Japanese Breakfast's Michelle Zauner Announces Second Book

10:14 AM EDT on September 17, 2026

Japanese Breakfast mastermind Michelle Zauner became an author back in 2021. That's when she published her memoir Crying In H Mart, an expansion of a New Yorker article about reconnecting with Korean food and culture after losing her immigrant mother. The book became a sensation, earning a ton of critical acclaim and debuting on the bestseller list. Zauner signed on to write and soundtrack a movie adaptation, which sadly got stuck in development hell. While all this was happening, Zauner kept making music with Japanese Breakfast. She also kept writing, and she announces her second memoir today.

Zauner's second memoir is called Thank You For Your Suffering, and it comes out next spring. After the publication of Crying In H Mart, Zauner spent a year living in Seoul, spending time with family and learning the language so that she could read a diary that her mother left behind. She covers that period of time in the new book.

In a new Elle interview, Zauner explains the title: "Gosaeng haesseoyo," the Korean phrase meaning "good job," literally translates to "you suffered." Zauner says that she heard it in a hair salon: "After getting my hair dyed, they kept saying, 'Gosaeng haesseoyo.' And I was like, 'Why are they telling me, 'Thank you for my suffering?'" Here's how she describes her decision to move to Seoul:

It felt like I spent all this time learning about Korean food and writing about that, and it just wasn’t enough. It made me suddenly really want to go further in connecting to that part of my mom’s history and who she was as a person, and so I really regretted not learning the language, and I felt quite embarrassed about it. I was really curious: If I did spend a year there, how much could I learn?

Zauner, about to become a mother herself, says that the experience of writing Thank You For Your Suffering was a lot happier than her previous book: "Especially having written my first book about something so raw and painful, it was really nice to write a book that had so much joy in it, and it was so funny to recall such a special time." Read the full Elle interview here.

Thank You For Your Suffering is out 4/27, via Penguin Random House. Pre-order it here. Check out our 2025 We've Got A File On You interview with Zauner here.

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