With humor and heart, Michelle Zauner tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band --- and meeting the man who would become her husband --- her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language and history that her mother had given her.