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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
"A poignant and piercing examination of the phenomenon of tears--exhaustive, yes, but also open-ended. . . A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book." --Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
"Spellbinding and propulsive--the map of a luminous mind in conversation with books, songs, friends, scientific theories, literary histories, her own jagged joy, and despair. Heather Christle is a visionary writer." --Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks
This bestselling "lyrical, moving book: part essay, part memoir, part surprising cultural study" is an examination of why we cry, how we cry, and what it means to cry from a woman on the cusp of motherhood confronting her own depression ( The New York Times Book Review ).
Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen-tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women's tears play in racist violence.
Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle's investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.
Author Notes
Heather Christle is the author of the poetry collections The Difficult Farm ; The Trees The Trees , which won the Believer Poetry Award; What Is Amazing ; and Heliopause . Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker , London Review of Books , Poetry , and many other journals. She teaches creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. The Crying Book is her first book of nonfiction.
Reviews (3)
Guardian Review
What makes you cry? Recently I cried when my eldest daughter won a medal in a gymnastics competition; during a conversation with my wife; and while watching the films Marriage Story; Do the Right Thing; and, less explicably, Unstoppable, in which Denzel Washington pursues a runaway train. On the morning I began writing this review, I watched Green MEP Molly Scott Cato's farewell speech to the European parliament. She started crying and then so did I. These films, conversations and speeches were all things that were happening while I cried, but saying precisely which aspects of them triggered my tears, and why, is more difficult. This is one of the areas the poet Heather Christle explores in The Crying Book, her investigation into the physical, cultural and political aspects of crying. "Maybe we cannot know the real reason why we are crying," she writes. "Maybe we do not cry about, but rather near or around. Maybe all our explanations are stories constructed after the fact. Not just stories. I won't say just." Christle's quotation-heavy style awards art at least equal status to science in trying to map the world of tears. She engages with several scientific investigations of crying and "the human lacrimal system", but as far as she's concerned, a Frank O'Hara poem about crying naked in the bath is as valid as a clinical study. She is good on the ugliness of crying, describing the way a proper cry makes people "hideous, as if they've grown a spare and diseased face beneath the one you know". She considers crying's moral ugliness, too, writing that white women's tears can be "subject to specific scrutiny, because their weaponisation has so often meant violence toward people of colour, and black people in particular ¿ They set others falling to help her, to correct and punish those who would dare make her weep". She illustrates this with a powerful account of the murder of an innocent black man by white police in an Ohio Walmart. One of the most fascinating characters Christle describes is the Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader (not Danish-born, as the book claims). In his film, I'm Too Sad to Tell You, Ader cries in front of the camera, but what he is crying for (or perhaps "near or around") remains mysterious. Christle, however, finds a statement Ader later made about the film. "When I cried," he said, at once open and enigmatic, "it was because of extreme grief." Ader's 1975 work, In Search of the Miraculous, began with the artist walking the night-time streets of Los Angeles with a torch, searching for some unknown person or object. "For the second instalment," Christle writes, "Ader planned to sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a small sailboat by himself, having been seen off by a group of his art students singing sea shanties. The third instalment was to be another series of night-wandering photographs, this time in Amsterdam, but Ader disappeared during his sea voyage, and so the final piece of the triptych remains potential, conceptual, unexecuted." This work of Ader's - a mysterious search and a journey that doesn't reach its destination - is something like the experience of reading The Crying Book. The broad range of her inquiry, which can move from Donald Trump ("'I'm not a big crier'") to Byzantine lycanthropy in the space of a sentence, is one of the book's primary pleasures. But its scattershot nature disrupts the through-line it also wants to develop. Interspersing its impersonal elements (facts, trivia, anecdotes involving famous actors and thinkers) are episodes from Christle's own life: being dumped in college, an abortion, a friend's suicide, getting pregnant and the experience of motherhood. Accompanying her throughout all this is the waxing and waning moon that Christle calls her "despair". She favours that word, she explains, because "depression and suicidal ideation and anxiety all cast a staged or laboratory light", which seems to be both a confession and a withholding. This doubleness is problematic; a fault line at the heart of her book. Her episodes of despair seem significant. They leave her "sobbing on the bathroom floor", render her incapable of performing basic tasks, and have, two asides suggest, brought her close to suicide. The fragmentary approach she favours - which allows her inquiry to dart this way and that, like Ader's torch beam on a dark LA street - means she can alight on the personal and then quickly retreat into cultural history, science, or poetry. Anyone who has read Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, which The Crying Book resembles in both its structure (each paragraph is set apart from its neighbours, in what Nelson has called a "faux-Wittgenstenian form") and in certain of its interests (pregnancy, lactation, exhaustion, Judith Butler), will know how powerful this approach can be, with fragments cohering as the book progresses, like iron filings unified by a magnet. In The Crying Book, the fragments mostly stay scattered. In its closing pages she quotes, a little defensively, from Anne Carson's poem "Uncle Falling" - "How light, how loose, how unprepared is the web of connections between any thought and any thought" - and expresses her doubts about the book: "I have been afraid all the connections are wrong. And I also have not known how to stop." The Crying Book is interesting enough that Christle needn't feel anxious about its fragmentation. But the one serious cost of its diffuseness is that its autobiographical elements - particularly those concerning Christle's "despair" - occupy an emotional no man's land. In the preface to his 1985 book Crying: The Mystery of Tears, William Frey, with whom Christle corresponds in The Crying Book, wrote that: "I hope this book will help place crying in its proper perspective as a normal human response to emotional stress." Christie offers no such "proper perspective", but as a selector of unusual, arresting details, she is exceptional. Everyone who reads her book will find something that stays with them, which for me turns out to be a line from the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar's Instructions for Crying, which I haven't been able, or particularly wanted, to get out of my head: picture, he suggests, a patch of water "into which no one sails ever".
Kirkus Review
An eclectic reflection on human waterworks.Award-winning poet Christle (Creative Writing/Emory Univ. Heliopause, 2015, etc.) pushes the boundaries of her genre with this hybrid approach to tears. Fusing poetry with lyric essay and a significant amount of research, the author sheds new light on the basic, universal phenomenon of crying. Beyond factnamely, that at one point or another, fluid has leaked from everyone's eyessome may wonder what more there is to know. This book provides the definitive answer: plenty. There are no chapters. Rather, in one long reflection, divided into small, partial-page sections, Christle examines such elements as pretend grief (she cites poet Chelsey Minnis, who calls it "cry-hustling"); "white tears," (a Caucasian person's response to suddenly realizing the enormity of systemic racism); and the differences between the three types of tears: basal (lubricant), irritant (a response to a foreign substance), and psychogenic (emotional). She also considers the distinction between crying and weeping"crying is louder; weeping is wetter"and introduces readers to professional mourners and lachrymatories, small vessels in which tears are stored. Of particular interest is Christle's inquiry into the connections among grief, gender, and anger. She wonders "whether men kill to create an occasion for the grief they already feel." The author infuses these tear-related themes with prose about her personal experiences, including her own treatment for depression and her staggering grief over a dear friend's suicide. The format of the book lends itself to either quick consumption or measured contemplation; sections range from one sentence to a little more than a page. Though this structure could make for a choppy text, the transitions between her various sources and streams of thought are mostly seamless, providing a pleasurable, even restful reading experience. The narrative is saturated with significant threads of sadness, but they don't overwhelm. Rather, the unconventional format, combined with the author's vast survey of the topic, provides fascinating food for thought.A surprisingly hopeful meditation on why we shed tears. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Poet Christle set out to make a map of every place she had cried. Instead, she ended up with this exploration of tears throughout history, in art and literature, and in her own life. Especially fragile after a dear friend's suicide and her own impending motherhood, Christle begins by chronicling her own grief and depression but quickly expands beyond herself to consider instances of crying in art, primarily in poetry. She includes historical information about the study of tears, devices used to collect tears (yes, really; they're called lachrymatories), and the role of white women's tears in oppression. Written in short bursts of information, few being longer than a page, and wildly jumping around thematically, The Crying Book reads like poetry and is reminiscent in style of Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life (2005). The cumulative effect hits the mark, and readers are sure to be moved to tears themselves. This is a lovely meditation on life and death through the lens of tears, both those spurred by grief and those by joy.--Kathy Sexton Copyright 2010 Booklist
