Reviews tagging 'Toxic relationship'

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

21 reviews

katschkekat's review

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

3.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death, Grief, Cancer, Chronic illness, and Death of parent

Minor: Addiction, Abortion, Medical content, Alcohol, Car accident, Drug abuse, Emotional abuse, Toxic relationship, Infidelity, Vomit, and Drug use

eatingbrains's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

2.5

I don't even really know what to say, but I will try to put something about the reading experience into words.

It was alright.  I teared up a few times.  The descriptions of food were verbose and evocative, sometimes excessively so.  I love Maangchi.

This is a story of grief and mourning, of finding your identity and how it changes as you grow, relationships and connections.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body horror, Cancer, Death of parent, Grief, Medical content, Medical trauma, Toxic relationship, Vomit, Alcohol, and Terminal illness

Moderate: Death, Excrement, and Fatphobia

Minor: Abortion, Body shaming, Drug use, Addiction, Suicidal thoughts, Bullying, Car accident, Confinement, Cultural appropriation, Eating disorder, Religious bigotry, Emotional abuse, Racial slurs, Racism, Rape, and Sexism

mirandyli's review

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Crying in Hmart has got me crying in Hmart. If you are a second gen East Asian immigrant, this book will make you cry. It was so painfully relatable and will make you want to hug your mom, no matter how much you hate her. Book of the year.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Alcohol, Alcoholism, Body shaming, Excrement, Abortion, Drug use, Medical content, Misogyny, Cancer, Colonisation, Death, Drug abuse, Panic attacks/disorders, Vomit, Addiction, Car accident, Death of parent, Eating disorder, Grief, Religious bigotry, Sexism, Terminal illness, Toxic relationship, Xenophobia, Infidelity, and Racism

authorbrittanibee's review

emotional reflective sad

Michele Zauner is a brilliant author whose attention to detail regarding both food and emotion and how they interweave with one another is absolutely breathtaking. I could picture each dish she wrote about in my mind, her descriptions rivaling the visual portrayal of food in a Studio Ghibli film. That's how wonderfully vivid her words were. I could practically see the Korean fried chicken, Taiwanese beef noodle soup, and gyeranjjim jumping off the page and into my rumbling belly.

However, I still find myself struggling to give a star rating for her memoir. I believe this is primarily because her story shines a light directly onto my own life and the recent struggles I have found myself facing in regards to the parent/ child dynamic and the issues that stem from generational trauma. 

While reading this memoir, I found (and highlighted) many instances where the dynamics between Michelle and her mother (and sometimes her father) felt toxic or uncomfortable. Of course, I must note that I read this story through a very specific lens having recently decided to cut ties with both of my parents. But--from my outside perspective--the dynamics within this family did not seem the most healthy and caused me a mixture of frustration and heartbreak when Michelle turned the blame onto herself. 

I literally had to close this book for a few weeks as it became too much for me to read. The enmeshed relationship between mother and daughter felt too similar to my own, which left me emotionally drained. 

In the end, my takeaway from this book is that the parent/ child relationship is one of the most complex relationships we will ever experience in our lives and everyone views it differently, oftentimes vastly. We can never truly know or understand the feelings that run deep within the relationships between families outside of our own, nor can we (or should we) judge any person's choice to stay within those dynamics or leave them entirely. And to add in an additional layer of becoming a parental caretaker complicates matters even more, creating a large, swirling vortex of feelings that may never become untangled. 

I thoroughly enjoyed Michelle's thoughtful and emotional portrayal of her complex relationship with her mother and how they grew closer together during a time of great crisis, but also how the early loss of her mother left a mixture of grief and questions and an unsteady path forward. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical trauma, Toxic relationship, Alcoholism, Grief, Medical content, Abortion, Death of parent, and Body shaming

maditowery's review

emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical content, Terminal illness, Vomit, Cancer, Chronic illness, Death, Death of parent, and Injury/Injury detail

Minor: Toxic relationship

melissa_b_67's review

challenging dark emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Grief, Medical content, Terminal illness, Toxic relationship, Death of parent, Body horror, and Cancer

Moderate: Alcoholism and Mental illness

adrienne_rennie's review

emotional reflective sad fast-paced

4.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Medical content, Grief, Death of parent, Medical trauma, Death, Terminal illness, Toxic relationship, and Cancer

L

magpie_'s review

dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Body shaming, Death of parent, Medical content, and Terminal illness

Moderate: Vomit, Alcohol, Alcoholism, Drug use, Drug abuse, Death, and Chronic illness

Minor: Toxic relationship, Medical content, Suicidal thoughts, Racism, and Abortion

ladythana's review against another edition

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Death of parent, Toxic relationship, Terminal illness, and Death

iamninjabuni's review

emotional sad medium-paced

1.0

 

I do not recommend listening to this as an audiobook as the author (who reads it) is incredibly monotone and difficult to listen to. I often found myself having to go back because I had completely zoned out to whatever she was droning about due to her complete lack of tone. My review does not reflect how difficult it was to listen to her, but the content of the book itself. 

That aside, I think that this book was written for the author herself and it probably should have stayed in her journals. I understand that this is a book on grief and have tried to view it through that lens, everyone grieves differently. I had hoped to find something to relate to in the realm of parental loss or the difficult relationship between mother and daughter but did not find the author relatable at all. That wouldn’t be a big deal, but the author seems to have gone out of her way to alienate her audience. 

She comes off as whiny, spoiled, petulant, and ungrateful – maybe it is an only child thing? There is no introspection. She bemoans her disconnection to her culture while also stating that she never bothered to learn it. She gives no thought to what her family members may be feeling and comes across as self-centered. Again, something I could dismiss to grief if she didn’t spend so much time talking about how angry she was that her sick mother wouldn’t eat the food she made and how difficult it was for her to care for her. That could also be chalked up to her mentally and physically abusive upbringing, which the author brings up in an offhanded way and does not really address. Again – maybe this should have stayed private 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Physical abuse, Toxic relationship, Child abuse, and Emotional abuse