Hi, everyone. You're listening to Women Who Travel, a podcast from Connie Nass Traveler. I'm Meredith Carey, and with me, as always, is my co-host, Bala Erica Koglou.

Hello.

This week, we're so excited to be joined by author and musician Michelle Zoner, also known as Japanese Breakfast.

Her latest album comes out at the start of the summer but today she's here to talk about crying

in hmart her new must-read memoir about family identity travel food love and grief over the loss

of her mother to cancer in 2014 thanks so much for chatting with us today michel thank you for having me

so both of us have torn through the book and it is really beautiful.

And as Meredith said, she just listed off like a sort of grocery list of things, topics

we're going to talk about.

But I want to start with, you know, there are many parts in the book where you look back on your childhood trips to Korea with your mom.

How do you think those experiences

shaped you as you were growing up? I think they shaped to me quite a great deal, especially because

I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, which is a sort of smaller town in the Pacific Northwest. And I also was

raised largely kind of outside of town in a house in the woods.

As an only child, without many sort of neighboring children, I had a very kind of lonely

childhood.

So going to Seoul was such an exciting experience for me, not just because it's like, you know,

such a different world to travel to Asia as a young kid, but, um, or even as an adult, but also

just being in like an urban environment was like such an exciting thing for me. And I think it like

granted me with a certain type of courageousness that like traveling was never really, you know,

a lot of families like traveling is, uh, kind of like a foreign, scary thing. And it was always like

a very normalized thing in my

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