Michelle Zauner, best known as Japanese Breakfast, has announced that her second memoir is set to arrive next year.
In 2021, the singer and writer released Crying in H Mart to critical acclaim as it went on to become a New York Times bestseller. She is now set to release its follow-up in the form of Thank You For Your Suffering, which will populate bookstores on April 27th, 2027. Pre-order here.
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The story picks up years after the passing of Zauner’s mother. After discovering a diary with her mother’s writing in Korean, she set out to learn the language in hopes of reading it and strengthening her connection with relatives in Seoul. The book follows her during a year she spent living in South Korea with her husband and bandmate, Peter Bradley.
Along the way, Zauner recounts struggling through an intensive language school, adjusting to life in Seoul, and the unexpected pressures the move placed on her marriage. On the other hand, she also fondly reflects on making new friends, exploring the city’s alternative underground, and spending time with her maternal aunt. The book also details her experiences with writing songs in a new language as she works toward a deeper understanding of Korean and the family ties at the heart of Crying in H Mart.
Zauner has been teasing the sequel for several years. In 2024, she told The Korea Times that she was studying at Sogang University’s Korean Language Education Center and that she planned to document her time there in a second book. In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar the following year, she shared that her drive to learn Korean partly came from wanting to communicate with her aunt and talk about her mother, and that their conversations grew deeper as her proficiency improved.
The last Japanese Breakfast album, For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), was released in March 2025.
