Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast
Listen On
“You have to put in the time to make it work. What matters is sitting down, writing, and leaving with something.”
Whether she’s writing a best selling memoir or fronting Japanese Breakfast, it’s always garbage before the good stuff.
You may know Michelle Zauner as the leader of the band Japanese Breakfast, but you can now add "best selling author" to her title. Zauner has a fantastic memoir out now called Crying in H Mart that's spent the last couple of weeks on the New York Times best seller list.
Zauner is a very busy writer. She doesn’t have time to wait for inspiration to strike. “I’m not the type of person who sits around and waits for it to happen,” Zauner told me. A big part of that process involves being unafraid to write garbage. First thought, best thought is her credo, no matter how terrible that first thought might be. “Raw source material is supposed to be crap,” Zauner says. “You have to allow yourself to be terrible.” Her best writing comes from her revision process, not from those first drafts. She needs to write “garbage” before she can unlock those good sentences.
Zauner and Japanese Breakfast have a new album out June 4 called Jubilee. Watch our interview here about her creative process.
