Melancholia has followed Michelle Zauner since she was very young. “I was haunted by nightmares and an intense paranoia of my parents dying,” she recalled of her childhood in her 2021 memoir Crying In H Mart. “I imagined robbers breaking into our house and envisioned their murders in horrible detail. If they returned home late from a night out, I was convinced they’d gotten into a car accident. I was plagued by recurring dreams of my father, impatient with traffic, attempting to navigate a faulty shortcut that led their car off the edge of the Ferry Street Bridge, plummeting them into the Willamette River, where they would drown, unable to escape through the doors due to the water pressure.”