Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner plans to move to Korea to work on second book
Michelle Zauner, leader of indie pop outfit Japanese Breakfast, has announced her plans to move to Korea for a year to begin work on her second book.
Speaking with fellow author Hua Hsu at The New Yorker festival, she shared, “I’m moving to Korea December 29th to live for a year and work on my second book where I am going to study the language and document that process.”
“And I think it was such a natural response to writing a book that was so rooted in the past and so much of what was hard about it was like it was so obviously emotional, but also it was hard to remember all of that,” she continued.
“So I’m really looking forward to writing about the day-to-day experience of living in another country and learning a language,” Zauner added, “And is it too late if you’re in your mid-30s and don’t have a great knack for languages? I guess the thing I’m most worried about is just being too dumb to learn… I’m really curious how it will go to be fully immersed and have my one job to be a student.”
Zauner released her first book, Crying in H Mart: A Memoir, in 2021 to huge critical acclaim. An ode to her late mother, the book charted her experience of loss through food and culture.
Speaking about the upcoming film adaptation of Crying In H Mart, she shared the process of turning the memoir into a screenplay: “I think I took it really far to, like, one direction where I wanted it to be very different. And then as the drafts progressed, I sort of started getting closer to the book.”
The book is set to be adapted to film by Orion Pictures, with director Will Sharpe at the helm. Sharpe previously created Flowers and starred in The White Lotus. Japanese Breakfast will proivide the soundtrack.
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