Michelle Zauner (Japanese Breakfast)

that to anybody except you. That's what I'm gonna start. I'm gonna start saying that to my manager. Time is elastic. What do you mean? Eleven thirty? Time is elastic? Hello, I'm Mini driver and welcome to many questions. I've always loved pruce questionnaire. It was originally an eighteenth century parlor game meant to reveal an individual's true nature, but with so many questions, there wasn't really an opportunity to expand

on anything. So I took the format of Pruce's questionnaire and adapted what I think are so one of the most important questions you could ever ask someone they are when and where were you happiest what is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped you the most?

What would be your last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that has grown out of a personal disaster. The more people we ask, the more we begin to see what makes us similar and what makes us individual. I've gathered a group of really remarkable people who I am honored and humbled to have had a chance to engage with. My guest today is musician, author, and poet in my estimation, Michelle's Honor. Michelle records as the band Japanese Breakfast, and her new record Jubilee is

now one of my favorite albums. We have both lost our mothers and listening to the last three of her albums tracks an extraordinary journey through patients, rage, and grief. My favorite song on her new album is called Posing in Bondage, and there's a line that I think about a lot in it. It goes those who run from pain those who have yet too. I felt intensely comforted by her per view of loss, and the music is like this awesome low Fi Nimble, part Funk. It's just excellent.

And she's also written an extraordinary book that was on the New York Times bestseller List called Crying in h Mark, which is deft and hilarious and heartbreaking all at the same time. I'm such a fan of hers, and I feel like I owe her for showing me that there is at least some sort of light at the end of the tunnel of grief. What person, place, or experience has most altered your life. I feel like my entire life right now feels very folded in half around this

moment of losing losing my mom. I'm a very different person after that. My whole life changed. I mean, my whole family just dissolves when my mom passed away. My dad moved to Thailand and we don't speak anymore. And you know, this person that represented my entire family is gone, but lives on in me in this new way. So I lost my MoMA a month and a half ago. Oh, I'm so sorry, but I've I've got to tell you.

I didn't know the stories behind your albums. And when I went back and I listened with this new per view, when I got listened to posing a bondage. I was like, this is where I'm going to get so lovely to hear thank you so much. The fact that your record as you believe, like what that means in terms of like the word itself, and the idea that there is celebration, There is celebration beyond death. There is celebration in the relationship that develops with your parents after they die that

nobody really talks about. And the energetically right now, even though I'm not there, the idea that that I'm going to get to this place because when I read parts of Crying and h Mark, it was realizing it was so familiar. Obviously the whole it's so familiar, but the idea that there is a journey that even though it feels like life stopped, it goes on and you carry

on and do you believe? For me felt like the emergence of life again, life after loss, real life after death was so beautiful and so amazing, and I'm so I'm so grateful because it's been so comforting to listen to your music. Oh, thank you so much. That means so much to me. I feel like You've just put into words that I I'm still wrapping my head around trying to explain, and so it it hits me so hard that I feel like you've just gotten completely what I meant to say, and it's the first time I'm

hearing it back to me. So I really appreciate that. How great it is meaningful, How great that what you're doing as an artist, because surely, quite self regarding as artists, you know we're in our process. But to create something that not only touches people but genuinely helps them, I think it's very It's rare. Sorry, I've like, you know, we've been on for two minutes. I've cried. I've told you know, that's so moving, Like it's not. I mean, it's a rare, precious thing to get to be vulnerable

and impacted deeply by art. I mean, there's no greater gift to get to share with you. So I really appreciate it. You're welcome. I think you're right. Artists don't often know how they've impacted the people who are who are metabolizing there are. I mean, that's why you do

it too. I feel like so much of the past, like a couple of months, has just been the rush of like running to make force people to like interact with your art, you know, so you forget when it actually hits someone, and like why you actually do it in the first place, because you're so convinced sometimes that your art is hitting because of like a marketing scheme or something. So it's nice to be reminded that the actual thing is doing something much more important, I think.

I also, you know, there's a line in that new song posing in Bondage and also expanded up on in the book where I say, you know, when the world divides into two people, those who have felt pain in those who have yet too. I wrote it down. I have it written right here, those who run from pain those who have yet to. Yeah, I feel like that's how I see the world now. And it's and like frustrating when you know people who haven't gone through this experience and it feels like such an unfair hand to

be dealt. But I also found I have a much deeper sense of compassion to other people. It was almost like I was invited into this new club I didn't want to be a part of exactly, that's exactly. But I remember after my mom died, I was sitting at a kitchen table with my mother in law and her mother, my husband's grandmother, and they were telling me about you know, my mother in law's brother died when she was in college.

They were in college together, and you know, she was telling me about this experience, and then her mother was saying, you know, I used to cry every day on the way to work in the car and every day when

I came home. And now it was a strange feeling because I don't know if they would have told me that story if I hadn't sort of gone through this type of grief, and I don't know if I would have felt it so deeply, such an intense understanding, or even the way that I feel towards you right now, that when you just know that someone has gone through that you're understanding and your feelings of closeness to a person really alters after you go through something like that.

And even though it's really hard and it's not necessarily a club you want to be a part of, there there is some like deeper connection to people. I think that you do start to feel after you go through something like that that is actually really beautiful. A hundred percent. It moves from being I was angry. It was so awful to say it. Then you then feel isolated and

like you're this total pariah. And then when you start talking to people who actually have lost their moms, and you realize that it's such a particular club, it's such a particular journey. You're very young to lose your mama. I mean, I'm I'm a hundred and forty, you know, I was, I'm older in it, you know, but like it's still it was still too soon. It was still too soon. What relationship, real or fictionalized to find love?

For you? I have a really wonderful relationship with my husband, and I'm really lucky because we had dated for about a year and a half when my mom got sick and when we found out her cancer is terminal, I called him from a hospital in Korea and I was like, if this is something that you are thinking of doing in the next five years and you don't just do it now, I don't think I'll ever be able to forgive you. And so we threw together a wedding three

weeks before my mother passed away. Oh my god. Because I was an only child and you know, for me, you know, getting married was never that important of a thing for me. But I knew it was a tremendously important thing for my mom, and that if I ever got married and she wasn't there, it would just destroy me. I could never enjoy myself at a at a wedding. So we're really lucky that she was able to go to the wedding and she went into a coma two

weeks after we got married. We got married in my parents backyard I talked about in the book, and I am so lucky that it worked out. I mean, I told him, you know, we'll just get divorced if it doesn't work out, you know, like we'll be like young hip divorces, and uh, you know, we can refer to our first marriages in this like very you know, mature way,

you know, in our late twenties. And it just I got so lucky because I think it worked out so well because my family was able to fold him into ours so seamlessly, and his family was able to embrace me in such a deeper way because we got married, and I think maybe subconsciously I could feel my nuclear family falling apart and sort of needed to recreate that

with someone. And yeah, I mean I just I never knew that I could feel this way about someone, and I feel like we are very uh perfectly matched in this way that you know, seemed realistically impossible, and so I can't think of a I can't think of a greater love than ours. I truly feel that way. I'm very lucky to have found that in my life. Yeah. Also, I think in a way, backing into these things, like it's not happening in a traditional way, often it destroys

all of our previous ideas about it. The hearing that you called him up and we're like, listen, we got to get married, or like or I'll hate you or I hate you, just so you know, And the fact that he could go this ritual is so important to

this person that I love. And not only that, but like to her mother, I will do this as an experience, but I love that the pressure is taken off because it's like, yeah, and if we get divorced, then maybe we'll get married again when we're like thirty five, right right, exactly, like observing the traditional desire of your mom to see you married, but getting rid of the expectation. It doesn't

have to work out. It's okay, and then that defines love. Yeah, And he I mean, I wrote that song Till Death about him, and you know, I don't know if I could have honestly been there for someone so selflessly the way that he was there for me during that time, because you're just I mean, you know, like when you go through the grief of losing someone so monumental to your life, you become so useless, totally and absolutely useless.

For a year, I felt like I was real learning how to walk, you know, relearning how to feed myself, relearning how to you know, breathe, and to have someone just stand by you because there's absolutely nothing they can do but just wait it out with you and wait for the person they love to come back. I was really lucky that I had someone like that, you know, m to just wait it out with me. I'd love I love that, because you're right, it's standing and waiting

it out. And I'm I felt that way when when my mom was dying, was that all all we could do was to be with her, was to hold her hand and to be there and to love her. And that's exactly what my boyfriend is doing for me now. He's just standing. He's not trying to fix it because it's unfixable. It's kind of like it's it's like standing by a really beautiful, really old tree. It feels he's not old. He's actually much younger than me, but um, it's he's an old tree in my in my life.

It's funny, that, isn't it, Particularly when I don't know about you, But I am such a do I want to fix stuff. I want to make you know, I'm a mom. I want to fix stuff of my kids. I want to I want to make it better. And you simply cannot make this better. You just have to stand and witness it it with as much compassion as you can, I guess. And there's just no skipping steps. I mean, it is it's like a you know it is.

It is something that you just have to let take you like a current, like it's not it's not going to wait for you, and when you think you've conquered it, it's going to kick your ass in a totally new way. I feel like it's so true, and that by the way, it is process like we are being forced or we are forced to process this. There's no getting around it.

There's no jumping to the end of the alphabet. You have to go through every step and that felt suffocating to begin with for me in the early days of grief, but now it's sort of more of a this is what we do. We wake up every day and you meet your grief and you don't know how it's going to take you, but you go with the current of it. You allow that because fighting it is actually so much worse. Are you do you mind? If I as, are you

having a lot of dreams? You know? The strangest thing and that this is the part that I've actually apart from her not being here, the thing I've found hardest is that I have not dreamt. I've been I've dreamed my whole life, like vividly, like write them down dreams. I have not had a dream since she died. And it's been it's been devastating. It's been devastating to me that I haven't seen her in a dream. It will happen. It'll happen when you're not at this place where you're

like where are you? You know, that's exactly because my aunt, I'm pretty sure I was like, are you dreaming about her? And I was like, oh my god, I'm not, you know, like is that wrong? And I think it must have been because I was like searching for it. But I feel like they they'll come like when you aren't thinking about wanting them so badly. You know. I wonder if they think it would make it worse, if they're like, it would actually make it so much worse if you do.

Don't want you to wake up thinking that you've been with me. You need to, you need to in that little time path. You know, it was so frust and because you see them and then it's like trying to call your way back to sleep and you can never do it. And it's a really interesting part though. I mean, it's so interesting because you think that all of these things are very unique to you, but every person that

goes through it goes through the same thing. Even when I got married, I was like, oh, I did this weird thing. And I heard so many stories about people who put weddings together when their parents were sick. Because it is a natural you know, all human beings are kind of made up of the same stuff, exactly in the Vendor diagram of light experience as these you know, matter made visible. We there is so much that is fundamental to all of us. Will do the same things

in the same situations. I kind of love that it feels tribal. Mm hmm. What is the quality that you least like about yourself. I'm incredibly impatient and everything, and and I can forget to enjoy things sometimes because you want the result, like you said, you don't pay attention to the journey of it as it were. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, that's my issue with art making. And sometimes it's the great thing. But I am not one to dwell in

the process. And I envy my husband's like that. He is all process and sometimes never gets anything done because he can learn something, can really take his time and have full understanding of something, whereas I often tend to skip steps and not in relish the process of things. But I also can be really impatient with people too, and I wish I wasn't like that. What what triggers you about a person, like if they take too long telling a story or what is it? Yeah? Yeah, that's

definitely yeah, yeah, there's that. And also if I think I'm quick to cut people out of my life or like snap to judgment in a way I don't suffer fools, well, I know I am exactly the same. I think a lot of it comes from my mother though, because my my mom raised me in this way where sometimes my friends will confide in me about something, and you know, my natural desires to fix it. But I think that when your friends confide in you, they're not asking you

to fix something. They just want to let it go, you know, and they want someone to listen to them. I want, I mean, I really want to get better at like not being like, well, obviously you do this, and then when they don't do that, you get naturally kind of upset about it. And as I get older, I'm realizing like, they're gonna do whatever they want to do. You can be you can offer some sound advice, but I think largely what your friends really wants you to do is just to be quiet and to listen and

offer up support. And I think sometimes I get confused and I'm like, well, clearly this is like these are the steps you need to take. And then if they don't take them, because they're human and they have their own interests and desires, like I have gotten frustrated in the past, and that's like totally unfair and uh, something that I just need to work on. I think, well,

it's you. We all have stuff to work on. But wait, so, because you write a lot about traditional Korean cooking, and it feels to me that there is an enormous amount of process in that, in the process of cooking, in the process of like shopping for the ingredients and the whole thing. So is that an area where you're not focused on the result, you really are in the journey. Would you say that there's a lot of flow when

you're making food. I do think so. I think it is like this really tactle intuitive thing where you don't I'm not after anything really when I'm doing it. I am like sort of in the process of that, and I enjoy it and I don't have to mentally like go after something in the same way that I go

after it in other parts of my life. And I think that that's something that I've really enjoyed about cooking, is because I'm such an analytical in my head person and there's none of that really when you're cooking ng it's all you know, very You're very present and not thinking about the future really at all, and um, your mind kind of unbusies itself in this beautiful way that's so interesting. So it's like that's a that is a meditation. I mean that would be my description of of meditation

or the meditative quality of absolutely. Yeah, that's so funny. I think I read in something I think it was in a New Yorker in the excerpt from your book, where you were like somebody said, you just add enough something until it tastes like moms. Oh yeah, yeah, sessame oil and things I don't sesame al to the taste like your mom's. That was excellent and thank you. Yeah. Yeah. There's this meal that my mom would make for me

every time I came home from college. She would marinate this short rib It's called Colby the sweet cream short rib with white rice, uh, this white radish kimchi in this really tart Brian sesame oil and red paper flakes and then this radish kimchi, just the way that my mom. It just is like a feeling, you know, it like sits like here. Do you ever make that meal now? Not often? Not often, because it doesn't taste as good

when you make it for yourself. Part of it is that you don't have to do anything, and it's just this person has gone through this whole process of like marinating this thing two days before and buying all the ingredients like weeks before you arrive, and just knowing that there was so much thought that went into it. It doesn't taste as good or mean as much when you make it for yourself. It's so true. But okay, hold on, I've got a plan. So it's your is yours. Your

husband is your husband a good cook? No, it's horrible, it's horrible. Okay, forget him. Do you have a friend who you love, who you could say, okay, can you take a day? Don't tell me what it's going to be, And I'm going to teach you and I teach them how to make it and then just happen like on your birthday. It surprised you with this meal, And I think that's a very good plan to see how I'm to see how I'm trying to fix your You're you're

not a problem, but you didn't have a problem. But I'm gonna I'm going to find a way to fix you're not a problem. Where and when were you happiest? It's so funny because it's such a childlike question to me, and when that could be really be quantified by an actual moment, Because I know that happiness is like lots of different things as we grow up, but like, if there is a time that you can think of, what

would it be? The thing that comes to mind first, I guess is I think that when you're a child, there's just such like unadulterated feeling in this way that you never get back. I think I could certainly say moments with my husband or when I feel the greatest joy.

But I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, which is a really beautiful place to grow up, and my friends and I used to visit this little hole in a fence where we would go through and have access to the limit river and we would sort of jump off these rocks and let the current take us down maybe a quarter mile before frantically swimming to shore and then uh scrambling back up to do it again. And that is maybe one of my favorite memories of just riding my bike in in the summertime and not worrying about much

and and being in nature and the beautiful Pacific Northwest. God, that's amazing. That's a that's a good image climbing through a hole in the fence, jumping in a river and like letting the current take you that's like childhood in general. But it is when there wasn't the same risk assess this month that certainly for me as a mother, goes with everything to do with my kid. I think our

parents were just so much freer with us. You know, I'd freak out of fights my son doing that, but then I'd probably jump in and do it with him. I don't think my parents were too excited about it, but they frequently didn't, didn't know what I think, or they just gave up. There are certainly worse things that you can do, I guess, definitely, definitely. But it's it's so funny how that taking that risk, that the risk assessment risk metric, which doesn't exist as a child, where

you are just where you're free. You're free of second guessing, and so happiness is innate in a way because it's not clouded by worry or irritation or judgment or anything other than that present moment. I wish I could be a bit more like that now, me too. I don't know when that changed for me, you know, I think that when my mom passed away, my relationship to death

changed a lot. Similarly, my risk aversion and increased in this strange way, because I think once you're really close to how fragile life can be and how real death is. In a way, I found myself really afraid in this new way. Like I used to love, you know, jumping off of high places into water, and now after that's happened, I don't know if it's necessarily because of that, or

I also just got older and became more afraid. I don't know if I wouldn't do it anymore, or like even if I'm on a plane and there's turbulence, that's something that I never was worried about, and now I'm I'm just certain I'm going to die. I'm not going to die. Oh my god. It's so it's so funny because like it is something that we're going to die, and you say like that, like I'm certain we're going to die at this moment. Losing someone you love so much, it does it makes you hang on to lie if

really tightly. But there must be a version of that where you can love life with looser hands. You know that. Actually it's like no, no, no, just just be here, just be here now and be in this life because yeah, it is over way quicker than it's one thing my mom said it right as she was dying, was you know, even if I had another another ten years. She was eighty four. If I had another ten years, it still wouldn't have been enough. Like it goes by in an instant,

it's so quick. Just love it. Maybe remembering the immediacy. It's so funny. I'm going to be thinking of that. If you crawling through a hole in the fence and jumping and moving water like it's so good, Like skidding and cooling through holes. I think that was pretty much my whole childhood as well. Yeah, I wish that there was more of that type of play incorporated into adult life, but I do think that that is fair. I mean,

I think I lived my life. I'm just so aware of how limited my time is in a way that I've accomplished so much more in the past seven years because I think I have so much to say before

it's over. I got married, I became successful as an artist for the first time, I developed this incredible career, and really great stuff happened also, you know, and it felt almost like she was looking out for me in this way, and I feel like it really lit a fire in me to make those things happen in a way that I didn't have before, and that is a

more positive way of looking at at this these things. Yeah, yeah, I mean the rare gifts that come with things that are hard, that we don't incorporate into the narrative often because we're too busy. We're too busy saying that they're hard. You know, there's you know that that quote that Helen Keller. We only ever ready say half of it, where where one door closed as another one opens? But what she said was where and one door closes and another one opens.

I'm paraphrasing, we're so busy looking at the door that closed, we forget to see the one that has opened. That's actually the whole thing that she said. And I feel like, since losing my mar I'm I want to look at the door that is open. I felt every every second of that door closing, and I really just so firmly want to to look at the opening and to be in this moment because you know, to carry on, maybe to carry on the analogy. The door closes really really

fucking quickly. M Oh my gosh, it has been such a pleasure. Um. I'd say I'm sorry about crying at the beginning of arranty, but I'm actually not sorry. I'm so grateful to have connected with the art that you're making. It's brilliant and thanks for being here. Thank you so much.

You're so welcome. Michelle's new record, Jubilee, is out now, and I strongly suggest that you have a listen and dive into the world that she creates and her book Crying in h Mark has just had the film right sports, so you should read the book before you see the movie. But I'm sure the movie will be awesome. Mini Questions is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, supervising producer

Aaron Kaufman, Producer Morgan Levoy, Research assistant Marissa Brown. Original music Sorry Baby by Mini Driver, Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Executive produced by Me Mini Driver. Special thanks to Jim Nikolay, Will Pearson, Addison No Day, Lisa Castella and Annique Oppenheim, a w kPr de La Pescador, Kate Driver and Jason Weinberg, and for constantly solicited tech support, Henry Driver