O ne day in 2023, Michelle Zauner went into a storage unit in Eugene, Oregon. It contained the remnants of her childhood home, miscellaneous paperwork and some belongings of her mother, Chongmi, who had died of cancer nine years earlier. There, in a box, she found a diary.
It was written by Chongmi when she was in her early twenties and living in Seoul, the Korean largely illegible to Zauner, who grew up speaking English in the United States. “It was serendipitous, finding the journal,” says Zauner, a bestselling author and the Grammy-nominated frontwoman of the indie pop band Japanese Breakfast, her hands and arms marked with jaunty tattoos, her hair cut into three stairs either side of her face. “I had never seen it, never knew it existed.
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