Dua Lipa‘s Service95 book club selection for April is a book by a fellow female musician with an immigrant background.
The book is Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, the Grammy-nominated indie artist who records under the name Japanese Breakfast. Dua writes on Instagram, “With this book, she also proves herself to be a first-class memoirist, writing with raw honesty about her difficult teenage relationship with her mother and the grief that follows her mother’s death from cancer.”
The daughter of Albanian parents, Dua, who moved to the U.K. from Kosovo, notes that “much of this story centres around the cultural and identity issues Michelle grappled with growing up in the U.S. with a feckless American father and a tough Korean mother.”
“Somehow food, and specifically the intricate traditional Korean dishes her mother prepared with such love and skill, becomes the theme which keeps mother and daughter together, and unites Michelle with the Korean half of her identity even after her mother has passed away,” writes Dua. “Everyone with an immigrant background will find relatability searching in a specialist food shop for food that reminds you of home.”
If you’re not familiar, H Mart is a supermarket chain that specializes in Asian food.
Dua says the “beautiful and heartbreaking” book made her “bawl her eyes out,” but she adds, “I also loved it and I hope you do too.”
This month’s book club content features Michelle’s reading list, a curated playlist of her favorite Korean bands and songs she listened to while writing the novel, as well as various articles about food in South Korea and a Q&A between Dua and Michelle.
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