head by its cable. Agape at the image, I found myself in a strange state of ambivalence. My first thought being how do I get to do that, and my second, if there’s already one Asian girl doing this, then there’s no longer space for me. Back then, I didn’t know what a scarcity mentality was. The dialogue surrounding representation in music was in its nascent stages, and because I didn’t personally know any other girls who played music, I didn’t know there were others like me struggling with the same feelings. I didn’t have the analogical capacity to imagine a white boy in the same situation, watching a live DVD of say, the Stooges, and thinking, if there’s already an Iggy Pop, how could there possibly be room for another white guy in music?

HEATING & COOLING: 52 MICRO-MEMOIRS by Beth Ann Fennelly

Not quite poetry, but not quite memoir either, Heating & Cooling is a mish-mash of beautiful prose. Fennelly tackles the subjects of marriage, children, illness, death, and grief with raw but playful micro imaginings. With few words, Fennelly gives the reader a look into a whole life with all its timid and fervent quivers in a few pages. Astonishing.  

Favorite line(s): At the deepest part of the deepest part, I rocked shut like a stone. I’d climbed as far inside me as I could. Everything else had fallen away. Midwife, husband, bedroom, world: quaint concepts. My eyes were clamshells. My ears were clapped shut by the palms of the dead. My throat was stoppered with bees. I was the fox caught in the trap, and I was the trap. Chewing off a leg would have been easier than what I now required of myself. I understood I was alone in it. I understood I would come back from there with the baby, or I wouldn’t come back at all. I was beyond the ministrations of loved ones. I was beyond the grasp of men. Even their prayers couldn’t penetrate me. The pain was such that I made peace with that. I did not fear death. Fear was an emotion, and pain had scalded away all emotion. I chose. In order to come back with the baby, I had to tear it out at the root. Understand, I did this without the aid of my hands.

ADMIT THIS TO NO ONE: STORIES by Leslie Pietrzyk

Admit This To No One is a page-turner collection of stories set in Washington, DC. As a witness to politics from the couch in my midwestern living room, I loved Pietrzyk’s gradually rubbing the patina off the lives of these characters, beginning with the Speaker of the House. The Speaker’s daughters’ stories, one a teenager and the other “his favorite” from a previous marriage, give the novel-in-stories its bookends that center around a brutal attack that puts the younger daughter and her famous father in the hospital. Estranged from her dad, the older daughter jumps in a car with her boyfriend to see the father before he dies after hearing about the incident. The Speaker’s loyal assistant, who for decades has been cleaning up the Speaker’s public relations disasters, hovers around the hospital playing mediator between the wife and daughter. Interspersed within these stories are stand-alone gems, especially “Green in Judgment.” A beautifully rendered look at how we bring our prejudices to light in a place where a bridge crossing the Potomac between Virginia and Maryland connects the have and have nots. In the end, the women and their wounds, both big and small, tell the real story of DC and all its dirty secrets. Pietrzyk writes with a keen eye, coloring the scenes with edgy dialogue amidst stately rooms and dive bars. Washington DC has never felt so seen.  

Favorite line(s): This was his favorite part, beyond the glass and alongside the full blitz of roaring traffic, exhaust fumes, eddies of road dust, that unnatural, constant hot wind bull-whipping the air. He couldn’t describe the moment nicely, or explain why he craved these sensations, feeling only a four-foot-high cement wall shielding the blurry onslaught of rushing cars. If one semi lost control, if one SUV careened off course, people on the walkway would be carnage, then headlines—the subjects of ratings-grubbing stories splashed across local news, giving rise to another round of cautionary tales about texting while driving. Yet it wasn’t a death wish in Patrick, more like an animal longing to feel danger without experiencing it.