Diligent Candy

There is a particular kind of grief that does not scream. It simmers. It simmers beneath daily rituals, under the echoes of a mother’s reprimand, or in the silence that follows a phone call. To read memoirs like Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi, and I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy is to enter a literary space where this grief becomes language, structure, scent, texture. Where daughters unearth both the ache and architecture of their becoming—by writing, remembering, and resisting.

These texts, while different in tone and setting, all circle a central question: What does it mean to love someone who could not, or would not, fully love you back? The mother figure, typically imagined in literature as soft and sacrificing, becomes instead a complex presence—sometimes harsh, sometimes absent, sometimes unbearably adored. And perhaps most importantly: always shaping.

Memory as Resistance, Grief as Structure

Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart opens in a supermarket, where grief is not abstract, but marinated in gochujang and soy sauce. The Korean dishes she learned from her mother become the last place her mother exists—alive, present, nourishing. Zauner’s memoir is not just about mourning, but about retrieval. She retrieves her identity, her mother tongue, her mother’s tongue, through the labor of cooking and remembering.

This structure—of mother as origin, as both wound and map—echoes Audre Lorde’s own reckoning in her biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Lorde writes: “My mother had secrets she kept from me, ones that made her eyes opaque, ones I would spend a lifetime decoding.” Both Zauner and Lorde show how grief forces us into excavation: peeling back language, culture, memory, to find a version of our mothers we can bear to carry forward.

Silence and Sound: Jennette McCurdy and the Violence of Expectations

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, McCurdy unspools the harrowing story of growing up under the weight of a mother who conflated love with control. The title itself is a provocation—a guttural punch—but within the memoir, it becomes a kind of liberation. McCurdy’s voice is matter-of-fact, raw, and biting. She writes not to memorialize, but to survive.

This call for survival through story recalls the urgency in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, where the narrator writes a letter to his illiterate mother: “I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word further from where you are.” In both texts, the son or daughter is writing toward the mother, not necessarily to reconcile, but to record what could not be said when she was alive.

Burnt Sugar: The Uncaring Eye and Unhealable Bond

Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar enters the scene like a slow poison, revealing the underside of maternal ambivalence. The narrator, Antara, must care for a mother who once abandoned her in an ashram, and who now forgets—conveniently or cruelly—much of their past. The novel is unsentimental, surgical in its prose, and terrifyingly honest. “I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure,” Antara says early on, and it is a line that haunts.

What Doshi uncovers is the corrosive nature of unmet maternal expectations—not only the ones placed upon daughters, but those daughters carry in turn. The novel evokes the psychological excavation found in Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, where motherhood is not a sacred instinct but a contested and sometimes unwanted claim. Doshi’s India is not exoticized; it is full of mildew, sweat, rot—and so is memory. So is love.

A Poetic Cartography of Hurt

The mother-daughter relationship, in these works, is less a linear narrative and more a recursive, poetic form. One thinks of Sylvia Plath’s “Medusa,” in which she addresses her mother:

“Off, off, eely tentacle!

I shall take no bite of your body,

Bottle in which I live…”

Plath’s metaphors are suffocating, almost grotesque—her mother as jellyfish, devouring, inescapable. This raw, unflinching portrayal stands beside Zauner’s gentler grief or McCurdy’s bitter clarity, but the impulse is shared: to make visible the unspeakable, to trace the emotional geography of growing up in someone else’s shadow.

Reading as Ritual, Writing as Reckoning

To read these books is to hold space for ambivalence. These daughters mourn and rage, remember and resist. They do not offer neat resolutions—because in real life, the maternal knot is seldom untangled with a single gesture. As Arundhati Roy writes in The God of Small Things: “They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.”

These memoirs and novels tamper too. They ask, what if love wasn’t enough? What if it hurt more than it healed? What if writing is the only way to forgive?

The Ache That Binds

There is a reason these books stay with us long after the last page. They do not offer catharsis in the traditional sense. Instead, they give us something more enduring: recognition. For those of us who have felt the sharp edge of maternal love—or its absence—these narratives do not instruct or resolve. They accompany.

Reading them, we realize: we are not alone in our ruminations. We are part of a long line of daughters turning pain into page, silence into speech.

And that, perhaps, is its own kind of inheritance.

References

Doshi, A. (2020). Burnt Sugar. Penguin Hamish Hamilton.

Ferrante, E. (2006). The Lost Daughter. Europa Editions.

Lorde, A. (1982). Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Crossing Press.

McCurdy, J. (2022). I’m Glad My Mom Died. Simon & Schuster.

Plath, S. (1965). “Medusa.” In Ariel. Faber & Faber.

Roy, A. (1997). The God of Small Things. Harper Perennial.

Vuong, O. (2019). On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Penguin Press.

Zauner, M. (2021). Crying in H Mart: A Memoir. Knopf.