What Grief Tastes Like

The musician Michelle Zauner’s mother died on October 18, 2014, a date that Zauner would have trouble remembering in the years that followed. She wasn’t quite sure why she was always forgetting it. Maybe this amnesia was her mind’s way of protecting itself. Maybe she scrubbed the detail from memory because it seemed so minute compared to all else she endured as her mother succumbed to cancer.

But Zauner hasn’t been able to forget what her mother ate. The older woman’s appetite was particular, Zauner writes in , her moving new memoir. Her mother would order minestrone with extra broth at Olive Garden “steamy hot,” a quirk of language that revealed her native Korean tongue. She’d feast on roasted chestnuts in the winter. She’d ask for extra vegetables with the spicy seafood noodle soup called that she got